. 'No words!' he whispered to Wharton, as he struck a casual
posture on a stool. 'Remember, for her sake,' he added.

The room echoed to a rough knock at the door; the latch raised and
Edwin Bentham stepped in.

'Seen anything of my wife?' he asked as soon as salutations had been
exchanged.

Two heads nodded negatively.

'I saw her tracks down from the cabin,' he continued tentatively, 'and
they broke off, just opposite here, on the main trail.' His listeners
looked bored.

'And I--I thought--'

'She was here!' thundered Wharton.

The priest silenced him with a look. 'Did you see her tracks leading up
to this cabin, my son?' Wily Father Roubeau--he had taken good care to
obliterate them as he came up the same path an hour before.

'I didn't stop to look, I--' His eyes rested suspiciously on the door
to the other room, then interrogated the priest. The latter shook his
head; but the doubt seemed to linger.

Father Roubeau breathed a swift, silent prayer, and rose to his feet.
'If you doubt me, why--' He made as though to open the door.

A priest could not lie. Edwin Bentham had heard this often, and
believed it.

'Of course not, Father,' he interposed hurriedly. 'I was only wondering
where my wife had gone, and thought maybe--I guess she's up at Mrs.
Stanton's on French Gulch. Nice weather, isn't it? Heard the news?
Flour's gone down to forty dollars a hundred, and they say the
che-cha-quas are flocking down the river in droves.

'But I must be going; so good-by.' The door slammed, and from the
window they watched him take his guest up French Gulch. A few weeks
later, just after the June high-water, two men shot a canoe into
mid-stream and made fast to a derelict pine. This tightened the painter
and jerked the frail craft along as would a tow-boat. Father Roubeau
had been directed to leave the Upper Country and return to his swarthy
children at Minook. The white men had come among them, and they were
devoting too little time to fishing, and too much to a certain deity
whose transient habitat was in countless black bottles.

Malemute Kid also had business in the Lower Country, so they journeyed
together.

But one, in all the Northland, knew the man Paul Roubeau, and that man
was Malemute Kid. Before him alone did the priest cast off the
sacerdotal garb and stand naked. And why not? These two men knew each
other. Had they not shared the last morsel of fish, the last pinch of
tobacco, the last and inmost