ars older than I and had a wife. I think that Marette loves you as
Marie loved Donald. And Donald's love was more than that. It was
worship. We came into the new mountain country, the three of us, even
before the big strikes at Dawson and Bonanza. It was a wild country, a
savage country, and there were few women in it, but Marie came with
Donald. She was beautiful, with hair and eyes like Marette's. That was
the tragedy of it.

"I won't tell you the details. They were terrible. It happened while
Donald and I were out on a hunt. Three men--white men--remember that,
Kent; WHITE MEN--came out of the North and stopped at the cabin. When
we returned, what we found there drove us mad. Marie died in Donald's
arms. And leaving her there, alone, we set out after the white-skinned
brutes who had destroyed her. Only a blizzard saved them, Kent. Their
trail was fresh when the storm came. Had it held off another two hours,
I, too, would have killed.

"From that day Donald and I became man-hunters. We traced the back
trail of the three fiends and discovered who they were. Two years later
Donald found one of the three on the Yukon, and before he killed him he
made him verify the names of the other two. It was a long search after
that, Kent. It has covered thirty years. Donald grew old faster than I,
and I knew, after a time, that he was strangely mad. He would be gone
for months at a time, always searching for the two men. Ten years
passed, and then, one day, in the deep of Winter, we came on a cabin
home that had been stricken with the plague--the smallpox. It was the
home of Pierre Radisson and his wife Andrea. Both were dead. But there
was a little child still living, almost a babe in arms. We took her,
Donald and I. The child was--Marette."

McTrigger had spoken almost in a monotone. He had not raised his eyes
from the ash of the fireplace. But now he looked up suddenly at Kent.

"We worshipped her from the beginning," he said, his voice a bit husky.
"I hoped that love for her would save Donald. It did, in a way. But it
did not cure his madness, his desire for vengeance. We came farther
east. We found this marvelous valley, and gold in the mountains,
untouched by other men. We built here, and I hoped even more that the
glory of this new world we had discovered would help Donald to forget.
I married, and my wife loved Marette. We had a child, and then another,
and both died. We loved Marette more than ever after that. Anne, my