“Oui; they will fight!” said Henri again.

“Ze wolf, he will fight, oui,” said Grouse Piet.  “But your dog, m’sieu, he be vair seek, lak a puppy, w’en ze fight come!”

A little later Miki saw a white man standing close to his cage.  It was MacDonnell, the Scotch factor.  He gazed at Miki and the wolf-dog with troubled eyes.  Ten minutes later, in the little room which he had made his office, he was saying to a younger man: 

“I’d like to stop it, but I can’t.  They wouldn’t stand for it.  It would lose us half a season’s catch of fur.  There’s been a fight like this at Fort O’ God for the last fifty years, and I don’t suppose, after all, that it’s any worse than one of the prize fights down there.  Only, in this case—­”

“They kill,” said the younger man.

“Yes, that’s it.  Usually one of the dogs dies.”

The younger man knocked the ash out of his pipe.

“I love dogs,” he said, simply.  “There’ll never be a fight at my post, Mac—­unless it’s between men.  And I’m not going to see this fight, because I’m afraid I’d kill some one if I did.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was two o’clock in the afternoon.  The caribou were roasting brown.  In two more hours the feast would begin.  The hour of the fight was at hand.

In the centre of the clearing three hundred men, women, and children were gathered in a close circle about a sapling cage ten feet square.  Close to this cage, one at each side, were drawn the two smaller cages.  Beside one of these cages stood Henri Durant; beside the other, Grouse Piet.  They were not bantering now.  Their faces were hard and set.  And three hundred pairs of eyes were staring at them, and three hundred pairs of ears waiting for the thrilling signal.

It came—­from Grouse Piet.

With a swift movement Durant pulled up the door of Miki’s cage.  Then, suddenly, he prodded him from behind with a crotched stick, and with a single leap Miki was in the big cage.  Almost at the same instant the wolf-dog leapt from Grouse Piet’s cage, and the two faced each other in the arena.

With the next breath he drew Durant could have groaned.  What happened in the following half minute was a matter of environment with Miki.  In the forest the wolf-dog would have interested him to the exclusion of everything else, and he would have looked upon him as another Netah or a wild wolf.  But in his present surroundings the idea of fighting was the last to possess him.  He was fascinated by that grim and waiting circle of faces closing in the big cage; he scrutinized it, turning his head sharply from point to point, as if hoping to see Nanette and the baby, or even Challoner his first master.  To the wolf-dog Grouse Piet had given the name of Taao, because of the extraordinary length of his fangs; and of Taao, to Durant’s growing horror, Miki was utterly oblivious after that