"NON!" he gasped. "It is a dog! A devil of a wild dog—robbing my traps!"

He rose to his feet, cursing. From the pocket of his coat he drew a small tin box, and from this box he took a round ball of fat. In the heart of the fat was a strychnine capsule. It was a poison-bait, to be set for wolves and foxes.

Le Beau chuckled exultantly as he stuck the deadly lure on the end of the bait-peg.

"OW, a wild dog," he growled. "I will teach him. To-morrow he will be dead."

On each of the five ravished bait-pegs he placed a strychnine capsule rolled in its inviting little ball of fat.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The next morning Miki set out again for the trapline of Jacques Le Beau. It was not the thought of food easily secured that tempted him. There would have been a greater thrill in killing for himself. It was the trail, with its smell of the man-beast, that drew him like a magnet. Where that smell was very strong he wanted to lie down, and wait. Yet with his desire there was also fear, and a steadily growing caution. He did not tamper with the first KEKEK, nor with the second. At the third Le Beau had fumbled in the placing of his bait, and for that reason the little ball of fat was strong with the scent of his hands. A fox would have turned away from it quickly. Miki, however, drew it from the peg and dropped it in the snow between his forefeet. Then he looked about him, and listened for a full minute. After that he licked the ball of fat with his tongue. The scent of Le Beau's hands kept him from swallowing it as he had swallowed the caribou meat. A little suspiciously he crushed it slowly between his jaws. The fat was sweet. He was about to gulp it down when he detected another and less pleasant taste, and what remained in his mouth he spat out upon the snow. But the acrid bite of the poison remained upon his tongue and in his throat. It crept deeper—and he caught up a mouthful of snow and swallowed it to put out the burning sensation that was crawling nearer to his vitals.

Had he devoured the ball of fat as he had eaten the other baits he would have been dead within a quarter of an hour, and Le Beau would not have gone far to find his body. As it was, he was beginning to turn sick at the end of the fifteen minutes. A premonition of the evil that was upon him drew him off the trail and in the direction of the windfall. He had gone only a short distance when suddenly his legs gave way under him, and he fell. He began to shiver. Every muscle in his body trembled. His teeth clicked. His eyes grew wide, and it was impossible for him to move. And then, like a hand throttling him, there came a strange stiffness in the back of his neck, and his breath hissed chokingly out of his throat. The stiffness passed like a wave of fire through his body. Where his muscles had trembled and shivered a moment before they now became rigid and lifeless. The throttling grip of the poison at the base of his brain drew his head back until his muzzle was pointed straight up to the sky. Still he made no cry. For a space every nerve in his body was at the point of death.

Then came the change. As though a string had snapped, the horrible grip left the back of his neck; the stiffness shot out of his body in a flood of shivering cold, and in another moment he was twisting and tearing up the snow in mad convulsions. The spasm lasted for perhaps a minute. When it was over Miki was panting. Streams of saliva dripped from his jaws into the snow. But he was alive. Death had missed him by a hair, and after a little he staggered to his feet and continued on his way to the windfall.

Thereafter Jacques Le Beau might place a million poison capsules in his way and he would not touch them. Never again would he steal the meat from a bait-peg.

Two days later Le Beau saw where Miki had fought his fight with death in the snow and his heart was black with rage and disappointment. He began to follow the footprints of the dog. It was noon when he came to the windfall and saw the beaten path where Miki entered it. On his knees he peered into the cavernous depths—and saw nothing. But Miki, lying watchfully, saw the man, and he was like the black, bearded monster who had almost killed him with a club a long time ago. And in his heart, too, there was disappointment, for away back in his memory of things there was always the thought of Challoner—the master he had lost; and it was never Challoner whom he found when he came upon the man smell.

Le Beau heard his growl, and the man's blood leapt excitedly as he rose to his feet. He could not go in after the wild dog, and he could not lure him out. But there was another way. He would drive him out with fire!

Deep back in his fortress, Miki heard the crunch of Le Beau's feet in the snow. A few minutes later he saw the man-beast again peering into his lair.

"BETE, BETE," he called half tauntingly, and again Miki growled.

Jacques was satisfied. The windfall was not more than thirty or forty feet in diameter, and about it the forest was open and clear of undergrowth. It would be impossible for the wild dog to get away from his rifle.

A second time he went around the piled-up mass of fallen timber. On three sides it was completely smothered under the deep snow. Only where Miki's trail entered was it open.

Getting the wind behind him Le Beau made his ISKOO of birch-bark and dry wood at the far end of the windfall. The seasoned logs and tree-tops caught the fire like tinder, and within a few minutes the flames began to crackle and roar in a manner that made Miki wonder what was happening. For a space the smoke did not reach him. Le Beau, watching, with his rifle in his bare hands, did not for an instant let his eyes leave the spot where the wild dog must come out.

Suddenly a pungent whiff of smoke filled Miki's nostrils, and a thin white cloud crept in a ghostly veil between him and the opening. A crawling, snake-like rope of it began to pour between two logs within a yard of him, and with it the strange roaring grew nearer and more menacing. Then, for the first time, he saw lightning flashes of yellow flame through the tangled debris as the fire ate into the heart of a mass of pitch-filled spruce. In another ten seconds the flames leapt twenty feet into the air, and Jacques Le Beau stood with his rifle half to his shoulder, ready to kill.

Appalled by the danger that was upon him, Miki did not forget Le Beau. With an instinct sharpened to fox-like keenness his mind leapt instantly to the truth of the matter. It was the man-beast who had set this new enemy upon him; and out there, just beyond the opening, the man-beast was waiting. So, like the fox, he did what Le Beau least expected. He crawled back swiftly through the tangled tops until he came to the wall of snow that shut the windfall in, and through this he burrowed his way almost as quickly as the fox himself would have done it. With his jaws he tore through the half-inch outer crust, and a moment later stood in the open, with the fire between him and Le Beau.

The windfall was a blazing furnace, and suddenly Le Beau ran back a dozen steps so that he could see on the farther side. A hundred yards away he saw Miki making for the deeper forest.

It was a clear shot. At that distance Le Beau would have staked his life that it was impossible for him to miss. He did not hurry. One shot, and it would be over. He raised his rifle, and in that instant a wisp of smoke came like the lash of a whip with the wind and caught him fairly in the eyes, and his bullet passed three inches over Miki's head. The whining snarl of it was a new thing to Miki. But he recognized the thunder of the gun—and he knew what a gun could do. To Le Beau, still firing at him through the merciful cloud of smoke, he was like a gray streak flashing to the thick timber. Three times more Le Beau fired. From the edge of a dense clump of spruce Miki flung back a defiant howl. He disappeared as Le Beau's last shot shovelled up the snow at his heels.

The narrowness of his escape from the man-beast did not frighten Miki out of the Jackson's Knee country. If anything, it held him more closely to it. It gave him something to think about besides Neewa and his aloneness. As the fox returns to peer stealthily upon the deadfall that has almost caught him, so the trapline was possessed now of a new thrill for Miki. Heretofore the man-smell had held for him only a vague significance; now it marked the presence of a real and concrete danger. And he welcomed it. His wits were sharpened. The fascination of the trapline was deadlier than before.

From the burned windfall he made a wide detour to a point where Le Beau's snowshoe trail entered the edge of the swamp; and here, hidden in a thick clump of bushes, he watched him as he travelled homeward half an hour later.

From that day he hung like a grim, gray ghost to the trapline. Silent-footed, cautious, always on the alert for the danger which threatened him, he haunted Jacques Le Beau's thoughts and footsteps with the elusive persistence of a were-wolf—a loup-garou of the Black Forest. Twice in the next week Le Beau caught a flash of him. Three times he heard him howl. And twice he followed his trail until, in despair and exhaustion, he turned back. Never was Miki caught unaware. He ate no more baits in the trap-houses. Even when Le Beau lured him with the whole carcass of a rabbit he would not touch it, nor would he touch a rabbit frozen dead in a snare. From Le Beau's traps he took only the living things, chiefly birds and squirrels and the big web-footed snowshoe rabbits. And because a mink jumped at him once, and tore open his nose, he destroyed a number of minks so utterly that their pelts were spoiled. He found himself another windfall, but instinct taught him now never to go to it directly, but to approach it, and leave it, in a roundabout way.

Day and night Le Beau, the man-brute, plotted against him. He set many poison-baits. He killed a doe, and scattered strychnine in its entrails. He built deadfalls, and baited them with meat soaked in boiling fat. He made himself a "blind" of spruce and cedar boughs, and sat for long hours, watching with his rifle. And still Miki was the victor.

One day Miki found a huge fisher-cat in one of the traps. He had not forgotten the battle of long ago with Oochak, the other fisher-cat, or the whipping he had received. But there was no thought of vengeance in his heart on the early evening he became acquainted with Oochak the Second. Usually he was in his windfall at dusk, but this afternoon a great and devouring loneliness had held him on the trail. The spirit of Kuskayetum—the hand of the mating-god—was pressing heavily upon him; the consuming desire of flesh and blood for the companionship of other flesh and blood. It burned in his veins like a fever. It took away from him all thought of hunger or of the hunt. In his soul was a vast, unfilled yearning.

It was then that he came upon Oochak. Perhaps it was the same Oochak of months ago. If so, he had grown even as Miki had grown. He was splendid, with his long silken fur and his sleek body, and he was not struggling, but sat awaiting his fate without excitement. To Miki he looked warm and soft and comfortable. It made him think of Neewa, and the hundred and one nights they had slept together. His desire leapt out to Oochak. He whined softly as he advanced. He would make friends. Even with Oochak, his old enemy, he would lie down in peace and happiness, so great was the gnawing emptiness in his heart.

Oochak made no response, nor did he move, but sat furred up like a huge soft ball, watching Miki as he crept nearer on his belly. Something of the old puppishness came back into the dog. He wriggled and thumped his tail, and as he whined again he seemed to say.

"Let's forget the old trouble, Oochak. Let's be friends. I've got a fine windfall—and I'll kill you a rabbit."

And still Oochak did not move or make a sound. At last Miki could almost reach out with his forepaws and touch him. He dragged himself still nearer, and his tail thumped harder.

"And I'll get you out of the trap," he may have been saying. "It's the man-beast's trap—and I hate him."

And then, so suddenly that Miki had no chance to guard himself, Oochak sprang the length of the trap-chain and was at him. With teeth and razor-edged claws he tore deep gashes in Miki's nose. Even then the blood of battle rose slowly in him, and he might have retreated had not Oochak's teeth got a hold in his shoulder. With a roar he tried to shake himself free, but Oochak held on. Then his jaws snapped at the back of the fisher-cat's neck. When he was done Oochak was dead.

He slunk away, but in him there was no more the thrill of the victor. He had killed, but in killing he had found no joy. Upon him—the four-footed beast—had fallen at last the oppression of the thing that drives men mad. He stood in the heart of a vast world, and for him that world was empty. He was an outcast. His heart crying out for comradeship, he found that all things feared him or hated him. He was a pariah; a wanderer without a friend or a home. He did not reason these things but the gloom of them settled upon him like black night.

He did not return to his windfall. In a little open he sat on his haunches, listening to the night sounds, and watching the stars as they came out. There was an early moon, and as it came up over the forest, a great throbbing red disc that seemed filled with life, he howled mournfully in the face of it. He wandered out into a big burn a little later, and there the night was like day, so clear that his shadow followed him and all other things about him cast shadows, And then, all at once, he caught in the night wind a sound which he had heard many times before.

It came from far away, and it was like a whisper at first, an echo of strange voices riding on the wind, A hundred times he had heard that cry of the wolves. Since Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gashed his shoulder so fiercely away back in the days of his puppyhood he had evaded the path of that cry. He had learned, in a way, to hate it. But he could not wipe out entirely the thrill that came with that call of the blood. And to-night it rode over all his fear and hatred. Out there was COMPANY. Whence the cry came the wild brethren were running two by two, and three by three, and there was COMRADESHIP. His body quivered. An answering cry rose in his throat, dying away in a whine, and for an hour after that he heard no more of the wolf-cry in the wind. The pack had swung to the west—so far away that their voices were lost. And it passed—with the moon straight over them—close to the shack of Pierrot, the halfbreed.

In Pierrot's cabin was a white man, on his way to Fort O' God. He saw that Pierrot crossed himself, and muttered.

"It is the mad pack," explained Pierrot then. "M'sieu, they have been KESKWAO since the beginning of the new moon. In them are the spirits of devils."

He opened the cabin door a little, so that the mad cry of the beasts came to them plainly. When he closed it there was in his eyes a look of strange fear.

"Now and then wolves go like that—KESKWAO (stark mad)—in the dead of winter," he shuddered. "Three days ago there were twenty of them, m'sieu, for I saw them with my own eyes, and counted their tracks in the snow. Since then they been murdered and torn into strings by the others of the pack. Listen to them ravin'! Can you tell me why, m'sieu? Can you tell me why wolves sometimes go mad in the heart of winter when there is no heat or rotten meat to turn them sick? NON? But I can tell you. They are the loups-garous; in their bodies ride the spirits of devils, and there they will ride until the bodies die. For the wolves that go mad in the deep snows always die, m'sieu. That is the strange part of it. THEY DIE!"

And then it was, swinging eastward from the cabin of Pierrot, that the mad wolves of Jackson's Knee came into the country of the big swamp wherein trees bore the Double-X blaze of Jacques Le Beau's axe. There were fourteen of them running in the moonlight. What it is that now and then drives a wolf-pack mad in the dead of winter no man yet has wholly learned. Possibly it begins with a "bad" wolf; just as a "bad" sledge-dog, nipping and biting his fellows, will spread his distemper among them until the team becomes an ugly, quarrelsome horde. Such a dog the wise driver kills—or turns loose.

The wolves that bore down upon Le Beau's country were red-eyed and thin. Their bodies were covered with gashes, and the mouths of some frothed blood. They did not run as wolves run for meat. They were a sinister and suspicious lot, with a sneaking droop to their haunches, and their cry was not the deep-throated cry of the hunt-pack but a ravening clamour that seemed to have no leadership or cause. Scarcely was the sound of their tongues gone beyond the hearing of Pierrot's ears than one of the thin gray beasts rubbed against the shoulder of another, and the second turned with the swiftness of a snake, like the "bad" dog of the traces, and struck his fangs deep into the first wolf's flesh. Could Pierrot have seen, he would have understood then how the four he had found had come to their end.

Swift as the snap of a whip-lash the fight between the two was on. The other twelve of the pack stopped. They came back, circling in cautiously and grimly silent about their fighting comrades. They ranged themselves in a ring, as men gather about a fistic battle; and there they waited, their jaws drooling, their fangs clicking, a low and eager whining smothered in their throats. And then the thing happened. One of the fighting wolves went down. He was on his back—and the end came. The twelve wolves were upon him as one, and, like those Pierrot had seen, he was torn to pieces, and his flesh devoured. After that the thirteen went on deeper into Le Beau's country.

Miki heard them again, after that hour's interval of silence. Farther and farther he had wandered from the forest. He had crossed the "burn," and was in the open plain, with the rough ridges cutting through and the big river at the edge of it. It was not so gloomy out here, and his loneliness weighed upon him less heavily than in the deep timber.

And across this plain came the voice of the wolves.

He did not move away from it to-night. He waited, silhouetted against the vivid starlight at the crest of a rocky knoll, and the top of this knoll was so small that another could not have stood beside him without their shoulders touching. On all sides of him the plain swept away in the white light of the stars and moon; never had the desire to respond to the wild brethren urged itself upon him more fiercely than now. He flung back his head, until his black-tipped muzzle pointed up to the stars, and the voice rolled out of his throat. But it was only half a howl. Even then, oppressed by his great loneliness, there gripped him that something instinctive which warned him against betrayal. After that he remained quiet, and as the wolves drew nearer his body grew tense, his muscles hardened, and in his throat there was the low whispering of a snarl instead of a howl. He sensed danger. He had caught, in the voice of the wolves, the ravening note that had made Pierrot cross himself and mutter of the loups-garous, and he crouched down on his belly at the top of the rocky mound.

Then he saw them. They were sweeping like dark and swiftly moving shadows between him and the forest. Suddenly they stopped, and for a few moments no sound came from them as they packed themselves closely on the scent of his fresh trail in the snow. And then they surged in his direction; this time there was a still fiercer madness in the wild cry that rose from their throats. In a dozen seconds they were at the mound. They swept around it and past it, all save one—a huge gray brute who shot up the hillock straight at the prey the others had not yet seen. There was a snarl in Miki's throat as he came. Once more he was facing the thrill of a great fight. Once more the blood ran suddenly hot in his veins, and fear was driven from him as the wind drives smoke from a fire. If Neewa were only there now, to fend at his back while he fought in front! He stood up on his feet. He met the up-rushing pack-brute head to head. Their jaws clashed, and the wild wolf found jaws at last that crunched through his own as if they had been whelp's bone, and he rolled and twisted back to the plain in a dying agony. But not until another gray form had come to fill his place. Into the throat of this second Miki drove his fangs as the wolf came over the crest. It was the slashing, sabre-like stroke of the north-dog, and the throat of the wolf was torn open and the blood poured out as if emptied by the blade of a knife. Down he plunged to join the first, and in that instant the pack swept up and over Miki, and he was smothered under the mass of their bodies. Had two or three attacked him at once he would have died as quickly as the first two of his enemies had come to their end. Numbers saved him in the first rush. On the level of the plain he would have been torn into pieces like a bit of cloth, but on the space at the top of the KOPJE, no larger than the top of a table, he was lost for a few seconds under the snarling and rending horde of his enemies. Fangs intended for him sank into other wolf-flesh; the madness of the pack became a blind rage, and the assault upon Miki turned into a slaughter of the wolves themselves. On his back, held down by the weight of bodies, Miki drove his fangs again and again into flesh. A pair of jaws seized him in the groin, and a shock of agony swept through him. It was a death-grip, sinking steadily into his vitals. Just in time another pair of jaws seized the wolf who held him, and the hold in his groin gave way. In that moment Miki felt himself plunging down the steep side of the knoll, and after him came a half of what was left alive of the pack.

The fighting devils in Miki's brain gave way all at once to that cunning of the fox which had served him even more than claw and fang in times of great danger. Scarcely had he reached the plain before he was on his feet, and no sooner had he touched his feet than he was off like the wind in direction of the river. He had gained a fifty-yard start before the first of the wolves discovered his flight. There were only eight that followed him now. Of the thirteen mad beasts five were dead or dying at the foot of the hillock. Of these Miki had slain two. The others had fallen at the fangs of their own brethren.

Half a mile away were the steep cliffs of the river, and at the edge of these cliffs was a great cairn of rocks in which for one night Miki had sought shelter. He had not forgotten the tunnel into the tumbled mass of rock debris, nor how easily it could be defended from within. Once in that tunnel he would turn in the door of it and slaughter his enemies one by one, for only one by one could they attack him. But he had not reckoned with that huge gray form behind him that might have been named Lightning, the fiercest and swiftest of all the mad wolves of the pack. He sped ahead of his slower-footed companions like a streak of light, and Miki had made but half the distance to the cairn when he heard the panting breath of Lightning behind him. Even Hela, his father, could not have run more swiftly than Miki, but great as was Miki's speed, Lightning ran more swiftly. Two thirds of the distance to the cliff and the huge wolf's muzzle was at Miki's flank. With a burst of speed Miki gained a little. Then steadily Lightning drew abreast of him, a grim and merciless shadow of doom.

A hundred yards farther on and a little to the right was the cairn. But Miki could not run to the right without turning into Lightning's jaws, and he realized now that if he reached the cairn his enemy would be upon him before he could dive into the tunnel and face about. To stop and fight would be death, for behind he could hear the other wolves. Ten seconds more and the chasm of the river yawned ahead of them.

At its very brink Miki swung and struck at Lightning. He sensed death now, and in the face of death all his hatred turned upon the one beast that had run at his side. In an instant they were down. Two yards from the edge of the cliff, and Miki's jaws were at Lightning's throat when the pack rushed upon them. They were swept onward. The earth flew out from under their feet, and they were in space. Grimly Miki held to the throat of his foe. Over and over they twisted in mid-air, and then came a terrific shock. Lightning was under. Yet so great was the shock, that, even though the wolf's huge body was under him like a cushion, Miki was stunned and dazed. A minute passed before he staggered to his feet. Lightning lay still, the life smashed out of him. A little beyond him lay the bodies of two other wolves that in their wild rush had swept over the cliff.

Miki looked up. Between him and the stars he could see the top of the cliff, a vast distance above him. One after the other he smelled at the bodies of the three dead wolves. Then he limped slowly along the base of the cliff until he came to a fissure between two huge rocks. Into this he crept and lay down, licking his wounds. After all there were worse things in the world than Le Beau's trapline. Perhaps there were even worse things than men.

After a time he stretched his great head out between his fore-paws, and slowly the starlight grew dimmer, and the snow less white, and he slept.



CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper. There was not another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in wickedness—unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles north, and who was Jacques's rival in several things. A giant in size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half-hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him—if he had a soul at all—Le Beau was a "throw-back" of the worst sort. In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.

It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes—trembling at his approach and a slave in his presence—she was, like his dogs, the PROPERTY of The Brute. And the woman had a baby. One had already died; and it was the thought that this one might die, as the other had died, that brought at times the new flash of fire into her dark eyes.

"Le bon Dieu—I pray to the Blessed Angels—I swear you SHALL live!" she would cry to it at times, hugging it close to her breast. And it was at these times that the fire came into her eyes, and her pale cheeks flushed with a smouldering bit of the flame that had once been her beauty. "Some day—SOME DAY—"

But she never finished, even to the child, what was in her mind. Sometimes her dreams were filled with visions. The world was still young, and SHE was not old. She was thinking of that as she stood before the cracked bit of mirror in the cabin, brushing out her hair, that was black and shining and so long that it fell to her hips. Of her beauty her hair had remained. It was defiant of The Brute. And deep back in her eyes, and in her face, there were still the living, hidden traces of her girlhood heritage ready to bloom again if Fate, mending its error at last, would only take away forever the crushing presence of the Master. She stood a little longer before the bit of glass when she heard the crunching of footsteps in the snow outside.

Swiftly what had been in her face was gone. Le Beau had been away on his trapline since yesterday, and his return filled her with the old dread. Twice he had caught her before the mirror and had called her vile names for wasting her time in admiring herself when she might have been scraping the fat from his pelts. The second time he had sent her reeling back against the wall, and had broken the mirror until the bit she treasured now was not much larger than her two slim hands. She would not be caught again. She ran with the glass to the place where she kept it in hiding, and then quickly she wove the heavy strands of her hair into a braid. The strange, dead look of fear and foreboding closed like a veil over the secrets her eyes had disclosed to herself. She turned, as she always turned in her woman's hope and yearning, to greet him when he entered.

The Brute entered, a dark and surly monster. He was in a wicked humour. His freshly caught furs he flung to the floor. He pointed to them, and his eyes were narrowed to menacing slits as they fell upon her.

"He was there again—that devil!" he growled. "See, he has spoiled the fisher, and he has cleaned out my baits and knocked down the trap-houses. Par les mille cornes du diable, but I will kill him! I have sworn to cut him into bits with a knife when I catch him—and catch him I will, to-morrow. See to it there—the skins—when you have got me something to eat. Mend the fisher where he is torn in two, and cover the seam well with fat so that the agent over at the post will not discover it is bad. Tonnerre de Dieu!—that brat! Why do you always keep his squalling until I come in? Answer me, Bete!"

Such was his greeting. He flung his snowshoes into a corner, stamped the snow off his feet, and got himself a fresh plug of black tobacco from a shelf over the stove. Then he went out again, leaving the woman with a cold tremble in her heart and the wan desolation of hopelessness in her face as she set about getting him food.

From the cabin Le Beau went to his dog-pit, a corral of saplings with a shelter-shack in the centre of it. It was The Brute's boast that he had the fiercest pack of sledge-dogs between Hudson Bay and the Athabasca. It was his chief quarrel with Durant, his rival farther north; and his ambition was to breed a pup that would kill the fighting husky which Durant brought down to the Post with him each winter at New Year. This season he had chosen Netah ("The Killer") for the big fight at God's Lake. On the day he would gamble his money and his reputation against Durant's, his dog would be just one month under two years of age. It was Netah he called from out of the pack now.

The dog slunk to him with a low growl in his throat, and for the first time something like joy shone in Le Beau's face. He loved to hear that growl. He loved to see the red and treacherous glow in Netah's eyes, and hear the menacing click of his jaws. Whatever of nobility might have been in Netah's blood had been clubbed out by the man. They were alike, in that their souls were dead. And Netah, for a dog, was a devil. For that reason Le Beau had chosen him to fight the big fight.

Le Beau looked down at him, and drew a deep breath of satisfaction.

"OW! but you are looking fine, Netah," he exulted. "I can almost see running blood in those devil-eyes of yours; OUI—red blood that smells and runs, as the blood of Durant's POOS shall run when you sink those teeth in its jugular. And to-morrow we are going to give you the test—such a beautiful test!—with the wild dog that is robbing my traps and tearing my fishers into bits. For I will catch him, and you shall fight him until he is almost dead; and then I shall cut his heart out alive, as I have promised, and you will eat it while it is still beating, so that there will be no excuse for your losing to that POOS which M'sieu Durant will bring down. COMPRENEZ? It will be a beautiful test—to-morrow. And if you fail I will kill you. OUI; if you so much as let a whimper out of you, I will kill you—dead."



CHAPTER SIXTEEN

That same night, ten miles to the west, Miki slept under a windfall of logs and treetops not more than half a mile from Le Beau's trapline.

In the early dawn, when Le Beau left his cabin, accompanied by Netah, The Killer, Miki came out from under his windfall after a night of troublous dreams. He had dreamed of those first weeks after he had lost his master, when Neewa was always at his side; and the visions that had come to him filled him with an uneasiness and a loneliness that made him whine as he stood watching the dark shadows fading away before the coming of day. Could Le Beau have seen him there, as the first of the cold sun struck upon him, the words which he had repeated over and over to The Killer would have stuck in his throat. For at eleven months of age Miki was a young giant of his breed. He weighed sixty pounds, and none of that sixty was fat. His body was as slim and as lean as a wolf's. His chest was massive, and over it the muscles rolled like BABICHE cord when he moved. His legs were like the legs of Hela, the big Mackenzie hound who was his father; and with his jaws he could crack a caribou bone as Le Beau might have cracked it with a stone. For eight of the eleven months of his life the wilderness had been his master; it had tempered him to the hardness of living steel; it had wrought him without abeyance to age in the mould of its pitiless schooling—had taught him to fight for his life, to kill that he might live, and to use his brain before he used his jaws. He was as powerful as Netah, The Killer, who was twice his age, and with his strength he possessed a cunning and a quickness which The Killer would never know. Thus had the raw wilderness prepared him for this day.

As the sun fired up the forest with a cold flame Miki set off in direction of Le Beau's trapline. He came to where Le Beau had passed yesterday and sniffed suspiciously of the man-smell that was still strong in the snowshoe tracks. He had become accustomed to this smell, but he had not lost his suspicion of it. It was repugnant to him, even as it fascinated him. It filled him with an inexplicable fear, and yet he found himself powerless to run away from it. Three times in the last ten days he had seen the man-brute himself. Once he had been hiding within a dozen yards of Le Beau when he passed.

This morning he headed straight for the swamp through which Le Beau's traps were set. There the rabbits were thickest and it was in the swamp that they most frequently got in Jacques's KEKEKS—the little houses he built of sticks and cedar boughs to keep the snow off his baits. They were so numerous that they were a pest, and each time that Le Beau made his trip over the line he found at least two out of every three traps sprung by them, and therefore made useless for the catching of fur. But, where there were many rabbits there were also fishers and lynx, and in spite of the rage which the plague of rabbits sent him into, Le Beau continued to set his traps there. And now, in addition to the rabbits, he had the wild dog to contend with.

His heart was fired by a vengeful anticipation as he hurried on through the glow of the early sun, with The Killer at his heels, led by a BABICHE thong. Miki was nosing about the first trap-house as Netah and Le Beau entered the edge of the swamp, three miles to the east.

It was in this KEKEK that Miki had killed the fisher-cat the previous morning. It was empty now. Even the bait-peg was gone, and there was no sign of a trap. A quarter of a mile farther on he came to a second trap-house, and this also was empty. He was a bit puzzled. And then he went on to the third house. He stood for several minutes, sniffing the air still more suspiciously, before he drew close to it. The man-tracks were thicker here. The snow was beaten down with them, and the scent of Le Beau was so strong in the air that for a space Miki believed he was near. Then he advanced so that he got a look into the door of the trap-house. Squatted there, staring at him with big round eyes, was a huge snowshoe rabbit. A premonition of danger held Miki back. It was something in the attitude of Wapoos, the old rabbit. He was not like the others he had caught along Le Beau's line. He was not struggling in a trap; he was not stretched out, half frozen, and he was not dangling at the end of a snare. He was all furred up into a warm and comfortable looking ball. As a matter of fact, Le Beau had caught him with his hands in a hollow log, and had tied him to the bait peg with a piece of buck-skin string; and after that, just out of Wapoos's reach, he had set a nest of traps and covered them with snow.

Nearer and nearer to this menace drew Miki, in spite of the unaccountable impulse that warned him to keep back. Wapoos, fascinated by his slow and deadly advance, made no movement, but sat as if frozen into stone. Then Miki was at him. His powerful jaws closed with a crunch. In the same instant there came the angry snap of steel and a fisher-trap closed on one of his hind feet. With a snarl he dropped Wapoos and turned upon it, SNAP—SNAP—SNAP went three more of Jacques's nest of traps. Two of them missed. The third caught him by a front paw. As he had caught Wapoos, and as he had killed the fisher-cat, so now he seized this new and savage enemy between his jaws. His fangs crunched on the cold steel; he literally tore it from his paw so that blood streamed forth and strained the snow red. Madly he twisted himself to get at his hind foot. On this foot the fisher-trap had secured a hold that was unbreakable. He ground it between his jaws until the blood ran from his mouth. He was fighting it when Le Beau came out from behind a clump of spruce twenty yards away with The Killer at his heels.

The Brute stopped. He was panting, and his eyes were aflame. Two hundred yards away he had heard the clinking of the trap-chain.

"OW! he is there," he gasped, tightening his hold on The Killer's lead thong. "He is there, Netah, you Red Eye! That is the robber devil you are to kill—almost. I will unfasten you, and then—GO TO!"

Miki, no longer fighting the trap, was eyeing them as they advanced. In this moment of peril he felt no fear of the man. In his veins the hot blood raged with a killing madness. The truth leapt upon him in a flash of instinctive awakening. These two were his enemies instead of the thing on his foot—the man-beast, and Netah, The Killer. He remembered—as if it were yesterday. This was not the first time he had seen a man with a club in his hand. And Le Beau held a club. But he was not afraid. His steady eyes watched Netah. Unleashed by his master, The Killer stood on stiff legs a dozen feet away, the wiry crest along his spine erect, his muscles tense.

Miki heard the man-beast's voice.

"Go to, you devil! GO TO!"

Miki waited, without the quiver of a muscle. Thus much he had learned of his hard lessons in the wilderness—to wait, and watch, and use his cunning. He was flat on his belly, his nose between his forepaws. His lips were drawn back a little, just a little; but he made no sound, and his eyes were as steady as two points of flame. Le Beau stared. He felt suddenly a new thrill, and it was not the thrill of his desire for vengeance. Never had he seen a lynx or a fox or a wolf in a trap like that. Never had he seen a dog with eyes like the eyes that were on Netah. For a moment he held his breath.

Foot by foot, and then almost inch by inch, The Killer crept in. Ten feet, eight, six—and all that time Miki made no move, never winked an eye. With a snarl like that of a tiger, Netah came at him.

What happened then was the most marvellous thing that Jacques Le Beau had ever seen. So swiftly that his eyes could scarcely follow the movement, Miki had passed like a flash under the belly of Netah, and turning then at the end of his trap chain he was at The Killer's throat before Le Beau could have counted ten. They were down, and The Brute gripped the club in his hand and stared like one fascinated. He heard the grinding crunch of jaws, and he knew they were the Wild Dog's jaws; he heard a snarl choking slowly into a wheezing sob of agony, and he knew that the sound came from The Eller. The blood rose into his face. The red fire in his eyes grew livid—a blaze of exultation, of triumph.

"TONNERRE DE DIEU! he is choking the life out of Netah!" he gasped. "NON, I have never seen a dog like that. I will keep him alive; and he shall fight Durant's POOS over at Post Fort O' God! By the belly of Saint Gris, I say—"

The Killer was as good as dead if left another minute. With upraised club Le Beau advanced. As he sank his fangs deeper into Netah's throat Miki saw the new danger out of the corner of his eye. He loosed his jaws and swung himself free of The Killer as the club descended. He only partly evaded the smashing blow, which caught him on the shoulder and knocked him down. Quick as a flash he was on his feet and had lunged at Le Beau. The Frenchman was a master with the club. All his life he had used it, and he brought it around in a sudden side-swing that landed with terrific force against Miki's head. The blood spurted from his mouth and nostrils. He was dazed and half blinded. He leapt again, and the club caught him once more. He heard Le Beau's ferocious cry of joy. A third, a fourth, and a fifth time he went down under the club, and Le Beau no longer laughed, but swung his weapon with a look that was half fear in his eyes. The sixth time the club missed, and Miki's jaws closed against The Brute's chest, ripping away the thick coat and shirt as if they had been of paper, and leaving on Le Beau's skin a bleeding gash. Ten inches more—a little better vision in his blood-dimmed eyes—and he would have reached the man's throat. A great cry rose out of Le Beau. For an instant he felt the appalling nearness of death.

"Netah! Netah!" he cried, and swung the club wildly.

Netah did not respond. It may be that in this moment he sensed the fact that it was his master who had made him into a monster. About him was the wilderness, opening its doors of freedom. When Le Beau called again The Killer was slinking away, dripping blood as he went—and this was the last that Le Beau saw of him. Probably he joined the wolves, for The Killer was a quarter-strain wild.

Le Beau got no more than a glimpse of him as he disappeared. His club-arm shot out again, a clean miss; and this time it was pure chance that saved him. The trap-chain caught, and Miki fell back when his hot breath was almost at The Brute's jugular. He fell upon his side. Before he could recover himself the club was pounding his head into the snow. The world grew black. He no longer had the power to move. Lying as if dead he still heard over him the panting, exultant voice of the man-beast. For Le Beau, black though his heart was, could not keep back a prayerful cry of thankfulness that he was victor—and had missed death, though by a space no wider than the link of a chain.



CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nanette, the woman, saw Jacques come out of the edge of the timber late in the afternoon, dragging something on the snow behind him. In her heart, ever since her husband had begun to talk about him, she had kept secret to herself a pity for the wild dog. Long before the last baby had come she had loved a dog. It was this dog that had given her the only real affection she had known in the company of The Brute, and with barbarous cruelty Le Beau had driven it from her. Nanette herself had encouraged it to seek freedom in the wilderness, as Netah had at last sought his. Therefore she had prayed that the wild dog of the trapline might escape.

As Le Beau came nearer she saw that what he drew after him upon the snow was a sledge-drag made of four lengths of sapling, and when, a moment later, she looked down at its burden, she gave a little cry of horror.

Miki's four feet were tied so firmly to the pieces of sapling that he could not move. A cord about his neck was fastened to one of the crossbars, and over his jaws Le Beau had improvised a muzzle of unbreakable BABICHE thong. He had done all this before Miki regained consciousness after the clubbing. The woman stared, and there was a sudden catch in her breath after the little cry that had fallen from her lips. Many times she had seen Jacques club his dogs, but never had she seen one clubbed like this. Miki's head and shoulders were a mass of frozen blood. And then she saw his eyes. They were looking straight up at her. She turned, fearing that Jacques might see what was in her face.

Le Beau dragged his burden straight into the cabin, and then stood back and rubbed his hands as he looked at Miki on the floor. Nanette saw that he was in a strangely good humour, and waited.

"By the Blessed Saints, but you should have seen him kill Netah—almost," he exulted. "OUI; he had him down by the throat quicker than you could flash your eye, and twice he was within an inch of my life when I fought him with the club. DIEU! I say, what will happen to Durant's dog when they meet at Post Fort 0' God? I will make a side wager that he kills him before the second-hand of LE FACTEUR'S watch, goes round twice. He is splendid! Watch him, Nanette, while I go make a corral for him alone. If I put him in with the pack he will kill them all."

Miki's eyes followed him as he disappeared through the cabin door. Then he looked swiftly back to Nanette. She had drawn nearer. Her eyes were shining as she bent over him. A snarl rose in Miki's throat, and died there. For the first time he was looking upon WOMAN. He sensed, all at once, a difference as vast as the world itself. In his bruised and broken body his heart stood still. Nanette spoke to him. Never in his life had he heard a voice like hers—soft and gentle, with a breaking sob in it; and then—miracle of miracles—she had dropped on her knees and her hands were at his head!

In that instant his spirit leapt back through the generations—back beyond his father, and his father's father; back to that far day when the blood in the veins of his race was "just dog," and he romped with children, and listened to the call of woman, and worshipped at the shrine of humankind. And now the woman had run quickly to the stove, and was back again with a dish of warm water and a soft cloth, and was bathing his head, talking to him all the time in that gentle, half-sobbing voice of pity and of love. He closed his eyes—no longer afraid. A great sigh heaved out of his body. He wanted to put out his tongue and lick the slim white hands that were bringing him peace and comfort. And then the strangest thing of all happened. In the crib the baby sat up and began to prattle. It was a new note to Miki, a new song of Life's spring-tide to him, but it thrilled him as nothing else in all the world had ever thrilled him before. He opened his eyes wide—and whined.

A laugh of joy—new and strange even to herself—came into the woman's voice, and she ran to the crib and returned with the baby in her arms. She knelt down beside him again, and the baby, at sight of this strange plaything on the floor, thrust out its little arms, and kicked its tiny moccasined feet, and cooed and laughed and squirmed until Miki strained at his thongs to get a little nearer that he might touch this wonderful creature with his nose. He forgot his pain. He no longer sensed the agony of his bruised and beaten jaws. He did not feel the numbness of his tightly bound and frozen legs. Every instinct in him was centred in these two.

And the woman, now, was beautiful. She UNDERSTOOD; and the gentle heart throbbed in her bosom, forgetful of The Brute. Her eyes glowed with the soft radiance of stars. Into her pale cheeks came a sweet flush. She sat the baby down, and with the cloth and warm water continued to bathe Miki's head. Le Beau, had he been human, must have worshipped her then as she knelt there, all that was pure and beautiful in motherhood, an angel of mercy, radiant for a moment in her forgetfulness of HIM. And Le Beau DID enter—and see her—so quietly that for a space she did not realize his presence; and with him staring down on her she continued to talk and laugh and half sob, and the baby kicked and prattled and flung out its little arms wildly in the joy of these exciting moments.

Le Beau's thick lips drew back in an ugly leer, and he gave a savage curse. Nanette flinched as if struck a blow.

"Get up, you fool!" he snarled.

She obeyed, shrinking back with the baby in her arms. Miki saw the change, and the greenish fire returned into his eyes when he caught sight of Le Beau. A deep and wolfish snarl rose in his throat.

Le Beau turned on Nanette. The glow and the flush had not quite gone from her eyes and cheeks as she stood with the baby hugged up to her breast, and her big shining braid had fallen over her shoulder, glistening with a velvety fire in the light that came through the western window. But Le Beau saw nothing of this.

"If you make a POOS (a house-kitten) of that dog—a thing like you made of Minoo, the breed-bitch, I will—"

He did not finish, but his huge hands were clinched, and there was an ugly passion in his eyes. Nanette needed no more than that. She understood. She had received many blows, but there was the memory of one that never left her, night or day. Some day, if she could ever get to Post Fort O' God, and had the courage, she would tell LE FACTEUR of that blow—how Jacques Le Beau, her husband, struck it at the nursing time, and her bosom was so hurt that the baby of two years ago had died. She would tell it, when she knew she and the baby would be safe from the vengeance of the Brute. And only LE FACTEUR—the Big Man at Post Fort O' God a hundred miles away—was powerful enough to save her.

It was well that Le Beau did not read this thought in her mind now. With his warning he turned to Miki and dragged him out of the cabin to a cage made of saplings in which the winter before he had kept two live foxes. A small chain ten feet in length he fastened around Miki's neck and then to one of the sapling bars before he thrust his prisoner inside the door of the prison and freed him by cutting the BABICHE thongs with a knife.

For several minutes after that Miki lay still while the blood made its way slowly through his numbed and half-frozen limbs. At last he staggered to his feet, and then it was that Le Beau chuckled jubilantly and turned back to the cabin.

And now followed many days that were days of hell and torment for him—an unequal struggle between the power of The Brute and the spirit of the Dog.

"I must break you—OW! by the Christ! I WILL break you!"—Le Beau would say time and again when he came with the club and the whip. "I will make you crawl to me—OUI, and when I say fight you will fight!"

It was a small cage, so small that Miki could not get away from the reach of the club and the whip. They maddened him—for a time, and Le Beau's ugly soul was filled with joy as Miki launched himself again and again at the sapling bars, tearing at them with his teeth and frothing blood like a wolf gone mad. For twenty years Le Beau had trained fighting dogs, and this was his way. So he had done with Netah until The Killer was mastered, and at his call crept to him on his belly.

Three times, from a window in the cabin, Nanette looked forth on these horrible struggles between the man and the dog, and the third time she buried her face in her arms and sobbed; and when Le Beau came in and found her crying he dragged her to the window and made her look out again at Miki, who lay bleeding and half dead in the cage. It was a morning on which he started the round of his traps, and he was always gone until late the following day. And never was he more than well out of sight than Nanette would run out and go to the cage.

It was then that Miki forgot The Brute. At times so beaten and blinded that he could scarcely stand or see, he would crawl to the bars of the cage and caress the soft hands that Nanette held in fearlessly to him. And then, after a little, Nanette began to bring the baby out with her, bundled up like a little Eskimo, and in his joy Miki whimpered and wagged his tail and grovelled in his worship before these two.

It was in the second week of his captivity that the wonderful thing happened. Le Beau was gone, and there was a raging blizzard outside to which Nanette dared not expose the baby. So she went to the cage, and with a heart that beat wildly, she unbarred the door—and brought Miki into the cabin! If Le Beau should ever discover what she had done—!

The thought made her shiver.

After this first time she brought him into the cabin again and again. Once her heart stood still when Le Beau saw blood on the floor, and his eyes shot at her suspiciously. Then she lied.

"I cut my finger she said," and a moment later, with her back to him, she DID cut it, and when Jacques looked at her hand he saw a cloth about the finger, with blood-stain on it.

After that Nanette always watched the floor carefully.

More and more this cabin, with the woman and the baby in it, became a paradise for Miki. Then came the time when Nanette dared to keep him in the cabin with her all night, and lying close to the precious cradle Miki never once took his eyes from her. It was late when she prepared for bed. She changed into a long, soft robe, and then, sitting near Miki, with her bare little feet in the fireglow, she took down her wonderful hair and began brushing it. It was the first time Miki had seen this new and marvellous garment about her. It fell over her shoulders and breast and almost to the floor in a shimmering glory, and the scent of it was so sweet that Miki crept a few inches nearer, and whimpered softly. After she had done brushing it Miki watched her as her slim fingers plaited it into two braids; and then, before she put the light out, a still more curious thing happened. She went to her bed, made of saplings, against the wall, and from its hiding place under the blankets drew forth tenderly a little ivory Crucifix. With this in her hands she knelt upon the log floor, and Miki listened to her prayer. He did not know, but she was asking God to be good to her baby—the little Nanette in the crib.

After that she cuddled the baby up in her arms, and put out the light, and went to bed; and through all the hours of the night Miki made no sound that would waken them.

In the morning, when Nanette opened her eyes, she found Miki with his head resting on the edge of the bed, close to the baby that was nestled against her bosom.

That morning, as she built the fire, something strange and stirring in Nanette's breast made her sing. Le Beau would be away until dark that night, and she would never dare to tell him what she and the baby and the dog were going to do. It was her birthday. Twenty-six; and it seemed to her that she had lived the time of two lives! And eight of those years with The Brute! But to-day they would celebrate, they three. All the morning the cabin was filled with a new spirit—a new happiness.

Years ago, before she had met Le Beau, the Indians away back on the Waterfound had called Nanette "Tanta Penashe" ("the Little Bird") because of the marvellous sweetness of her voice. And this morning she sang as she prepared the birthday feast; the sun flooded through the windows, and Miki whimpered happily and thumped his tail, and the baby cackled and crowed, and The Brute was forgotten. In that forgetfulness Nanette was a girl again, sweet and beautiful as in those days when old Jackpine, the Cree—who was now dead—had told her that she was born of the flowers. The wonderful dinner was ready at last, and to the baby's delight Nanette induced Miki to sit on a chair at the table. He felt foolish there, and he looked so foolish that Nanette laughed until her long dark lashes were damp with tears; and then, when Miki slunk down from the chair, feeling his shame horribly, she ran to him and put her arms around him and pleaded with him until he took his place at the table again.

So the day passed until mid-afternoon, when Nanette cleared away all signs of the celebration and locked Miki in his cage. It was fortunate she was ahead of time, for scarcely was she done when Le Beau came into the edge of the clearing, and with him was Durant, his acquaintance and rival from the edge of the Barrens farther north. Durant had sent his outfit on to Port O' God by an Indian, and had struck south and west with two dogs and a sledge to visit a cousin for a day or two. He was on his way to the Post when he came upon Le Beau on his trapline.

Thus much Le Beau told Nanette, and Nanette looked at Durant with startled eyes. They were a good pair, Jacques and his guest, only that Durant was older. She had become somewhat accustomed to the brutality in Le Beau's face, but she thought that Durant was a monster. He made her afraid, and she was glad when they went from the cabin.

"Now I will show you the BETE that is going to kill your POOS as easily as your lead-whelp killed that rabbit to-day, m'sieu," exulted Jacques. "I have told you but you have not seen!"

And he took with him the club and the whip.

Like a tiger fresh out of the jungles Miki responded to the club and the whip to-day, until Durant himself stood aghast, and exclaimed under his breath: "MON DIEU! he is a devil!"

From the window Nanette saw what was happening, and out of her rose a cry of anguish. Sudden as a burst of fire there arose in her—triumphant at last and unafraid—that thing which for years The Brute had crushed back: her womanhood resurrected! Her soul broken free of its shackles! Her faith, her strength, her courage! She turned from the window and ran to the door, and out over the snow to the cage; and for the first time in her life she struck at Le Beau, and beat fiercely at the arm that was wielding the club.

"You beast!" she cried. "I tell you, you SHALL NOT! Do you hear? You SHALL NOT!"

Paralyzed with amazement, The Brute stood still. Was this Nanette, his slave? This wonderful creature with eyes that were glowing fire and defiance, and a look in her face that he had never seen in any woman's face before? NON—impossible! Hot rage rose in him, and with a single sweep of his powerful arm he flung her back so that she fell to the earth. With a wild curse he lifted the bar of the cage door.

"I will kill him, now; I will KILL him!" he almost shrieked. "And it is YOU—YOU—you she-devil! who shall eat his heart alive! I will force it down your throat: I will—"

He was dragging Miki forth by the chain. The club rose as Miki's head came through. In another instant it would have beaten his head to a pulp—but Nanette was between it and the dog like a flash, and the blow went wild. It was with his fist that Le Beau struck out now, and the blow caught Nanette on the shoulder and sent her frail body down with a crash. The Brute sprang upon her. His fingers gripped in her thick, soft hair.

And then—

From Durant came a warning cry. It was too late. A lean gray streak of vengeance and retribution, Miki was at the end of his chain and at Le Beau's throat. Nanette HEARD! Through dazed eyes she SAW! She reached out gropingly and struggled to her feet, and looked just once down upon the snow. Then, with a terrible cry, she staggered toward the cabin.

When Durant gathered courage to drag Le Beau out of Miki's reach Miki made no movement to harm him. Again, perhaps, it was the Beneficent Spirit that told him his duty was done. He went back into his cage, and lying there on his belly looked forth at Durant.

And Durant, looking at the blood-stained snow and the dead body of The Brute, whispered to himself again:

"MON DIEU! he is a devil!"

In the cabin, Nanette was upon her knees before the crucifix.



CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There are times when death is a shock, but not a grief. And so it was with Nanette Le Beau. With her own eyes she had looked upon the terrible fate of her husband, and it was not in her gentle soul to weep or wish him alive again. At last there had overtaken him what LE BON DIEU had intended him to receive some day: justice. And for the baby's sake more than her own Nanette was not sorry. Durant, whose soul was only a little less wicked than the dead man's, had not even waited for a prayer—had not asked her what to do. He had chopped a hole in the frozen earth and had buried Le Beau almost before his body was cold. And Nanette was not sorry for that. The Brute was gone. He was gone for ever. He would never strike her again. And because of the baby she offered up a prayer of gratitude to God.

In his prison-cage of sapling bars Miki cringed on his belly at the end of his chain. He had scarcely moved since those terrible moments in which he had torn the life out of the man-brute's throat. He had not even growled at Durant when he dragged the body away. Upon him had fallen a fearful and overwhelming oppression. He was not thinking of his own brutal beatings, or of the death which Le Beau had been about to inflict upon him with the club; he did not feel the presence of pain in his bruised and battered body, nor in his bleeding jaws and whip-lashed eyes. He was thinking of Nanette, the woman. Why had she run away with that terrible cry when he killed the man-beast? Was it not the man-beast who had struck her down, and whose hands were at her white throat when he sprang the length of his chain and tore out his jugular? Then why was it that she ran away, and did not come back?

He whimpered softly.

The afternoon was almost gone, and the early gloom of mid-winter night in the Northland was settling thickly over the forests. In that gloom the dark face of Durant appeared at the bars of Miki's prison. Instinctively Miki had hated this foxhunter from the edge of the Barrens, just as he had hated Le Beau, for in their brutish faces as well as in their hearts they were like brothers. Yet he did not growl at Durant as he peered through. He did not even move.

"UGH! LE DIABLE!" shuddered Durant.

Then he laughed. It was a low, terrible laugh, half smothered in his coarse black beard, and it sent an odd chill through Miki.

He turned after that and went into the cabin.

Nanette rose to meet him, her great dark eyes glowing in a face dead white. She had not yet risen above the shock of Le Beau's tragic death, and yet in those eyes there was already something re-born. It had not been there when Durant came to the cabin with Le Beau that afternoon. He looked at her strangely as she stood with the baby in her arms. She was another Nanette. He felt uneasy. Why was it that a few hours ago he had laughed boldly when her husband had cursed her and said vile things in her presence—and now he could not meet the steady gaze of her eyes? DIEU! he had never before observed how lovely she was! He drew himself together, and stated the business in his mind.

"You will not want the dog," he said. "I will take him away."

Nanette did not answer. She seemed scarcely to be breathing as she looked at him. It seemed to him that she was waiting for him to explain; and then the inspiration to lie leapt into his mind.

"You know, there was to be the big fight between HIS dog and mine at Post Fort O' God at the New Year carnival," he went on, shuffling his heavy feet. "For that, Jacques—your husband—was training the wild dog. And when I saw that OOCHUN—that wolf devil—tearing at the bars of the cage I knew he would kill my dog as a fox kills a rabbit. So we struck a bargain, and for the two cross foxes and the ten red which I have outside I bought him." (The VRAISEMBLANCE of his lie gave him courage. It sounded like truth, and Jacques, the dead man, was not there to repudiate his claim.) "So he is mine," he finished a little exultantly, "and I will take him to the Post, and will fight him against any dog or wolf in all the North. Shall I bring in the skins, MADAME?"

"He is not for sale," said Nanette, the glow in her eyes deepening. "He is my dog—mine and the baby's. Do you understand, Henri Durant? HE IS NOT FOR SALE!"

"OUI," gasped Durant, amazed.

"And when you reach Post Fort O' God, m'sieu, you will tell LE FACTEUR that Jacques is dead, and how he died, and say that some one must be sent for the baby and me. We will stay here until then."

"OUI," said Durant again, backing to the door.

He had never seen her like that. He wondered how Jacques Le Beau could swear at her, and strike her. For himself, he was afraid. Standing there with those wonderful eyes and white face, with the baby in her arms, and her shining hair over her breasts, she made him think of a picture he had once seen of the Blessed Lady.

He went out through the door and back to the sapling cage where Miki lay. Softly he spoke through the bars.

"OW, BETE" he called; "she will not sell you. She keeps you because you fought for her, and killed MON AMI, Jacques Le Beau. And so I must take you my own way. In a little while the moon will be up, and then I will slip a noose over your head at the end of a pole, and will choke you so quickly she will not hear a sound. And who will know where you are gone, if the cage door is left open? And you will fight for me at Post Fort 0' God. MON DIEU! how you will fight! I swear it will do the ghost of Jacques Le Beau good to see what happens there."

He went away, to where he had left his light sledge and two dogs in the edge of the timber, and waited for the moon to rise.

Still Miki did not move, A light had appeared in the window of the cabin, and his eyes were fixed on it yearningly as the low whine gathered in his throat again. His world no longer lay beyond that window. The Woman and the baby had obliterated in him all desire but to be with them.

In the cabin Nanette was thinking of him—and of Durant. The man's words came to her again, vividly, significantly: "YOU WILL NOT WANT THE DOG." Yes, all the forest people would say that same thing—even LE FACTEUR himself, when he heard. SHE WOULD NOT WANT THE DOG! And why not? Because he had killed Jacques Le Beau, her husband, in defence of her? Because he had freed her from the bondage of The Brute? Because God had sent him to the end of his chain in that terrible moment that the baby Nanette might live, as the OTHER had not, and that she might grow up with laughter on her lips instead of sobs? In her there rose suddenly a thought that fanned the new flame in her heart. It MUST have been LE BON DIEU! Others might doubt, but she—never. She recalled all that Le Beau had told her about the wild dog—how for many days he had robbed the traps, and the terrific fight he had made when at last he was caught. And of all that The Brute had said there stood out most the words he had spoken one day.

"He is a devil, but he was not born of wolf. NON, some time, a long time ago, he was a white man's dog."

A WHITE MAN'S DOG!

Her soul thrilled. Once—a long time ago—he had known a master with a white heart, just as she had known a girlhood in which the flowers bloomed and the birds sang. She tried to look back, but she could not see very far. She could not vision that day, less than a year ago, when Miki, an angular pup, came down out of the Farther North with Challoner; she could not vision the strange comradeship between the pup and Neewa, the little black bear cub, nor that tragic day when they had fallen out of Challoner's canoe into the swift stream that had carried them over the waterfall and into the Great Adventure which had turned Neewa into a grown bear and Miki into a wild dog. But in her heart she FELT the things which she could not see. Miki had not come by chance. Something greater than that had sent him.

She rose quietly, so that she would not waken the baby in the crib, and opened the door. The moon was just rising over the forest and through the glow of it she went to the cage. She heard the dog's joyous whine, and then she felt the warm caress of his tongue upon her bare hands as she thrust them between the sapling bars.

"NON, NON; you are not a devil," she cried softly, her voice filled with a strange tremble. "O-o-ee, my SOKETAAO, I prayed, PRAYED—and you came. Yes, on my knees each night I prayed to Our Blessed Lady that she might have mercy on my baby, and make the sun in heaven shine for her through all time. AND YOU CAME! And the dear God does not send devils in answer to prayer. NON; never!"

And Miki, as though some spirit had given him the power to understand, rested the weight of his bruised and beaten head on her hands.

From the edge of the forest Durant was watching. He had caught the flash of light from the door and had seen Nanette go to the cage, and his eyes did not leave her until she returned into the cabin. He laughed as he went to his fire and finished making the WAHGUN he was fastening to the end of a long pole. This WAHGUN and the pole added to his own cleverness were saving him twelve good fox skins, and he continued to chuckle there in the fireglow as he thought how easy it was to beat a woman's wits. Nanette was a fool to refuse the pelts, and Jacques was—dead. It was a most lucky combination of circumstances for him. Fortune had surely come his way. On LE BETE, as he called the wild dog, he would gamble all that he possessed in the big fight. And he would win.

He waited until the light in the cabin went out before he approached the cage again. Miki heard him coming. At a considerable distance he saw him, for the moon was already turning the night into day. Durant knew the ways of dogs. With them he employed a superior reason where Le Beau had used the club and the rawhide. So he came up openly and boldly, and, as if by accident, dropped the end of the pole between the bars. With his hands against the cage, apparently unafraid, he began talking in a casual way. He was different from Le Beau. Miki watched him closely for a space and then let his eyes rest again on the darkened cabin window. Stealthily Durant began to take advantage of his opportunity. A little at a time he moved the end of the pole until it was over Miki's head, with the deadly bowstring and its open noose hanging down. He was an adept in the use of the WAHGUN. Many foxes and wolves, and even a bear, he had caught that way. Miki, numbed by the cold, scarcely felt the BABICHE noose as it settled softly about his neck. He did not see Durant brace himself, with his feet against the running-log of the cage.

Then, suddenly, Durant lurched himself backward, and it seemed to Miki as though a giant trap of steel had closed about his neck. Instantly his wind was cut off. He could make no sound as he struggled frantically to free himself. Hand over hand Durant dragged him to the bars, and there, with his feet still braced, he choked with his whole weight until—when at last he let up on the WAHGUN—Miki collapsed as if dead. Ten seconds later Durant was looping a muzzle over his closed jaws. He left the cage door open when he went back to his sledge, carrying Miki in his arms. Nanette's slow wits would never guess, he told himself. She would think that LE BETE had escaped into the forest.

It was not his scheme to club Miki into serfdom, as Le Beau had failed to do. Durant was wiser than that. In his crude and merciless way he had come to know certain phenomena of the animal mind. He was not a psychologist; oh the other hand brutality had not utterly blinded him. So, instead of lashing Miki to the sledge as Le Beau had fastened him to his improvised drag, Durant made his captive comfortable, covering him with a warm blanket before he began his journey eastward. He made sure, however, that there was no flaw in the muzzle about Miki's jaws, and that the free end of the chain to which he was still fastened was well hitched to the Gee-bar of his sledge.

When these things were done Durant set off in the direction of Fort O' God, and if Jacques Le Beau could have seen him then he would have had good reason to guess at his elation. By taint of birth and blood Durant was a gambler first, and a trapper afterward. He set his traps that he might have the thrill of wagering his profits, and for half a dozen successive years he had won at the big annual dog fight at Post Fort O' God. But this year he had been half afraid. His fear had not been of Jacques Le Beau and Netah, but of the halfbreed away over on Red Belly Lake. Grouse Piet was the halfbreed's name, and the "dog" that he was going to put up at the fight was half wolf. Therefore, in the foolish eagerness of his desire, had Durant offered two cross foxes and ten reds—the price of five dogs and not one—for the possession of Le Beau's wild dog. And now that he had him for nothing, and Nanette was poorer by twelve skins, he was happy. For he had now a good match for Grouse Piet's half wolf, and he would chance his money and his credit at the Post to the limit.

When Miki came back to his senses Durant stopped his dogs, for he had been watching closely for this moment. He bent over the sledge and began talking, not in Le Beau's brutal way, but in a careless chummy sort of voice, and with his mittened hand he patted his captive's head. This was a new thing to Miki, for he knew that it was not the hand of Nanette, but of a man-beast, and the softness of his nest in the blanket, over which Henri had thrown a bear skin, was also new. A short time ago he was frozen and stiff. Now he was warm and comfortable. So he did not move. And Durant exulted in his cleverness. He did not travel far in the night, but stopped four or five miles from Nanette's cabin, and built a fire. Over this he boiled coffee and roasted meat. He allowed the meat to roast slowly, turning it round and round on a wooden spit, so that the aroma of it grew thick and inviting in the air. He had fastened his two sledge dogs fifty paces away, but the sledge was close to the fire, and he watched the effect on Miki of the roasting meat. Since the days of his puppyhood with Challoner a smell like that which came from the meat had not filled Miki's nostrils, and at last Durant saw him lick his chops and heard the click of his teeth. He chuckled in his beard. Still he waited another quarter of an hour. Then he pulled the meat off the spit, cut it up, and gave a half of it to Miki. And Miki ate it ravenously.

A clever man was Henri Durant!



CHAPTER NINETEEN

During the last few days in December all trails for ten thousand square miles around led to Post Fort 0' God. It was the eve of OOSKE PIPOON—of the New Year—the mid-winter carnival time of the people of the wilderness, when from teepees and cabins far and near come the trappers and their families to sell their furs and celebrate for a few days with others of their kind. To this New Year gathering men, women, and children look forward through long and weary months. The trapper's wife has no neighbour. Her husband's "line" is a little kingdom inviolate, with no other human life within many miles of it; so for the women the OOSKE PIPOON is a time of rejoicing; for the children it is the "big circus," and for the men a reward for the labour and hardship of catching their fur. During these few days old acquaintanceships are renewed and new ones are made. It is here that the "news" of the trackless wilderness is spread, the news of deaths, of marriages, and of births; of tragic happenings that bring horror and grief and tears, and of others that bring laughter and joy. For the first and last time in all the seven months' winter the people of the forests "come to town." Indian, halfbreed, "blood," and white man, join in the holiday without distinction of colour or creed.

This year there was to be a great caribou roast, a huge barbecue, at Fort O' God, and by the time Henri Durant came within half a dozen miles of the Post the trails from north and south and east and west were beaten hard by the tracks of dogs and men. That year a hundred sledges came in from the forests, and with them were three hundred men and women and children and half a thousand dogs.

Durant was a day later than he had planned to be, but he had made good use of his time. For Miki, while still muzzled, now followed at the end of the babiche that was tied to Henri's sledge. In the afternoon of the third day after leaving Nanette Le Beau's cabin Durant turned off the main-travelled trail until he came to the shack of Andre Ribon, who kept the Factor and his people at the Post supplied with fresh meat. Andre, who was becoming over-anxious at Durant's delay, was still waiting when his friend came. It was here that Henri's Indian had left his fighting dog, the big husky. And here he left Miki, locked in Andre's shack. Then the two men went on to the Post which was only a mile away.

Neither he nor Ribon returned that night. The cabin was empty. And with the beginning of dusk Miki began to hear weird and strange sounds which grew louder as darkness settled deeper. It was the sound of the carnival at the Post—the distant tumult of human voice mingled with the howling of a hundred dogs. He had never heard anything like it before, and for a long time he listened without moving. Then he stood up like a man before the window with this fore-paws resting against the heavy sash. Ribon's cabin was at the crest of a knoll that over-looked the frozen lake, and far off, over the tops of the scrub timber that fringed the edge of it, Miki saw the red glow in the sky made by a score of great camp fires. He whined, and dropped on his four feet again. It was a long wait between that and another day. But the cabin was more comfortable than Le Beau's prison-cage had been. All through the night his restless slumber was filled with visions of Nanette and the baby.

Durant and Ribon did not return until nearly noon the next day. They brought with them fresh meat, of which Miki ate ravenously, for he was hungry. In an unresponsive way he tolerated the advances of these two. A second night he was left alone in the cabin. When Durant and Ribon came back again in the early dawn they brought with them a cage four feet square made of small birch saplings. The open door of this cage they drew close to the door of the cabin, and by means of a chunk of fresh meat Miki was induced to enter through it. Instantly the trap fell, and he was a prisoner. The cage was already fastened on a wide toboggan, and scarcely was the sun up when Miki was on his way to Fort O' God.

This was the big day at the carnival—the day of the caribou-roast and the fight. For many minutes before they came in sight of Fort O' God Miki heard the growing sound. It amazed him, and he stood up on his feet in his cage, rigid and alert, utterly unconscious of the men who were pulling him. He was looking ahead of them, and Durant chuckled exultantly as they heard him growl, and his teeth click.

"Oui, he will fight! He would fight NOW," he chuckled.

They were following the shore of a lake. Suddenly they came around the end of a point, and all of Fort O' God lay on the rising shelf of the shore ahead of them. The growl died in Miki's throat. His teeth shut with a last click. For an instant his heart seemed to grow dead and still. Until this moment his world had held only half a dozen human beings. Now, so suddenly that he had no flash of warning, he saw a hundred of them, two hundred, three hundred. At sight of Durant and the cage a swarm of them began running down to the shore. And everywhere there were wolves, so many of them that his senses grew dazed as he stared. His cage was the centre of a clamouring, gesticulating horde of men and boys as it was dragged up the slope. Women began joining the crowd, many of them with small children in their arms. Then his journey came to an end. He was close to another cage, and in that cage was a beast like himself. Beside this cage there stood a tall, swarthy, shaggy-headed halfbreed who looked like a pirate. The man was Grouse Piet, Durant's rival.

A contemptuous leer was on his thick-lipped face as he looked at Miki. He turned, and to the group of dark-faced Indians and breeds about him he said something that roused a guttural laugh.

Durant's face flamed red.

"Laugh, you heathen," he challenged, "but don't forget that Henri Durant is here to take your bets!" Then he shook the two cross and ten red foxes in the face of Grouse Piet.

"Cover them, Grouse Piet," he cried. "And I have ten times more where they came from!"

With his muzzle lifted, Miki was sniffing the air. It was filled with strange scents, heavy with the odours of men, of dogs, and of the five huge caribou roasting on their spits fifteen feet over the big fires that were built under them. For ten hours those caribou would roast, turning slowly on spits as thick as a man's leg. The fight was to come before the feast.

For an hour the clatter and tumult of voices hovered about the two cages. Men appraised the fighters and made their bets, and Grouse Piet and Henri Durant made their throats hoarse flinging banter and contempt at each other. At the end of the hour the crowd began to thin out. In the place of men and women half a hundred dark-visaged little children crowded about the cages. It was not until then that Miki caught glimpses of the hordes of beasts fastened in ones and twos and groups in the edge of the clearing. His nostrils had at last caught the distinction. They were not wolves. They were like himself.

It was a long time before his eyes rested steadily on the wolf-dog in the other cage. He went to the edge of his bars and sniffed. The wolf-dog thrust his gaunt muzzle toward him. He made Miki think of the huge wolf he had fought one day on the edge of the cliff, and instinctively he showed his fangs, and snarled. The wolf-dog snarled back. Henri Durant rubbed his hands exultantly, and Grouse Piet laughed softly.

"Oui; they will FIGHT!" said Henri again.

"Ze wolf, he will fight, oui," said Grouse Piet. "But your dog, m'sieu, he be vair seek, lak a puppy, w'en ze fight come!"

A little later Miki saw a white man standing close to his cage. It was MacDonnell, the Scotch factor. He gazed at Miki and the wolf-dog with troubled eyes. Ten minutes later, in the little room which he had made his office, he was saying to a younger man:

"I'd like to stop it, but I can't. They wouldn't stand for it. It would lose us half a season's catch of fur. There's been a fight like this at Fort O' God for the last fifty years, and I don't suppose, after all, that it's any worse than one of the prize fights down there. Only, in this case—"

"They kill," said the younger man.

"Yes, that's it. Usually one of the dogs dies."

The younger man knocked the ash out of his pipe.

"I love dogs," he said, simply. "There'll never be a fight at my post, Mac—unless it's between men. And I'm not going to see this fight, because I'm afraid I'd kill some one if I did."



CHAPTER TWENTY

It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The caribou were roasting brown. In two more hours the feast would begin. The hour of the fight was at hand.

In the centre of the clearing three hundred men, women, and children were gathered in a close circle about a sapling cage ten feet square. Close to this cage, one at each side, were drawn the two smaller cages. Beside one of these cages stood Henri Durant; beside the other, Grouse Piet. They were not bantering now. Their faces were hard and set. And three hundred pairs of eyes were staring at them, and three hundred pairs of ears waiting for the thrilling signal.

It came—from Grouse Piet.

With a swift movement Durant pulled up the door of Miki's cage. Then, suddenly, he prodded him from behind with a crotched stick, and with a single leap Miki was in the big cage. Almost at the same instant the wolf-dog leapt from Grouse Piet's cage, and the two faced each other in the arena.

With the next breath he drew Durant could have groaned. What happened in the following half minute was a matter of environment with Miki. In the forest the wolf-dog would have interested him to the exclusion of everything else, and he would have looked upon him as another Netah or a wild wolf. But in his present surroundings the idea of fighting was the last to possess him. He was fascinated by that grim and waiting circle of faces closing in the big cage; he scrutinized it, turning his head sharply from point to point, as if hoping to see Nanette and the baby, or even Challoner his first master. To the wolf-dog Grouse Piet had given the name of Taao, because of the extraordinary length of his fangs; and of Taao, to Durant's growing horror, Miki was utterly oblivious after that first head-on glance. He trotted to the edge of the cage and thrust his nose between the bars, and a taunting laugh rose out of Grouse Piet's throat. Then he began making a circle of the cage, his sharp eyes on the silent ring of faces. Taao stood in the centre of the cage, and not once did his reddish eyes leave Miki. What was outside of the cage held small interest for him. He understood his business, and murder was bred in his heart. For a space during which Durant's heart beat like a hammer Taao turned, as if on a pivot, following Miki's movement, and the crest on his spine stood up like bristles.

Then Miki stopped, and in that moment Durant saw the end of all his hopes. Without a sound the wolf-dog was at his opponent. A bellow rose from Grouse Piet's lips. A deep breath passed through the circle of spectators, and Durant felt a cold chill run up his back to the roots of his hair. What happened in the next instant made men's hearts stand still. In that first rush Miki should have died. Grouse Piet expected him to die, and Durant expected him to die. But in the last fractional bit of the second in which the wolf-dog's jaws closed, Miki was transformed into a thing of living lightning. No man had ever seen a movement swifter than that with which he turned on Taao. Their jaws clashed. There was a sickening grinding of bone, and in another moment they were rolling and twisting together on the earth floor. Neither Grouse Piet nor Durant could see what was happening. They forgot even their own bets in the horror of that fight. Never had there been such a fight at Fort O' God.

The sound of it reached to the Company's store. In the door, looking toward the big cage, stood the young white man. He heard the snarling, the clashing of teeth, and his jaws set heavily and a dull flame burned in his eyes. His breath came in a sudden gasp.

"DAMN!" he cried, softly.

His hands clenched, and he stepped slowly down from the door and went toward the cage. It was over when he made his way through the ring of spectators. The fight had ended as suddenly as it had begun, and Grouse Piet's wolf-dog lay in the centre of the cage with a severed jugular. Miki looked as though he might be dying. Durant had opened the door and had slipped a rope over his head, and outside the cage Miki stood swaying on his feet, red with blood, and half blind. His flesh was red and bleeding in a dozen places, and a stream of blood trickled from his mouth. A cry of horror rose to the young white man's lips as he looked down at him.

And then, almost in the same breath, there came a still stranger cry.

"Good God! Miki—Miki—Miki—"

Beating upon his brain as if from a vast distance, coming to him through the blindness of his wounds, Miki heard that voice.

The VOICE! THE voice that had lived with him in all his dreams, the voice he had waited for, and searched for, and knew that some day he would find. The voice of Challoner, his master!

He dropped on his belly, whining, trying to see through the film of blood in his eyes; and lying there, wounded almost unto death, his tail thumped the ground in recognition. And then, to the amazement of all who beheld, Challoner was down upon his knees beside him, and his arms were about him, and Miki's lacerated tongue was reaching for his hands, his face, his clothes.

"Miki—Miki—Miki!"

Durant's hand fell heavily upon Challoner's shoulder.

It was like the touch of a red-hot iron to Challoner. In a flash he was on his feet, facing him.

"He's mine," Challoner cried, trying to hold back his passion. "He's mine you—you devil!"

And then, powerless to hold back his desire for vengeance, his clenched fist swung like a rock to Durant's heavy jaw, and the Frenchman went to the ground. For a moment Challoner stood over him, but he did not move. Fiercely he turned upon Grouse Piet and the crowd. Miki was cringing at his feet again. Pointing to him, Challoner cried loudly, so all could hear.

"He's my dog. Where this beast got him I don't know. But he's mine. Look for yourselves! See—see him lick my hand. Would he do that for HIM? And look at that ear. There's no other ear in all the north cut like that. I lost him almost a year ago, but I'd know him among ten thousand by that ear. By God!—if I had known—"

He elbowed his way through the breeds and Indians, leading Miki by the rope Durant had slipped over the dog's head. He went to MacDonnell, and told him what had happened. He told of the preceding spring, and of the accident in which Miki and the bear cub were lost from his canoe and swept over the waterfall. After registering his claim against whatever Durant might have to say he went to the shack in which he was staying at Fort 0' God.

An hour later Challoner sat with Miki's big head between his two hands, and talked to him. He had bathed and dressed his wounds, and Miki could see. His eyes were on his master's face, and his hard tail thumped the floor. Both were oblivious of the sounds of the revellers outside; the cries of men, the shouting of boys, the laughter of women, and the incessant barking of dogs. In Challoner's eyes there was a soft glow.

"Miki, old boy, you haven't forgotten a thing—not a dam' thing, have you? You were nothing but an onery-legged pup then, but you didn't forget! Remember what I told you, that I was going to take you and the cub down to the Girl? Do you remember? The Girl I said was an angel, and 'd love you to death, and all that? Well, I'm glad something happened—and you didn't go. It wasn't the same when I got back, an' SHE wasn't the same, Miki. Lord, she'd got married, AND HAD TWO KIDS! Think of that, old scout—TWO! How the deuce could she have taken care of you and the cub, eh? And nothing else was the same, Boy. Three years in God's Country—up here where you burst your lungs just for the fun of drinking in air—changed me a lot, I guess. Inside a week I wanted to come back, Miki. Yessir, I was SICK to come back. So I came. And we're going to stick now, Miki. You're going with me up to that new Post the Company has given me. From now on we're pals. Understand, old scout, we're PALS!"