in search of beaver; and finally, he came to the
break with his partners. The hard feeling which developed at the camp on
the Ghost, Jean made no attempt to gloss over, but boldly told how the
others had not played fair with the food, and he had left them to fight
out the winter alone. Of the death of Piquet he spoke as one speaks of
the extermination of vermin. An assassin in the night, Piquet had come
to the tent of a sleeping man and the dog alone had saved his life.

They called his dog the "man-killer." Would they have asked less of
their own huskies? he demanded. But if any of them doubted, and he
understood that the Lelacs were among these, that his dog could have
killed Piquet, let them come to the tent in the Mission stockade by
night--and learn for themselves.

"_Nama_, no!" some Indian audibly protested, and for a space the room
was a riot of laughter, for the Crees had seen Fleur, the "man-killer."

But when the narrative of Marcel reached the discovery of the dead
Antoine, stabbed to the heart in the shack on the Ghost, his voice broke
with emotion. When he had found Antoine, killed in his sleep by Piquet,
Marcel said that he had bitterly regretted that he had not taken
Beaulieu with him, leaving Piquet to work out his own fate.

Then Jean described how he had lashed the body of Antoine, sewed in a
tent, on the platform cache, and placed the fur-packs and rifles beside
it, when he left to go into the barrens for deer. Turning, the Frenchman
pointed his finger at the scowling Lelacs, and cried dramatically, "When
you came to the camp this spring, you did not find the body of Antoine
Beaulieu buried on the shore; you found it on the cache sewed in a tent.
If I had killed him would I not have hidden him somewhere in the snow
where the starving lynx and wolverines would have done the rest? No, you
found Antoine on the cache, and beside him were his rifle and fur-pack
with those of Joe Piquet. What did you do with them?"

His evil face distorted with rage, the elder Lelac snarled:

"You lie, you got de fur and rifle hid."

Suppressing the half-breeds, Wallace ordered Marcel to continue.

Jean finished his story with the account of his long journey into the
barrens beyond the Height-of-Land where the streams flowed northeast
instead of west, his meeting with the returning deer, when weak with
starvation, and his return to the Ghost to find that a canoe had
preceded him there.

As he resumed his seat, the