as in the telling, it had seemed very real to
them. Then there had come that Christmas-Eve, when Jacques La France
had been found dead in his shack, with a hole in his neck, just
outside of Dawson City. Little Baptiste had owned with tears to the
crime, and had excused himself saying that he had been compelled to
the shooting because Jacques was his dearest friend, and Jacques had
become a _loup-garou_ through not attending the Easter Sacrament for
seven years; as everybody knew, only by the inflicting of a bloody
wound on his beast's body could his soul be saved from hell.

The jury who had tried him had been composed mostly of
French-Canadians. When it had been proved to them that wolf tracks had
been found before the dead man's threshold, they had acquitted
Baptiste, and had apologised for his arrest, in defiance of the
judge's disapproval.

* * * * *

Two and a half years at Murder Point had made Granger undogmatic on
problems of metempsychosis, and of the extent to which the barriers
which hedge in Man's spiritual life may be pushed back.

It seemed not unlikely to him that there were men whose souls,
consciously or unconsciously, either by reason of their crimes or for
the better accomplishment of an evil desire, could go out from their
bodies while they slept, and be changed into the forms of beasts of
prey between sunset and dawn-rise. At all events, this was a
phenomenon which could not be disproved, and there were many who
believed it true.

So he recalled unjudgingly the story of Jacques, also he remembered an
instance still nearer home--that of the Hudson Bay factor, who had
prayed to God that he might gaze with his living eyes upon his
disembodied soul.

It was not the possibility of the fact which he doubted, but
Spurling's motive in telling him such a tale.

Might he not have shown him the gold only in order to regain his
friendship, and then have lied to him in order to restrain him from
investigating, and, perhaps, with the purpose of sowing distrust in
his mind concerning Beorn and Eyelids? Whatever had been his purpose,
_there_ was the gold; Granger was determined, in spite of the risk, to
see the Forbidden River for himself. Spurling was speaking, "And his
eyebrows meet," he said.

Granger knew to what he was referring, for, all the world over, where
this belief is current, it is supposed that the werewolf may be
detected in his human guise by the meeting of his eyebrows, w