Three-quarters of an hour and then--death. There was no doubt in his mind this time. Ever in the coyote, with eternity staring him in the face, he had hoped and fought for life. But here there was no hope, there was to be no fighting. Through one of the black holes in the wall he was to be shot down, with no chance to defend himself, to prove himself innocent. And Meleese--did she, too, believe him guilty of that crime?

He groaned aloud, and picked up the note again. Softly he repeated her last words to him: "If G.o.d fails to answer my prayers I will still do as I have promised, and follow you." Those words seemed to cry aloud his doom. Even Meleese had given up hope. And yet, was there not a deeper significance in her words? He started as if some one had struck him, his eyes agleam.

"_'I will follow you._'"

He almost sobbed the words this time. His hands trembled and he dropped the paper again on the table and turned his eyes in staring horror toward the door. What did she mean? Would Meleese kill herself if he was murdered by her brothers? He could see no other meaning in her last message to him, and for a time after the chilling significance of her words struck his heart he scarce restrained himself from calling aloud for Jean. If he could but send a word back to her, tell her once more of his great love--that the winning of that love was ample reward for all that he had lost and was about to lose, and that it gave him such happiness as he had never known even in this last hour of his torture!

Twice he shouted for Croisset, but there came no response save the hollow echoings of his own voice in the subterranean chambers. After that he began to think more sanely. If Meleese was a prisoner in her room it was probable that Croisset, who was now fully recognized as a traitor at the post, could no longer gain access to her. In some secret way Meleese had contrived to give him the note, and he had performed his last mission for her.

In Howland's breast there grew slowly a feeling of sympathy for the Frenchman. Much that he had not understood was clear to him now. He understood why Meleese had not revealed the names of his a.s.sailants at Prince Albert and Wekusko, he understood why she had fled from him after his abduction, and why Jean had so faithfully kept secrecy for her sake. She had fought to save him from her own flesh and blood, and Jean had fought to save him, and in these last minutes of his life he would liked to have had Croisset with him that he might have taken has hand and thanked him for what he had done. And because he had fought for him and Meleese the Frenchman's fate was to be almost as terrible as his own. It was he who would fire the fatal shot at six o'clock. Not the brothers, but Jean Croisset, would be his executioner and murderer.

The minutes pa.s.sed swiftly, and as they went Howland was astonished to find how coolly he awaited the end. He even began to debate with himself as to through which hole the fatal shot would be fired. No matter where he stood he was in the light of the big hanging lamp. There was no obscure or shadowy corner in which for a few moments he might elude his executioner. He even smiled when the thought occurred to him that it was possible to extinguish the light and crawl under the table, thus gaining a momentary delay. But what would that delay avail him? He was anxious for the fatal minute to arrive, and be over.

There were moments of happiness when in the damp horror of his death-chamber there came before him visions of Meleese, grown even sweeter and more lovable, now that he knew how she had sacrificed herself between two great loves--the love of her own people and the love of himself. And at last she had surrendered to him. Was it possible that she could have made that surrender if she, like her brothers, believed him to be the murderer of her father--the son of the man-fiend who had robbed her of a mother? It was impossible, he told himself. She did not believe him guilty. And yet--why had she not given him some such word in her last message to him?

His eyes traveled to the note on the table and he began searching in his coat pockets. In one of them he found the worn stub of a pencil, and for many minutes after that he was oblivious to the pa.s.sing of time as he wrote his last words to Meleese. When he had finished he folded the paper and placed it under his watch. At the final moment, before the shot was fired, he would ask Jean to take it. His eyes fell on his watch dial and a cry burst from his lips.

It lacked but ten minutes of the final hour!

Above him he heard faintly the sharp barking of dogs, the hollow sound of men's voices. A moment later there came to him an echo as of swiftly tramping feet, and after that silence.

"Jean," he called tensely. "Ho, Jean--Jean Croisset--"

He caught up the paper and ran from one black opening to another, calling the Frenchman's name.

"As you love your G.o.d, Jean, as you have a hope of Heaven, take this note to Meleese!" he pleaded. "Jean--Jean Croisset--"

There came no answer, no movement outside, and Howland stilled the beating of his heart to listen. Surely Croisset was there! He looked again at the watch he held in his hand. In four minutes the shot would be fired. A cold sweat bathed his face. He tried to cry out again, but something rose in his throat and choked him until his voice was only a gasp. He sprang back to the table and placed the note once more under the watch. Two minutes! One and a half! One!

With a sudden fearless cry he sprang into the very center of his prison, and flung out his arms with his face to the hole next the door. This time his voice was almost a shout.

"Jean Croisset, there is a note under my watch on the table. After you have killed me take it to Meleese. If you fail I shall haunt you to your grave!"

Still no sound--no gleam of steel pointing at aim through the black aperture. Would the shot come from behind?

Tick--tick--tick--tick--

He counted the beating of his watch up to twenty. A sound stopped him then, and he closed his eyes, and a great shiver pa.s.sed through his body.

It was the tiny bell of his watch tinkling off the hour of six!

Scarcely had that sound ceased to ring in his brain when from far through the darkness beyond the wall of his prison there came a creaking noise, as if a heavy door had been swung slowly on its hinges, or a trap opened--then voices, low, quick, excited voices, the hurrying tread of feet, a flash of light shooting through the gloom. They were coming!

After all it was not to be a private affair, and Jean was to do his killing as the hangman's job is done in civilization--before a crowd.

Howland's arms dropped to his side. This was more terrible than the other--this seeing and hearing of preparation, in which he fancied that he heard the click of Croisset's gun as he lifted the hammer.

Instead it was a hand fumbling at the door. There were no voices now, only a strange moaning sound that he could not account for. In another moment it was made clear to him. The door swung open, and the white-robed figure of Meleese sprang toward him with a cry that echoed through the dungeon chambers. What happened then--the pa.s.sing of white faces beyond the doorway, the subdued murmur of voices, were all lost to Howland in the knowledge that at the last moment they had let her come to him, that he held her in his arms, and that she was crushing her face to his breast and sobbing things to him which he could not understand.

Once or twice in his life he had wondered if realities might not be dreams, and the thought came to him now when he felt the warmth of her hands, her face, her hair, and then the pa.s.sionate pressure of her lips on his own. He lifted his eyes, and in the doorway he saw Jean Croisset, and behind him a wild, bearded face--the face that had been over him when life was almost choked from him on the Great North Trail. And beyond these two he saw still others, shining ghostly and indistinct in the deeper gloom of the outer darkness. He strained Meleese to him, and when he looked down into her face he saw her beautiful eyes flooded with tears, and yet shining with a great joy. Her lips trembled as she struggled to speak. Then suddenly she broke from his arms and ran to the door, and Jean Croisset came between them, with the wild bearded man still staring over his shoulder.

"M'seur, will you come with us?" said Jean.

The bearded man dropped back into the thick gloom, and without speaking Howland followed Croisset, his eyes on the shadowy form of Meleese. The ghostly faces turned from the light, and the tread of their retreating feet marked the pa.s.sage through the blackness. Jean fell back beside Howland, the huge bulk of the bearded man three paces ahead. A dozen steps more and they came to a stair down which a light shone. The Frenchman's hand fell detainingly on Howland's arm, and when a moment later they reached the top of the stairs all had disappeared but Jean and the bearded man. Dawn was breaking, and a pale light fell through the two windows of the room they had entered. On a table burned a lamp, and near the table were several chairs. To one of these Croisset motioned the engineer, and as Howland sat down the bearded man turned slowly and pa.s.sed through a door. Jean shrugged his shoulders as the other disappeared.

"_Mon Dieu_, that means that he leaves it all to me," he exclaimed. "I don't wonder that it is hard for him to talk, M'seur. Perhaps you have begun to understand!"

"Yes, a little," replied Howland. His heart was throbbing as if he had just finished climbing a long hill. "That was the man who tried to kill me. But Meleese--the--" He could go no further. Scarce breathing, he waited for Jean to speak.

"It is Pierre Th.o.r.eau," he said, "eldest brother to Meleese. It is he who should say what I am about to tell you, M'seur. But he is too full of grief to speak. You wonder at that? And yet I tell you that a man with a better soul than Pierre Th.o.r.eau never lived, though three times he has tried to kill you. Do you remember what you asked me a short time ago, M'seur--if I thought that _you_ were the John Howland who murdered the father of Meleese sixteen years ago? G.o.d's saints, and I did until hardly more than half an hour ago, when some one came from the South and exploded a mine under our feet. It was the youngest of the three brothers. M'seur we have made a great mistake, and we ask your forgiveness."

In the silence the eyes of the two men met across the table. To Howland it was not the thought that his life was saved that came with the greatest force, but the thought of Meleese, the knowledge that in that hour when all seemed to be lost she was nearer to him than ever. He leaned half over the table, his hands clenched, his eyes blazing. Jean did not understand, for he went on quickly.

"I know it is hard, M'seur. Perhaps it will be impossible for you to forgive a thing like this. We have tried to kill you--kill you by a slow torture, as we thought you deserved. But think for a moment, M'seur, of what happened up here sixteen years ago this winter. I have told you how I choked life from the man-fiend. So I would have choked life from you if it had not been for Meleese. I, too, am guilty. Only six years ago we knew that the right John Howland--the son of the man I slew--was in Montreal, and we sent to seek him this youngest brother, for he had been a long time at school with Meleese and knew the ways of the South better than the others. But he failed to find him at that time, and it was only a short while ago that this brother located you.

"As Our Blessed Lady is my witness, M'seur, it is not strange that he should have taken you for the man we sought, for it is singular that you bear him out like a brother in looks, as I remember the boy. It is true that Francois made a great error when he sent word to his brothers suggesting that if either Gregson or Thorne was put out of the way you would probably be sent into the North. I swear by the Virgin that Meleese knew nothing of this, M'seur. She knew nothing of the schemes by which her brothers drove Gregson and Thorne back into the South. They did not wish to kill them, and yet it was necessary to do something that you might replace one of them, M'seur. They did not make a move alone but that something happened. Gregson lost a finger. Thorne was badly hurt--as you know. Bullets came through their window at night. With Jackpine in their employ it was easy to work on them, and it was not long before they sent down asking for another man to replace them."

For the first time a surge of anger swept through Howland.

"The cowards!" he exclaimed. "A pretty pair, Croisset--to crawl out from under a trap to let another in at the top!"

"Perhaps not so bad as that," said Jean. "They were given to understand that they--and they alone--were not wanted in the country. It may be that they did not think harm would come to you, and so kept quiet about what had happened. It may be, too, that they did not like to have it known that they were running away from danger. Is not that human, M'seur? Anyway, you were detailed to come, and not until then did Meleese know of all that had occurred."

The Frenchman stopped for a moment. The glare had faded from Howland's eyes. The tense lines in his face relaxed.

"I--I--believe I understand everything now, Jean," he said. "You traced the wrong John Howland, that's all. I love Meleese, Jean. I would kill John Howland for her. I want to meet her brothers and shake their hands.

I don't blame them. They're men. But, somehow, it hurts to think of her--of Meleese--as--as almost a murderer."

"_Mon Dieu_, M'seur, has she not saved your life! Listen to this! It was then--when she knew what had happened--that Meleese came to me--whom she had made the happiest man in the world because it was she who brought my Mariane over from Churchill on a visit especially that I might see her and fall in love with her, M'seur--which I did. Meleese came to me--to Jean Croisset--and instead of planning your murder, M'seur, she schemed to save your life--with me--who would have cut you into bits no larger than my finger and fed you to the carrion ravens, who would have choked the life out of you until your eyes bulged in death, as I choked that one up on the Great Slave! Do you understand, M'seur? It was Meleese who came and pleaded with me to save your life--before you had left Chicago, before she had heard more of you than your name, before--"

Croisset hesitated, and stopped.

"Before what, Jean?"

"Before she had learned to love you, M'seur."

"G.o.d bless her!" exclaimed Howland.

"You believe this, M'seur?"

"As I believe in a G.o.d."

"Then I will tell you what she did, M'seur," he continued in a low voice. "The plan of the brothers was to make you a prisoner near Prince Albert and bring you north. I knew what was to happen then. It was to be a beautiful vengeance, M'seur--a slow torturing death on the spot where the crime was committed sixteen years ago. But Meleese knew nothing of this. She was made to believe that up here, where the mother and father died, you would be given over to the proper law--to the mounted police who come this way now and then. She is only a girl, M'seur, easily made to believe strange things in such matters as these, else she would have wondered why you were not given to the officers in Prince Albert. It was the eldest brother who thought of her as a lure to bring you out of the town into their hands, and not until the last moment, when they were ready to leave for the South, did she overhear words that aroused her suspicions that they were about to kill you. It was then, M'seur, that she came to me."

"And you, Jean?"

"On the day that Mariane promised to become my wife, M'seur, I promised in Our Blessed Lady's name to repay my debt to Meleese, and the manner of payment came in this fashion. Jackpine, too, was her slave, and so we worked together. Two hours after Meleese and her brothers had left for the South I was following them, shaven of beard and so changed that I was not recognized in the fight on the Great North Trail. Meleese thought that her brothers would make you a prisoner that night without harming you. Her brothers told her how to bring you to their camp. She knew nothing of the ambush until they leaped on you from cover. Not until after the fight, when in their rage at your escape the brothers told her that they had intended to kill you, did she realize fully what she had done. That is all, M'seur. You know what happened after that.

She dared not tell you at Wekusko who your enemies were, for those enemies were of her own flesh and blood, and dearer to her than life.

She was between two great loves, M'seur--the love for her brothers and--"

Again Jean hesitated.