close to a fallen tree, a wee red
flower nodding on its slender stalk. She sighed and broke it.

"In memory of a brave man," she said sadly. "Oh, a very brave man!"

CHAPTER XXVII RETURN

Eastward through the little lakes, across the portages where McElroy was
carried by means of pole and blanket swung from sturdy shoulders, they
went at hurried pace, and never a man of Maren's small command but
watched the sadness of her face, that seemed to grow with the days and
to feel an aching counterpart of it within his own heart.

"Take my coat for your head, Ma'amselle," when she rested among the
thwarts,--"Let me, Ma'amselle," when she would do some little task.
Thus they served her from the old desire that sight of her face had ever
stirred in the breasts of men, she who had never played at the game of
love, nor knew its simplest trick.

Southward, presently, up the rivers hurrying to the great bay at the
north, and at last out upon the broad waters of Winnipeg, and never for
an hour had McElroy's wandering soul come back to his suffering body.
Day by day Maren tended him, feeding him as one feeds a helpless babe,
shielding him from the sun by her own shadow when the branches gathered
at morn withered ere noon, wetting the fair head with its waving
sunburnt hair with water dipped from overside, and praying constantly
for his life.

As they neared the southern end, where Winnipeg narrows like the neck
of a bottle, his tongue loosened from its silence and he began to babble
and talk in broken sentences, and it was all about De Courtenay and a
remorse that ate the troubled soul.

"I owe you apologies, M'sieu,--'tis a sorry plight and I alone am to
blame. And yet I have a score,--gladly would I take my will of you for
that one fault,--another time,--another place. Still have I no right,
save as one man who,--But I have a plan,--one may escape,--listen--when
I grapple with this guard, do you make for the river--with all speed--My
God! My God! M'sieu! Why did you not run?" And so he muttered and
sighed, and Maren bent above with wide eyes.

Something there was between these two, some enmity that followed even
into the land of shadows and yet held them gentlemen through it all,
offering and rejecting some chance of escape. A weary, weary tangle.

Again he would fancy himself back in De Seviere and always there was De
Courtenay with his smiling face and tantalizing beauty.

"Welcome, M'sieu, to our post! Seldom do we