with them,
no trace at the camp. Two dead and the third, possibly alive, if he had
not starved out. And that third man was Jean Marcel.

That was the grim tale which was travelling down the river ahead of him
to the spring trade. Who killed Antoine Beaulieu, and where is Piquet?
This was the question he would have to answer. This the factor and the
kinsmen of his partners would demand of the third man, if he survived to
reach the post. Yes, Whale River would anxiously await the return of
Jean Marcel that spring, but would Whale River believe his story? Of the
people of the post he had no doubt. Julie, Pere Breton, the factor,
Angus, Jules, he could count on. They knew him--were his friends. But
the Crees, and half-breds; would they believe that Joe Piquet had been
the evil genius of the tragedy on the Ghost, Joe Piquet, now dead and
helpless to speak in his own defense? Would they believe in the
innocence of the man who alone of the three partners had fought free of
the long famine? Marcel's knowledge of the Indians' mental make-up told
him that since the visit of the Crees to the camp his case was hopeless.

They would readily believe that he had killed his partners for the
remaining food, and, not anticipating the coming of a canoe in the
spring to the camp, had gone after caribou, planning to secrete the body
of Antoine, with its evidence of violence, on his return.

Of those who had peopled the canoes starting for the up-river summer
camps in July, many a face would now be absent when the Crees returned
for this year's trade. Famine surely had come to more than one camp of
the red hunters that winter; and doubtless, swift death in the night,
also, among some of those, who, when caught by the rabbit plague and the
absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet, went mad with hunger.
Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many
a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepee in the silent
places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January
winds.

To the red hunters, starvation and tragic death wore familiar faces. In
the wide north they were common enough. So, when in the spring, men
loosed from the maw of the pitiless snows returned without comrade, wife
or child, seeking succor at the fur-posts, with tales of death by
starvation or disease, the absence of witnesses or evidence compelled
the acceptance of their stories however suspicious the circumstances.
There be