After the meal, as Jean prepared to leave, Pere Breton renewed his
protests against the trip, but in vain. If he had luck, Marcel insisted,
he could beat the "freeze-up" home; if not, he would travel up the
coast, later, on the ice, or--well, it did not much matter what became
of Jean Marcel.

So, with the letter of the factor, on which he could draw supplies at
the southern posts, Jean Marcel shook the hands of his friends and,
sliding his canoe into the ebb tide, started south as the dying sun
gilded the flat Bay to the west. He waved his hand in farewell to the
group of Company men on the shore, when he saw above them the figures of
Julie Breton and the priest. As Julie held aloft something white, she
and her brother were joined by a man. It was Inspector Wallace. Jean
swung his paddle to and fro, in response to Julie's Godspeed, then
dropping to his knees, drove the craft swiftly down-stream on the long
pursuit which might take him four hundred miles down the coast to the
white-waters of the great Rupert and beyond, he knew not where. And with
him he carried the thought that Julie, his Julie, would daily, for a
week, see this great man of the Company. It was a heavy heart that
Marcel that night took down to the sea.

With the vision of Fleur, strangely sensing the impending separation
from her master, as her wail of despair rose from the stockade the night
he left her to go north, constantly before his eyes, Jean Marcel reached
the coast and turned south. The thought of his puppy muzzled and bound
in the canoe two days ahead of him lent power to every lunge of his
paddle. While the knowledge that, back at Whale River, instead of
walking the river shore in the long twilight with Jean Marcel, as he had
dreamed, Julie would have Wallace at her side, added to the viciousness
of his stroke. The sea was flat and when at daylight he saw looming
ahead the shores of Big Island, he knew he had won a deserved rest, so
went ashore, cooked some food and slept.

CHAPTER VII

THE LONG TRAIL TO THE SOUTH COAST

A day's hard paddle past Big Island the dreaded Cape of the Four Winds
thrust its bold buttresses far out into the sea toward the White Bear,
and Marcel knew that wind here meant days of delay, for no canoe could
round this grim headland feared by all _voyageurs_, except in fair
weather. So, after a few hours' sleep, he toiled all day down the coast
and at midnight had put the gray cape behind him.

Two day