llowed, shaped, and scraped it, and finally brought it
home as good a boat as any in the camp.

Since that time, early and late, the lake had been her favourite
haunt. Caribou Lake enjoys an unenviable reputation for weather; Bela
thought nothing of crossing the ten miles in any stress.

When she returned from fishing, the skunks were still there, and the
quarrel had recommenced. The result was no different. Charley finally
issued out of the teepee beaten, and the little carcasses flew out of
the door after him, propelled by a vigorous foot. Charley, swaggering
abroad as a man does who has just been worsted at home, sought his
mates for sympathy.

He took his way to the river bank in the middle of camp, where a
number of the young men were making or repairing boats for the summer
fishing just now beginning. They had heard all that had passed in the
teepee, and, while affecting to pay no attention to Charley, were
primed for him--showing that men in a crowd are much the same white or
red.

Charley was a skinny, anxious-looking little man, withered and
blackened as last year's leaves, ugly as a spider. His self-conscious
braggadocio invited derision.

"Huh!" cried one. "Here come woman-Charley. Driven out by the man of
the teepee!"

A great laugh greeted this sally. The soul of the little man writhed
inside him.

"Did she lay a stick to your back, Charley?"

"She give him no breakfast till he bring wood."

"Hey, Charley, get a petticoat to cover your legs. My woman maybe give
you her old one."

He sat down among them, grinning as a man might grin on the rack. He
filled his pipe with a nonchalant air belied by his shaking hand, and
sought to brave it out. They had no mercy on him. They out vied each
other in outrageous chaffing.

Suddenly he turned on them shrilly. "Coyotes! Grave-robbers! May you
be cursed with a woman-devil like I am. Then we'll see!"

This was what they desired. They stopped work and rolled on the ground
in their laughter. They were stimulated to the highest flights of wit.

Charley walked away up the river-bank and hid himself in the bush.
There he sat brooding and brooding on his wrongs until all the world
turned red before his eyes. For years that fiend of a girl had made
him a laughing-stock. She was none of his blood. He would stand it no
longer.

The upshot of all his brooding was that he cut himself a staff of
willow two fingers thick, and carrying it as inconspicuously as
pos