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other and I came for three years. Then we went east, and again came back, and here we have been." "The shutter?" Pierre asked. They needed few explanations--their minds were moving with the same thought. "I would not have it changed, and of course no one cared to touch it. So it has hung there." "As I placed it ten years ago," he said. They both became silent for a time, and at last he said: "Marcey had no one,--Sergeant Laforce a mother." "It killed his mother," she whispered, looking into the white sunlight. She was noting how it was flashed from the bark of the birch-trees near the Fort. "His mother died," she added again, quietly. "It killed her--the gaol for him!" "An eye for an eye," he responded. "Do you think that evens John Marcey's death?" she sighed. "As far as Marcey's concerned," he answered. "Laforce has his own reckoning besides." "It was not a murder," she urged. "It was a fair fight," he replied firmly, "and Laforce shot straight." He was trying to think why she lived here, why the broken shutter still hung there, why the matter had settled so deeply on her. He remembered the song she was singing, the legend of the Scarlet Hunter, the fabled Savior of the North. "Heavy of heart is the Red Patrol-- (Why should the key-hole rust?) The Scarlet Hunter is sick for home, (Why should the blind be drawn?)" He repeated the words, lingering on them. He loved to come at the truth of things by allusive, far-off reflections, rather than by the sharp questioning of the witness-box. He had imagination, refinement in such things. A light dawned on him as he spoke the words--all became clear. She sang of the Scarlet Hunter, but she meant someone else! That was it-- "Hungry and cold is the Red Patrol-- (Why should the door be shut?) The Scarlet Hunter has come to bide, (Why is the window barred?)" But why did she live here? To get used to a thought, to have it so near her, that if the man--if Laforce himself came, she would have herself schooled to endure the shadow and the misery of it all? Ah, that was it! The little girl, who had seen her big lover killed, who had said she would never forgive the other, who had sent him back the fretted-silver basket, the riding-whip, and other things, had kept the criminal in her mind all these years; had, out of her childish coquetry, grown into--what? As a child she had been w
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