in from wool-gathering?"

He, too, was more comfortably bound, and McElroy noticed that there
were little rubbed creases in the sleeves of the gay blue coat where the
numbing bonds had cut. The sparkling spirit was as high in his handsome
face as it had been that long past morning morning by the well. The
factor wondered if there was in heaven or earth anything with power to
dim it.

He was to see, and marvel at, the test.

"Aye," he answered the cheerful query; "it has been a weary day, M'sieu,
it would seem, with my senses drifting out and in at ragged intervals of
which I have only vague impressions. How has it fared with you?"

"Much as another day. There has been plenty to see and enjoy, even from
under the feet of our hasty friends of the paddles."

"Enjoy! Holy Mother! Have you not been thinking over your sins, M'sieu?"

"Sins? I have none. Who thinks of sins while the red blood runs? Rather
have I dreamed dreams of,--memories. Ah, no, M'sieu, it has not been
a weary day to me, but one of swift emotions, of riots of colour in
a strip of racing sky when the sun turned his palette for a gorgeous
spread. The sunset was stupendous at its beginning. Now the darker greys
come with so much forest."

McElroy fell silent, biting his lip.

Sorry as he felt for the plight of his rival, the old anger was close to
his heart, and it seemed that the rascal knew it and probed for a weak
spot with his smiling allusions to his memories. Memories of what but of
the red lips of a girl?

The young factor, too, had memories of those red lips, though they gave
him only a pain so bitter as not to be borne.

Almost it forced from his heart the gentle justice he had striven so
hard to keep in sight.

As he sat thinking and staring at the twilight river rippling below, a
man came from the forest at the back of the camp and passed near on his
way to the fires.

It was Bois DesCaut, and he did not lift his evil eyes.

The white lack on his temple gleamed with a sinister distinctness amid
his black hair.

"Double foe," thought McElroy; "I am to pay for my own words and Maren's
blow."

As the trapper passed he sidled swiftly near the Nor'wester and
something dropped from a legstrap. It was a small knife, and it tumbled
with seeming carelessness close to De Courtenay's knee.

"So," thought McElroy again; "by all rights that should have been for
me."

DesCaut went on into the heart of the camp among the women, and De
Court