three roads led into the wide north, and the hopelessness of his pursuers' quest would turn them back.
Since midnight, when he had reached his canoe, cached in the brush above the camp of the Transcontinental contractors at the End-of-Steel, and pushed north, he had given little thought to the man lying back there in the shack with a knife in his heart. That had been the inevitable result of the dead man's infamy. He had paid in the coin of the north, and there was an end to it.
But the raw agony of his own home-coming would live with him by day and by night until the good God took what was left of François Hertel. The grief that had struck him from the blue sky on his return from his winter hunt to find his home a charred ruin and his wife Marie gone—drowned, or dead somewhere in the forest, no one knew which—would companion him into the gray years. Again and again as he drove his canoe up the long quick-water he had recalled the joy that had been his when he turned the bend above the Hudson's Bay Company post at Coocoocache—Cree, for Nest of the Gray Owl—and his glad eyes sought the cabin on the island he had built the previous summer for his young bride. How he and Philippe, his partner, had sung, thinking she might hear them before they came in sight around the bend, and then—the thrust of pain that reached his heart at the grim spectacle of his ruined home. Song there died on his lips, never to return.
They had hastened to the island, but nothing in the ruins enlightened them as to the fate of Marie. Hop-
