eight over there is mine.  They’ll take us north.  And I want to warn you, don’t put yourself in reach of them until they get acquainted with you.  They’re not pets, you know; I guess they’d appreciate petting just about as much as they would boiled fish, or poison.  There’s nothing on earth like a husky or an Eskimo dog when it comes to lookin’ you in the eye with a friendly and lovable look and snapping your hand off at the same time.  But you’ll like ’em, David.  You can’t help feeling they’re pretty good comrades when you see what they do in the traces.”

Thoreau had shouldered the second gunny sack and now led the way into the thicker spruce and balsam behind the cabin.  David and Father Roland followed, the latter explaining more fully why it was necessary to keep the sledge dogs “hard as rocks,” and how the trick was done.  He was still talking, with the fingers of one hand closed about the little plush box in his pocket, when they came to the first of the fox pens.  He was watching David closely, a little anxiously—­thrilled by the touch of that box.  He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and conflicting forces struggling now for mastery.  It was not in the surrender of the box that he had felt David’s triumph, but in the voluntary sacrifice of what that box contained.  He wanted to rid himself of the picture, and quickly.  He was filled with apprehension lest David should weaken again, and ask for its return.  The locket meant nothing.  It was a bauble—­cold, emotionless, easily forgotten; but the other—­the picture of the woman who had almost destroyed him—­was a deadly menace, a poison to David’s soul and body as long as it remained in his possession, and the Little Missioner’s fingers itched to tear it from the velvet casket and destroy it.

He watched his opportunity.  As Thoreau tossed three fish over the high wire netting of the first pen the Frenchman was explaining to David why there were two female foxes and one male in each of his nine pens, and why warm houses partly covered with earth were necessary for their comfort and health, while the sledge dogs required nothing more than a bed of snow.  Father Roland seized this opportunity to drop back toward the cabin, calling in Cree to Mukoki.  Five seconds after the cabin concealed him from David he had the plush box out of his pocket; another five and he had opened it and the locket itself was in his hand.  And then, his breath coming in a sudden, hissing spurt between his teeth, he was looking upon the face of the woman.  Again in Cree he spoke to Mukoki, asking him for his knife.  The Indian drew it from his sheath and watched in silence while Father Roland accomplished his work of destruction.  The Missioner’s teeth were set tight.  There was a strange gleam of fire in his eyes.  An unspoken malediction rose out of his soul.  The work was