Men and dogs looked askance at Batard when he drifted into their camps and posts.  The men greeted him with feet threateningly lifted for the kick, the dogs with bristling manes and bared fangs.  Once a man did kick Batard, and Batard, with quick wolf snap, closed his jaws like a steel trap on the man’s calf and crunched down to the bone.  Whereat the man was determined to have his life, only Black Leclere, with ominous eyes and naked hunting-knife, stepped in between.  The killing of Batard—­ah, sacredam, that was a pleasure Leclere reserved for himself.  Some day it would happen, or else—­bah! who was to know?  Anyway, the problem would be solved.

For they had become problems to each other.  The very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other.  Their hate bound them together as love could never bind.  Leclere was bent on the coming of the day when Batard should wilt in spirit and cringe and whimper at his feet.  And Batard—­Leclere knew what was in Batard’s mind, and more than once had read it in Batard’s eyes.  And so clearly had he read, that when Batard was at his back, he made it a point to glance often over his shoulder.

Men marvelled when Leclere refused large money for the dog.  “Some day you’ll kill him and be out his price,” said John Hamlin once, when Batard lay panting in the snow where Leclere had kicked him, and no one knew whether his ribs were broken, and no one dared look to see.

“Dat,” said Leclere, dryly, “dat is my biz’ness, M’sieu’.”

And the men marvelled that Batard did not run away.  They did not understand.  But Leclere understood.  He was a man who lived much in the open, beyond the sound of human tongue, and he had learned the voices of wind and storm, the sigh of night, the whisper of dawn, the clash of day.  In a dim way he could hear the green things growing, the running of the sap, the bursting of the bud.  And he knew the subtle speech of the things that moved, of the rabbit in the snare, the moody raven beating the air with hollow wing, the baldface shuffling under the moon, the wolf like a grey shadow gliding betwixt the twilight and the dark.  And to him Batard spoke clear and direct.  Full well he understood why Batard did not run away, and he looked more often over his shoulder.

When in anger, Batard was not nice to look upon, and more than once had he leapt for Leclere’s throat, to be stretched quivering and senseless in the snow, by the butt of the ever ready dogwhip.  And so Batard learned to bide his time.  When he reached his full strength and prime of youth, he thought the time had come.  He was broad-chested, powerfully muscled, of far more than ordinary size, and his neck from head to shoulders was a mass of bristling hair—­to all appearances a full-blooded wolf.  Leclere was lying asleep in his furs when Batard deemed the time to be ripe.  He crept upon him stealthily, head low to earth and lone ear laid back, with a feline