"Ah!" she gasped, "to--to----"

"To La Roche," Bruce supplied. "You see I was right. I came just in time."

With an impulsive, winning gesture Desiree put her hands in Dunvegan's.

"I ought to be thankful," she began, brokenly. "And I am! Heaven knows I am! But I should also be frank. After greeting you as I did in my room I must explain."

"Not unless you wish, unless----"

"It is my wish, my will," she interrupted.

"I need relief; I must give someone my confidence. Otherwise I shall go mad!"

"There is another who should receive your confidence."

"You think so?" she cried bitterly. "Even if he could comprehend no single word of it? If he were sunk in debauchery from the very day of our marriage? From the moment of flight?"

"What!" exclaimed the thunderstruck chief trader. "What's that you say?"

Desiree tottered. "Let me sit down on this bench," she begged. "I'm weak somehow and--and faint."

Dunvegan leaned back against the store counter.

"G.o.d," he breathed--"no wonder!"

The woman looked up beneath the hand which soothed her hammering temples.

"You love Glyndon," Bruce burst out unguardedly.

Her fist descended viciously on the bench where she sat.

"No! My G.o.d, who could--now?" Vehemence, abhorrence, disgust, filled her voice.

"You did," he persisted, rather cruelly and with an ultra-selfish motive.

"Infatuation," Desiree cried, "for the clean mask that he wore. But love?--Ah! no, can one love a sot, a beast?"

"Tell me," Dunvegan urged.

She caught her breath a few times helplessly in the stress of emotion, her eyes roving round the big store which held none but themselves. Her gaze stopped on Bruce's face. Her sentences came from her lips mechanically.

"I think his beauty and his old-world manners dazzled me," was her frank, pride-dissolving confession. "For the time I--I forgot you, Bruce. I imagined I cared more for the other. My indecision could not brook his mad wooing. For remember that change, absence, and pressure are the three things which convert any woman's will."

Desiree paused, a pleading for pity in her glance.

"I took refuge behind my vow," she continued after a second. "But that gave me no stability. If I would marry him, he promised to leave Oxford House immediately and join the Nor'westers. You see Ferguson had already approached him through Gaspard Follet."

"That," Dunvegan observed, "should have shown you his true character."

"I was blind," she lamented. "I deemed it sacrifice. In a way it was, I suppose. How could I know that the plan arranged by Ferguson through Gaspard Follet was the very thing that suited his evil intentions? He offered Edwin command of Brondel. I thought it safe enough to be the factor's wife in a post removed from Fort La Roche."

Bruce made a disdainful gesture. "Those messengers showed you how safe it was," he remarked acridly.

"Father Brochet married us," Desiree went on stonily. "It was in the evening. At once we fled from Oxford House, the sentry thinking we were only taking a turn on the lake with the dogs. But in the forest a Nor'west guide from Brondel met us with another sledge as agreed, and the flight began in earnest. The Nor'wester had rum with him. I rode on one sledge. The thing I had married rode on the other, gulping down the rum. You can imagine what happened!"

"Ah!" breathed Dunvegan pityingly.

"When we made camp near dawn he was drunk! He rolled off the sled, while the Nor'wester built a fire, in order to greet his bride----"

Bruce's smothered oath interrupted.

"What?" Desiree asked.

"Nothing," he murmured, the veins of his neck swelling and nearly choking him.

"Instead," Desiree resumed, "he greeted my pistol muzzle. Day and night since he has greeted it also."

Struck with the lightning significance of her speech, Bruce Dunvegan leaped across the intervening floor s.p.a.ce. Like some cherished possession of his own he s.n.a.t.c.hed her palms. "Desiree! Desiree!" he panted.

The danger note was in his voice, the danger fire in his look.

Recklessly she met the sweet menace. Facing each other for a long minute, secret thoughts were read to the full.

"Yet you are married to him," breathed Dunvegan.

"Not in the bonds of G.o.d!" she declared.

CHAPTER XX

THE LONG LEAGUER

Shackled with cold, iron fetters that chilled the earth to its marrow, the mighty northland lay desolate beneath the brief sunshine, fantastic under the auroras. Past Fort Brondel the ghostly caribou hordes drifted rank on rank, coming from the foodless s.p.a.ces, going where subsistence permitted. In phantom packs the wolves howled by, trailing the swift moose across the crusted barrens. Four-legged creatures which never hibernate foraged farther south where the snows were thinner. The winged terrors of the air followed them, preying as opportunity afforded.

Survival was ordained for only the strong, the fierce-fanged, the predatory. Indented in the white surface of the forest aisles were ptarmigans' tracks and over these the long, shallow furrows left by swooping owls' wings.

A homely spot of life and warmth amid this vast desolation was the post of Brondel. All the Nor'west prisoners except Gaspard Follet, Glyndon, and Desiree had been transferred in care of a strong guard to Oxford House where they were confined under very strict surveillance in the blockhouse. The men of the guard returning brought news of how Malcolm Macleod, failing to surprise Fort Dumarge and rush its stockades, was besieging the place, hoping to starve it into surrender.

Dunvegan had hastened a messenger to Macleod, informing him of the capture of Brondel. The Factor dispatched a runner back with orders for Bruce to be ready to move on La Roche when Macleod should send him word of his coming on the completion of his own project. Realizing the danger in which he stood from the overwhelming power of his own desires, Dunvegan prayed in his heart for the fall of Fort Dumarge and the advent of the Factor. He thought he could find respite and ultimate safety in the call which would summon him to the attack of La Roche away from the lure of Desiree Lazard.

But monotonously the short days slipped into long nights, and still no word came from Malcolm Macleod. Dumarge was proving stubborn.

Nor did the tiresome fort routine offer the chief trader any relief. The unspeakable desolation all about, the inactivity, the eternal waiting, waiting for a command which failed to come, wore down by degrees the control Dunvegan had exercised over his emotions up to this stage. His pent-up pa.s.sion was gradually gaining in volume. He knew that its torrent must soon sweep him away, beating to atoms the barrier of moral code which was now but an undermined protection. He was facing the certain issue, understanding the immensity of his struggle, seeing no chance of escape.

True, he contemplated asking permission of the Factor to send Glyndon and Desiree to Oxford House. But over this he hesitated long, fearing that beyond his guard Black Ferguson's cunning might prevail and that Desiree might fall into the Nor'wester's grip. But finally, driven to desperation, Bruce started a runner on the trail to the beleaguering camp outside the palisades of Dumarge, requesting the transfer of the prisoners to the home post.

Fate seemed determined to torture, to tempt, to break Dunvegan. Macleod would not hear of such a proceeding. His answer was that neither Edwin Glyndon nor Gaspard Follet must pa.s.s from confinement or out of the chief trader's sight. The one-time clerk and the spy, possessing Nor'west secrets and intimate knowledge of the enemy's affairs, were captives far too valuable in the Factor's eyes to be given the remotest opportunity of obtaining freedom. When he should have extracted much-desired information from them, Macleod planned to deal them the deserts their actions had merited. Death he had decreed for Gaspard, a hundred lashes from dried moosehide thongs, a lone journey to York Factory, and a homeward working pa.s.sage on a fur barque were promised the puerile drunkard. Incidentally the runner whom Bruce had sent out mentioned the presence of two strange men at Oxford House.