He did not hear Roger Audemard as he rose from his chair.  For a moment the riverman stared at the back of David’s head, and in that moment he was fighting to keep back what wanted to come from his lips in words.  He turned before David faced him again, and did not pause until he stood at the cabin door with his hand at the latch.  There he was partly in shadow.

“I shall not see you again until you reach the Yellowknife,” he said.  “Not until then will you know—­or will I know—­what is going to happen.  I think you will understand strange things then, but that is for the hour to tell.  Bateese has explained to you that you must not make an effort to escape.  You would regret it, and so would I. If you have red blood in you, m’sieu—­if you would understand all that you cannot understand now—­wait as patiently as you can.  Bonne nuit, M’sieu Carrigan!”

“Good night!” nodded David.

In the pale shadows he thought a mysterious light of gladness illumined Black Roger’s face before the door opened and closed, leaving him alone again.

XXIV

With the going of Black Roger also went the oppressive loneliness which had gripped Carrigan, and as he stood listening to the low voices outside, the undeniable truth came to him that he did not hate this man as he wanted to hate him.  He was a murderer, and a scoundrel in another way, but he felt irresistibly the impulse to like him and to feel sorry for him.  He made an effort to shake off the feeling, but a small voice which he could not quiet persisted in telling him that more than one good man had committed what the law called murder, and that perhaps he didn’t fully understand what he had seen through the cabin window on the raft.  And yet, when unstirred by this impulse, he knew the evidence was damning.

But his loneliness was gone.  With Audemard’s visit had come an unexpected thrill, the revival of an almost feverish anticipation, the promise of impending things that stirred his blood as he thought of them.  “You will understand strange things then,” Roger Audemard had said, and something in his voice had been like a key unlocking mysterious doors for the first time.  And then, “Wait, as patiently as you can!” Out of the basket on the table seemed to come to him a whispering echo of that same word—­wait!  He laid his hands upon it, and a pulse of life came with the imagined whispering.  It was from Marie-Anne.  It seemed as though the warmth of her hands were still there, and as he removed the cloth the sweet breath of her came to him.  And then, in the next instant, he was trying to laugh at himself and trying equally hard to call himself a fool, for it was the breath of newly-baked things which her fingers had made.

Yet never had he felt the warmth of her presence more strangely in his heart.  He did not try to explain to himself why Roger Audemard’s visit had broken down things which had seemed insurmountable an hour ago.  Analysis was impossible, because he knew the transformation within himself was without a shred of reason.  But it had come, and with it his imprisonment took on another form.  Where before there had been thought of escape and a scheming to jail Black Roger, there filled him now an intense desire to reach the Yellowknife and the Chateau Boulain.