The chief nodded, "_Enh_, yes."

"Look at them and see if he speaks rightly."

It took the Indian but a few minutes to check the distinguishing marks on the pelts and examine the large pile which Marcel had said possessed none.

"Are the marks on these pelts as Marcel says?"

"Yes, they are there, these marks as he says."

The cowed Lelacs, their dark faces now twisted with fear, awaited the next words of Gillies. Then the irate factor turned on them.

"Gaspard Lelac!" he roared. The face of Lelac paled to a sickly white as his furtive eyes met the factor's.

"All this fur, here, you and your sons traded in last week; your own fur, and the pelts of Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, dead men. I have held them separate from the rest. You are thieves and liars!"

The bomb had exploded. At the words of the factor, the trade-room became a bedlam of chattering and excited Indians. In the north, to steal the fur of another is one of the cardinal sins. The supporters of Marcel loudly exulted in the turn the hearing had taken, while the deluded adherents of the Lelacs, maddened by the villainy of men who had stolen from the dead and accused another, loudly cursed the half-breeds.

Nonplussed, paralyzed by the trick of the factor, instigated by the adroit Marcel, the Lelacs sent murderous looks at Jean who smiled contemptuously in their faces.

Gillies' deep ba.s.s quieted the uproar.

"Jules!" he called the second time. All were on tiptoe to learn what further surprise the stalwart Jules had in store for them, when he entered the room with two rifles, which he laid on the table, while the Lelacs stared in wide-eyed amazement.

"Where did you get these rifles?" asked Gillies.

"In the tepee of Lelac, just now, hidden under blankets."

"Whose rifles were they, Marcel?"

Marcel examined the guns.

"This 30-30 gun belonged to Piquet. This is the rifle of Antoine."

With a cry, a tall half-breed roughly shouldered his way to the front of the excited Crees.

"You thieves!" he cried, straining to reach the Lelacs with the knife which he held in his hand. But sinewy arms seized him and the frenzied uncle of Antoine Beaulieu was pushed, struggling, from the room.

It was the final straw. The mercurial Crees had turned as quickly from the Lelacs to Marcel as, in the first instance, they had credited the tale of the half-breeds. Now, with the Lelacs proven liars and thieves, Jean's explanation of the deaths of his partners, as Gillies foresaw, had, without corroboration, and on his word as a man, only, been at once accepted.

Calling for silence Gillies again spoke to the hunters.

"You have heard the words of these men. You have judged who has spoken with a double tongue; who, with the guns of dead men hidden in a tepee, have traded their fur and put their blood upon the head of another. Do you believe Jean Marcel when he says that Piquet killed Antoine Beaulieu and went out to kill him also, or do you believe the men who stole the guns and fur of a dead man which belong to his kinsmen?"

"_Enh! Enh!_ Jean Marcel speaks truth!" cried the Crees, and the chattering mob poured into the post clearing to carry the news to the curious young men and the women, who waited.

Meanwhile Pere Breton embraced the happy Marcel while the unchecked tears welled in Julie's eyes. Then Gillies and McCain wrung the Frenchman's hand until he grimaced. But the big Jules, patiently waiting his turn, pounced upon Jean with a fierce hug and, in spite of his protests carrying him like a child in his great arms from the trade-house, showed the man they had maligned, to the Crees, who now loudly cheered him.

Turning to Gillies, the Inspector said gravely: "These Lelacs go south for trial. I'll make an example of their thieving."

But Colin Gillies had no intention of having the half-breeds sent "outside" for trial, if he could prevent it. It would mean that Jean and he, himself, with Jules, would have to go as witnesses. He could take care of the Lelacs in his own way. He had punished men before.

"That would leave us very short-handed here. The famine has reduced the trade this year a third. If we want to make a showing next season, we can't spend six months travelling down below for a trial."

"Yes, that would mean your going and we can't afford to injure the trade; but I ought to make a report on this murder business in famine years."

"If you get the government into this, it will hurt us, Mr. Wallace. Why can't we handle this matter as we have handled it for two centuries?"

protested Gillies. "A report will only place the Company in a bad light--make them think we can't control the Crees."

"Well, perhaps you're right," admitted Wallace. "I'm out to make a showing on the East Coast and I don't want to handicap you."

So Gillies had his way.

CHAPTER XXVIII

BITTER-SWEET

To Jean Marcel it had been a happy moment--that of his exoneration by the hunters of Whale River. For weeks, with rage in his heart, he had silently borne the black looks of the Crees whom he could not avoid in going to his net and crossing the post clearing to the trade-house. For weeks his name had been a byword at the spring trade--Marcel, the man who had murdered his partners. But now the stain of infamy had been washed clean from an honored name. In his humble grave in the Mission Cemetery, Andre Marcel could now sleep in peace, for in the eyes of the small world of the East Coast, his son had come scathless through the long snows. The tale would not now travel down the coast in the Inspector's canoe that another white man had turned murderer for the scanty food of his friends.

And with his acquittal by the Company and the Crees, his love for Julie Breton, more poignant from its very hopelessness, gave him no rest. As he struggled with renunciation, he brought himself to realize that, after all, it had been but presumption on his part to hope that this girl with her education of years in a Quebec convent, her acquaintance with the ways of the great world "outside," should look upon a humble Company hunter as a possible husband. He had all along mistaken her kindness, her friendship, for something more which she had never felt.

In comparison with Wallace who, Jean had heard Gillies say, might some day go to Winnipeg as a.s.sistant Commissioner of the Company, he was as nothing. Doomed by his inheritance and his training to a life beyond the pale of civilization, he could offer Julie Breton little but a love that knew no bounds, no frontiers; that would find no trail, which led to her, too long; no water too vast; no height too sheer; to separate them, did she but call him.

So, in the hour of his triumph, the soul-sick Marcel went to one who never had failed him; who loved him with a singleness of heart but rarely paralleled by human kind; who, however humble his lot, would give him the worship accorded to no king--his dog.

Seated beside Fleur with her squealing children crawling over him, he circled her great neck with his arms and told his troubles to a hairy ear. She sought his hand with her tongue, her throat rumbling with content, for had she not there on the gra.s.s in the soft June sun, all her world--her puppies and her G.o.d, Jean Marcel?

There, Julie Breton, having in vain announced supper from the Mission door, found them, man and dog, and led Marcel away, protesting. The girl wore the frock she had donned in honor of his return, and never to Jean had she seemed so vibrant with life, never had the color bathed her dark face so exquisitely, nor the tumbled ma.s.ses of her hair so allured him.

But as he entered the Mission, he saw Inspector Wallace seated in conversation with the priest, and his heart went cold.

During the meal, served by a Cree woman, the admiring eyes of Wallace seldom left Julie's face. At first he seemed surprised at the presence of Marcel at the table but the priest made it quite evident to the Company man that Jean was as one of the family. However, as the Frenchman rarely joined in the conversation and early excused himself, leaving Wallace a free field, the Inspector's temper at what might have seemed presumption in a Company hunter was unmarred.

July came and to the surprise of Gillies and Whale River, the big Company canoe still remained under its tarpaulin on the post landing.

That the priest looked kindly on the possibility of such a brother-in-law was evident from his hospitality to Wallace, but what piqued the curiosity of Colin Gillies and McCain was whether Wallace, a Scotch Protestant, had as yet accepted the Catholic faith, for the Oblat, Pere Breton, could not marry his sister to a man of another religious belief. However, deep in the spell of the charming Julie, Inspector Wallace stayed on after the trade was over, giving as his reason his desire to go south with the Company steamer which shortly would be due.

Although to Jean she was the same merry Julie, each morning visiting the stockade to play with Fleur's puppies, who now had their eyes well open and were beginning to find an uncertain balance, he avoided her, rarely seeing her except at meal time. Of the change in their relations he never spoke, but man-like he was hurt that she failed to take him to task for his moodiness. In the evening, now, she walked on the river-sh.o.r.e with Wallace, and talked through the twilight when the sun lingered below the rim of the world in the west. Jean Marcel had gone out of her life. He ceased to mention the Inspector's name, and absented himself from meals when the Scotchman was expected.

Julie had said: "Jean, you are one of us, always welcome. Why do you stay away when Monsieur Wallace comes?" And he had answered: "You know why I stay away, Julie Breton."

That was all.

CHAPTER XXIX