and spring only a few days away? It is not like the cold chills at
Churchill, which come up with the icebergs and stay there all summer!
What do you think of your Jean de Gravois and his country now?"

Jean was bringing back with him a splendid young woman, with big,
lustrous eyes, and hair that shone with the gloss of a raven's wing in
the sun. She laughed at him proudly as he danced and leaped beside
her, replying softly in Cree, which is the most beautiful language in
the world, to everything that he said.

Jean leaped and ran, cracked his caribou whip, and shouted and sang
until he was panting and red in the face. Just as Iowaka had called
upon him to stop and get a second wind, the Malemutes dropped back
upon their haunches where Jan Thoreau lay, twisted and bleeding, in
the snow.

"What is this?" cried Jean.

He caught Jan's limp head and shoulders up in his arms, and called
shrilly to Iowaka, who was disentangling herself from the thick furs
in which he had wrapped her.

"It is the fiddler I told you about, who lives with Williams at Post
Lac Bain!" he shouted excitedly in Cree. "He has been murdered! He has
been choked to death, and torn to pieces in the face, as if by an
animal!" Jean's eyes roved about as Iowaka kneeled beside him. "What a
fight!" he gasped. "See the footprints--a big man and a small boy, and
the murderer has gone on a sledge!"

"He is warm," said Iowaka. "It may be that he is not dead."