Breton who met him at the door, Jean learned
the story.

Ten days before, Julie had cut her hand with a knife while preparing
frozen fish for cooking. For days she had ignored the wound, when the
hand, suddenly reddening, began to swell, causing much pain. Gillies and
her brother had opened the inflamed wound, cleansing it with bichloride,
but in spite of their efforts, the swelling had increased, advancing to
the elbow.

She was now running a high fever, suffering great pain and frequently
delirious. They realized that the proper treatment was an opening of the
lymphatic glands of forearm and elbow to reach the poison slowly working
upward, but did not dare attempt it. The priest told Marcel that in such
cases if the poison was not absorbed into the circulation or reached by
operation, it would extend to the arm-pit, then to the neck, with fatal
termination.

Jean Marcel listened with head in hands to the despairing brother. Then
he asked:

"Is there at Fort George or East Main, no one who could help her?"

"At Fort George, Monsieur Hunter who has been lately ordered there to
the Protestant church, is a medical missionary. We learned this to-day
when the Christmas mail arrived. But they were five days coming from
Fort George with their poor dogs. It will take you eight days to make
the round trip and even in a week it may be too late--too late----" He
finished with a groan.

"Father, I will go and bring this missionary. I shall return before a
week."

"God speed you, my son! The mail team is worn out and we were sending a
team of the Crees, but they have no dogs like yours."

Mrs. Gillies led Marcel into Julie Breton's room and left them. On her
white bed, with wayward masses of dusky hair tumbled on her pillow, lay
Julie Breton, moaning low in the delirium of high fever. On a pillow at
her side lay her bandaged left arm. As Marcel looked long at the flushed
face with its parted lips murmuring incoherently, the muscles of his jaw
flexed through the frost-blackened skin as he clenched his teeth at his
helplessness to aid her--this stricken girl for whom he would have given
his life.

Then he knelt, and lifting the limp hand on the coverlet, pressed it
long to his lips, rose, and went out.

When Mrs. Gillies returned she found the right hand of Julie Breton
wet--and understood.

First feeding and loosing his dogs in the stockade Marcel hurried to the
trade-house. There he obtained from Jules five days' rat