“Look here,” cried Wentworth suddenly.  “Do you want money?  More money than you ever saw before?”

The breed shook his head.  “No.  De money can’t buy w’at I wan’.”

“What do you want?”

Again came the twisted smile.  “Mebbe-so we eat de suppaire firs’.  I got som’ feesh.  We buil’ de fire an’ cook ’um.”

The meal was eaten in silence, and during its progress Wentworth in a measure recovered his nerve.

“You haven’t told me yet what you want,” he suggested when they had lighted their pipes and thrown on an armful of greens for a smudge.

Between the narrowed lids the black eyes seemed to smoulder as they fixed upon the face of the white man.  “I wan’ you heart,” he said, casually.  “Red in my han’s I wan’ it, an’ squeeze de blood out, an’ watch it splash on de rocks.  Mebbe-so I’m eat a piece dat heart, an’ feed de res’ to my dog.”

Wentworth’s pipe dropped to the gravel and lay there.  He uttered no sound.  The wind had died down and save for the droning hum of a billion mosquitoes the silence was absolute.  A thin column of smoke streamed from the bowl of the neglected pipe.  In profound fascination Wentworth watched it flow smoothly upward.  An imperceptible air current set the column swaying and wavering, and a light puff of breeze dispersed it in a swirl of heavy yellow smoke from the smudge.  Dully, impersonally, he sensed that the half-breed had just told him that he would squeeze the red blood from his heart and watch it splash upon the rocks.  His eyes rested upon the rocks rimmed up by the ice above the gravelly beach.  The blood would splash there, and there, and those other rocks would be spattered with tiny drops of it—­his blood, the blood from his own heart which Alex Thumb would squeeze dry, as one would wring water from a sponge.  He wondered that he felt no sense of fear.  He believed that Alex Thumb would do that, yet it was a matter that seemed not of any importance.  He raised his eyes and encountered the malevolent glare of the breed.  The black eyes seemed to glow with an inner lustre, like the smoulder of banked fires.

With a start he seemed to have returned from some far place.  The words of Corporal Downey flittered through his brain:  “You’ll be servin’ with the devils in hell if you don’t quit makin’ enemies of men like Alex Thumb.”  And there was Alex Thumb regarding him through narrowed smouldering eyes across the little fire.  Alex Thumb would kill him!  Would kill him—­Ross Wentworth!  The whole thing was preposterous.  If the man had really meant to kill him he would have done it before this.  He wouldn’t dare; there were the Mounted.  Other words of Downey came to him, “If he does kill you, I’ll get him.”  So there was a possibility that the man would kill him.  Why not?  Who would ever know?  They would think he disappeared with Orcutt’s money—­would even institute a world-wide search from him—­but not in the bush.  Thought of the money nerved him to speak.