And then he found strength to try to push me away.  “Go!  Go!  The woman!” I made the words out of the writhing of his lips.

I leaned over him.  “Where?  Where is she?  Where?”

He tried many times before he made a sound that I could catch, and his strength ebbed.  I tried more brandy, but he was past reviving.  I strained to hear, till my agony matched his.  I thought I caught a word.  “Woods!” I cried.  “Is she in the woods?”

“Yes.”  He suddenly spoke clearly.  “Go.”  And he fell back in my arms.

I thought that he died with that word, but I held him a moment longer to make sure.  It did not matter now that I hated him.  As to what he had brought on me,—­I could not visit my despair on him for that.  As well rage at the forces that made him.  Life had given him a little soul in a compelling body.  The world believed the body, and expected of the man what he could not reach.  I looked at his dead face and trembled before the mystery of inheritance.

But he was not dead.  He opened his eyes to mine, quivered, and spoke, and his voice was clear.

“I would have followed her into the woods but they bound me.  I was not a coward that time.  I would have followed her.”

And then the end came to him in a way that I could not mistake, for with the last struggle he cried to the woman.

I laid him down.  While I had held him I had known that Frenchmen were fighting around me, and my neck was slimy with warm blood, for an arrow had nicked my ear.  But the battle had swayed on to the north of the camp, and only dead and dying were left in sight.  I looked at Starling.  I could not carry him.  I took off my coat, covered the body, and went on.

The woman had gone to the woods.  She had gone to the woods.

But woods lay on every side.

As I ran through the camp toward the north I saw a woman ahead of me.  She had a broad, fat figure, and I knew she was an Indian.  But she was a woman and the first that I had seen.  I caught her and jerked her around to face me.

“The woman?  The white woman?  Where is she?” I used the Illinois speech.

The woman was a Miami slave and apparently unhurt.  But as I stood over her a line of foam bubbled out of her blue lips.  Her eyes were meaningless.  I had frightened her into catalepsy, and I ground my teeth at my ill luck, for she could have told me something of the woman.  I took my brandy flask and tried to pry her teeth apart.

Both of my hands were busy with her when Pierre’s bellow rose from behind me.  “Master!  Jump!  Jump!” In the same instant I heard breathing close upon me.

I jumped.  As I did it I heard the crash of a hatchet through bone, and the pounding of a great body heaving down upon its knees.  I turned.

Pemaou’s hatchet was in Pierre’s brain, and my giant, my man who had lived with me, was crumpled down on hands and knees, looking at me and dying.