answered:

"Yes, I have."

The man nodded, "I knew you had." He turned his injured eye quickly
from the dazzle of the sunlight that flashed from the surface of the
river, and Chloe saw that it was discoloured and bloodshot. She arose,
and stepping to his side laid her hand upon his arm.

"You _are_ hurt," she said earnestly, "your eye gives you pain."

Beneath her fingers the girl felt the play of strong muscles as the arm
pressed against her hand. Their eyes met, and her heart quickened with
a strange new thrill. Hastily she averted her glance and then---- The
man's arm suddenly was withdrawn and Chloe saw that his fist had
clinched. With a rush the words brought back to him the scene in the
trading-room of the post at Fort Rae. The low, log-room, piled high
with the goods of barter. The great cannon stove. The two groups of
dark-visaged Indians--his own Chippewayans, and MacNair's Yellow
Knives, who stared in stolid indifference. The trembling, excited
clerk. The grim chief trader, and the stern-faced factor who watched
with approving eyes while two men fought in the wide cleared space
between the rough counter and the high-piled bales of woollens and
strouds.

Chloe Elliston drew back aghast. The thin lips of the man had twisted
into a snarl of rage, and a living, bestial hate seemed fairly to blaze
from the smouldering eyes, as Lapierre's thoughts dwelt upon the
closing moments of that fight, when he felt himself giving ground
before the hammering, smashing blows of Bob MacNair's big fists. Felt
the tightening of the huge arms like steel bands about his body when he
rushed to a clinch--bands that crushed and burned so that each sobbing
breath seemed a blade, white-hot from the furnace, stabbing and searing
into his tortured lungs. Felt the vital force and strength of him ebb
and weaken so that the lean, slender fingers that groped for MacNair's
throat closed feebly and dropped limp to dangle impotently from his
nerveless arms. Felt the sudden release of the torturing bands of
steel, the life-giving inrush of cool air, the dull pain as his dizzy
body rocked to the shock of a crashing blow upon the jaw, the blazing
flash of the blow that closed his eye, and, then--more soul-searing,
and of deeper hurt than the blows that battered and marred--the feel of
thick fingers twisted into the collar of his soft shirt. Felt himself
shaken with an incredible ferocity that whipped his ankles against
floor a