cursing Marie.
She came into the store a little later, big-eyed and frightened, one of
her cheeks flaming red where McTaggart had struck her. While the
storekeeper was getting her the canned salmon McTaggart wanted for his
dinner Valence found the opportunity to whisper softly in her ear:

"M'sieu Lerue has trapped a silver fox," he said with low triumph. "He
loves you, cherie, and he will have a splendid catch by spring--and
sends you this message from his cabin up on The Little Black Bear with
No Tail: BE READY TO FLY WHEN THE SOFT SNOWS COME!"

Marie did not look at him, but she heard, and her eyes shone so like
stars when the young storekeeper gave her the salmon that he said to
Valence, when she had gone:

"Blue Death, but she is still beautiful at times. Valence!"

To which Valence nodded with an odd smile.

CHAPTER 26

By the middle of January the war between Baree and Bush McTaggart had
become more than an incident--more than a passing adventure to the
beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for
the time, the elemental raison d'etre of their lives. Baree hung to the
trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that
he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was
impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging
himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted McTaggart. He
continued to strip his traps of their bait and the humor grew in him
more strongly to destroy the fur he came across. His greatest pleasure
came to be--not in eating--but in destroying.

The fires of his hatred burned fiercer as the weeks passed, until at
last he would snap and tear with his long fangs at the snow where
McTaggart's feet had passed. And all of the time, away back of his
madness, there was a vision of Nepeese that continued to grow more and
more clearly in his brain. That first Great Loneliness--the loneliness
of the long days and longer nights of his waiting and seeking on the
Gray Loon, oppressed him again as it had oppressed him in the early
days of her disappearance. On starry or moonlit nights he sent forth
his wailing cries for her again, and Bush McTaggart, listening to them
in the middle of the night, felt strange shivers run up his spine. The
man's hatred was different than the beast's, but perhaps even more
implacable. With McTaggart it was not hatred alone. There was mixed
with it an indefinable and superstitious fear