off, mellowed in the sun-mists, the guardian crests of Trout Mountains sentineling the country beyond!  Into that mystery-land on the farther side of the Wabiskaw waterways Carrigan would have loved to set his foot four days ago.  It was that mystery of the unpeopled places that he most desired, their silence, the comradeship of spaces untrod by the feet of man.  And now, what a fool he was!  Through vast distances the forests he loved seemed to whisper it to him, and ahead of him the river seemed to look back, nodding over its shoulder, beckoning to him, telling him the word of the forests was true.  It streamed on lazily, half a mile wide, as if resting for the splashing and roaring rush it would make among the rocks of the next rapids, and in its indolence it sang the low and everlasting song of deep and slowly passing water.  In that song David heard the same whisper, that he was a fool!  And the lure of the wilderness shores crept in on him and gripped him as of old.  He looked at the rowers in the two York boats, and then his eyes came back to the end of the barge and to St. Pierre’s wife.

Her little toes were tapping the floor of the deck.  She, too, was looking out over the wilderness.  And again it seemed to him that she was like a bird that wanted to fly.

“I should like to go into those hills,” she said, without looking at him.  “Away off yonder!”

“And I—­I should like to go with you.”

“You love all that, m’sieu?” she asked.

“Yes, madame!”

“Why ‘madame,’ when I have given you permission to call me ’Marie-Anne’?” she demanded.

“Because you call me ’m’sieu’.”

“But you—­you have not given me permission—­”

“Then I do now,” he interrupted quickly.

“Merci!  I have wondered why you did not return the courtesy,” she laughed softly.  “I do not like the m’sieu.  I shall call you ’David’!”

She rose out of the hammock suddenly and dropped her needles and lace work into the little basket.  “I have forgotten something.  It is for you to eat when it comes dinner-time, m’sieu—­I mean David.  So I must turn fille de cuisine for a little while.  That is what St. Pierre sometimes calls me, because I love to play at cooking.  I am going to bake a pie!”

The dark-screened door of the kitchenette closed behind her, and Carrigan walked out from under the awning, so that the sun beat down upon him.  There was no longer a doubt in his mind.  He was more than fool.  He envied St. Pierre, and he coveted that which St. Pierre possessed.  And yet, before he would take what did not belong to him, he knew he would put a pistol to his head and blow his life out.  He was confident of himself there.  Yet he had fallen, and out of the mire into which he had sunk he knew also that he must drag himself, and quickly, or be everlastingly lowered in his own esteem.  He stripped himself naked and did not lie to that other and greater thing of life that was in him.