"Ah, Jean," she broke in, "you are hurt. But you will always be my
friend, won't you?"

"Yes, I shall always be that." And he was gone.

CHAPTER X

THE CAMP ON THE GHOST

Although the stinging winds with swirls of fine snow were already
driving down the valleys, and nightly the ice filmed the eddies and the
backwaters, yet the swift river remained open to the speeding canoe
until, one frosty morning, Marcel waked in camp at the Conjuror's Falls
to find that the ice had over-night closed in on the quiet reaches of
the Ghost just above, shackling the river for seven months against canoe
travel.

Caching his boat and supplies on spruce saplings, he circled each peeled
trunk with a necklace of large inverted fish-hooks, to foil the raids of
that arch thief and defiler of caches, the wolverine. That night he
reached the camp of his partners.

Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, like Marcel, had lost their immediate
families in the plague, and the year before, had been only too glad to
join the Frenchman in a trapping partnership of mutual advantage. For
while Marcel, son of the former Company head man, with a schooling at
the Mission, and a skill and daring as canoeman and hunter, beyond their
own, was looked upon as leader by the half-breeds, Antoine was a good
hunter, while Joe Piquet's manual dexterity in fashioning snow-shoes,
making moccasins and building bark canoes rendered him particularly
useful. Marcel's feat of the previous spring in finding the headwaters
of the Salmon and his appearance at Whale River with a pure bred Ungava
husky, to the amazement of the Crees, had increased his influence with
his partners; but his determination to go south after his dog when it
was already high time for the three men to start for their
trapping-grounds had left them in a sullen mood. Because they could use
them, if he did not return from the south, they had packed his supplies
over the portages of the Whale and up the Ghost to their camp, but had
netted no extra whitefish for the dog they felt he would not bring home.

That night they sat long over the fire in the shack they had built the
autumn previous, listening to Marcel's tale of the rescue of Fleur and
of the great goose grounds of the south coast.

In the morning Jean waked with the problem of a supply of fish for Fleur
and himself troubling him, for one of the precepts of Andre Marcel had
been, "Save your fish for the tail of the winter, for no one kno