"My God!" said Jo Portugais, and peered into the man's face. "It's
him." Then he remembered the last words the man had spoken to him--
"Get out of my sight. You're as guilty as hell!" But his heart yearned
towards the man nevertheless.




CHAPTER X

THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT

In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a
widely travelled man. He had adventured freely on the great rivers and
in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson's Bay farther than
any man in seven parishes.

Jo's father and mother had both died in one year--when he was twenty-
five. That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy into a
morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by his
disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to find his
mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted. What had driven Jo from
home only his father knew; what had happened to him during that year only
Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his dying father.

A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it. He was a figure apart
in Chaudiere parish. A dreadful memory that haunted him, carried him out
of the village, which clustered round the parish church, into Vadrome
Mountain, three miles away, where he lived apart from all his kind. It