call himself a fool and a weakling, but those words were purely mechanical, hollow, meaningless.  The truth remained.  It was a blazing fire in his breast, a conflagration that might easily get the best of him, a thing which he must fight and triumph over for his own salvation.  He did not think of danger for Marie-Anne, for such a thought was inconceivable.  The tragedy was one-sided.  It was his own folly, his own danger.  For just as he loved Marie-Anne, so did she love her husband, St. Pierre.

He came to the low ridge close to the river and climbed up through the thick birches and poplars.  At the top was a bald knob of sandstone, over which the riverman had already passed.  David paused there and looked down on the broad sweep of the Athabasca.

What he saw was like a picture spread out on the great breast of the river and the white strip of shoreline.  Still a quarter of a mile upstream, floating down slowly with the current, was a mighty raft, and for a space his eyes took in nothing else.  On the Mackenzie, the Athabasca, the Saskatchewan, and the Peace he had seen many rafts, but never a raft like this of St. Pierre Boulain.  It was a hundred feet in width and twice and a half times as long, and with the sun blazing down upon it from out of a cloudless sky it looked to him like a little city swept up from out of some archaic and savage desert land to be transplanted to the river.  It was dotted with tents and canvas shelters.  Some of these were gray, and some were white, and two or three were striped with broad bands of yellow and red.  Behind all these was a cabin, and over this there rose a slender staff from which floated the black and white pennant of St. Pierre.  The raft was alive.  Men were running between the tents.  The long rudder sweeps were flashing in the sun.  Rowers with naked arms and shoulders were straining their muscles in four York boats that were pulling like ants at the giant mass of timber.  And to David’s ears came a deep monotone of human voices, the chanting of the men as they worked.

Nearer to him a louder response suddenly made answer to it.  A dozen steps carried him round a projecting thumb of brush, and he could see the open shore where the bateau was tied.  Marie-Anne had crossed the strip of sand, and Bateese was helping her into a waiting York boat.  Then Bateese shoved it off, and the four men in it began to row.  Two canoes were already half-way to the raft, and David recognized the occupant of one of them as Andre, the Broken Man.  Then he saw Marie-Anne rise in the York boat and wave something white in her hand.