The Flaming Forest

unseen little devils were shooting red-hot arrows into his brain. He did not sense the fact of human presence; nor that the divan had been changed in

fingers worked with the old medicine man's. He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment. He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who was over him. He did not hear her voice nor feel the soothing of her hands, nor

ting themselves insistently upon his senses. He was back in the hot sand again, and this time he heard the voices of Jeanne Marie-Anne and Golden-Hair, and Golden-Hair flaunted a banner in his face, a triangular pennon of black on which a huge bear was fighting white Arctic wolves, and then she would run away from him, crying out-"St. Pierre Boulain-St. Pierre Boulain-" and the last he could see of her was her hair flaming like fire in the sun. But it was alw

which the sun was shining, and a black pennon-and he heard a soft, wonderful music that seemed to come to him faintly from another world. Other creatures were at work in his brain now. They were building up and putting together the loose ends of things. Carrigan became one of them, working so hard that fr

ried to answer, to call back to it, and the voice came again, repeating the words, emotionless, hollow, as if echoing up out of a grave. And still harder he struggled to reply to it, to say that he was David Carrigan, and that he was out on the trail of Black Roger Audemard, and that Black Roger was far north. And suddenly it seemed to him that the voice changed into the flesh and blood of Black Roger himself, though he could not see in th

eu David!" s

s relaxed, and his arms dropped limply. "Pardon-I

by long darkness, saw the change come in an instant like a flash of sunshine. And then-so near that he could have tou

Roger Audemard," he continued

as it had come. "A little, m'sieu. I am gl

stubble of beard on his cheeks. He was puzzled. This morning h

of the third day. You have been in a great fever. Nepapinas, my Indian doctor,

ack Roger

no

olden-

f Golde

se-with dark hai

y be,

polar bears, and white wolves, and of a great lord

of all

id. "I guess I've told you all I know. You shot me, bac

tly, and she rose swiftly from bes

led with subdued sunlight now, a western sun that glowed softly, giving depth and richness to the colors on the floor and walls, lighting up the piano keys, suffusing the pictures with a warmth of life. David's eyes traveled slowly to his own feet. The divan had been opened and transformed into a bed. He was undressed. He had on somebody's white

e waters of the Three Rivers that pennon was known. Yet it was not common. Seldom was it seen, and never had it come south of Chipewyan. Many things came to Carrigan now, t

s and the Dog Ribs call him KICHEOO KIMOW, or King, and the same rumors say there is never starvation or plague in his regions; and it is fact that neither the Hudson's Bay nor

ciated it with the name of Boulain. It was of St. Pierre that he had heard stories, St. Pierre

r a Yellowknife open his mouth about KICHEOO KIMOW St. Pierre, the master of their unmapped domains. In that great country north and west of the Great Slave he remained an enigma and a sphinx. If he ever came out with his brigades, he did not disclose his identity, so that if one saw a fleet of boats or canoes with the St. Pierre pennon, one had to make his own guess whether St. Pierre himself was there or not. But these things were known-that the keenest, quickest, and strongest men in the northland ran the St. Pierre brigades, that they brought out the richest carg

iefly the story of this half of a great continent in which for two hundred years romance and tragedy and strife for mastery had gone on in a way to thrill the hearts of men. He had told of huge forts with thirty-foot stone bastions, of fierce wars, of great warships that had fired their broadsides in battle in the ice-filled waters of Hudson's Bay. He had described the coming into this northern world of thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest and best-blooded men of England and France, and how these thousands had continued to come, bringing wi

ds were gone. Like dethroned monarchs, stripped to the level of other men, they lived in the memories of what had been. Their might now lay in trade. No more could they set out to wage war upon their rivals with powder and ball. Keen wit, swift dogs,

Of all men the Law wanted Black Roger most, and he, David Carrigan, was the chosen one to consummate its desire. Yet in spite of that he felt upon him the strange unrest of a greater adventure than the quest for Black Roger. It was like an impending thing that could not be seen, urging him, rousing his faculties from the slough into which they had fallen because of his wound and sickness. I

s the moral obligation of the thing was urging him, something that was becoming deeply and dangerously personal. At least-he tried to think of it as dangerous. And that danger was his unbecoming interest in the girl herself. It was an interest distinctly

er Audemard. Not long ago the one question to which, above all others, he had desired an answer was, why had Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain worked so desperately to kill him and so hard t

arge of state. A fierce-blooded offspring, he thought, one like Cleopatra hersel

he old Indian stood over him for a moment and put a cold, claw-like hand to his forehead. He grunted and nodded his head, his little sunken eyes gle

er. And-if you don't mind-my last lunch was three

g to eat, M'sieu David," bro

echless. He heard the door close behind the old Indian. Then Jeanne Marie-Anne drew up a chai

e hot sands. Her hair was as he had seen it there. It was coiled upon her head like ropes of spun silk, jet-black, glowing softly. But it was her eyes he stared at, and so fixed wa

bluntly. "I'm glad you haven't. I don'

pted him, sitting down close

ely as he was alive, were beginning to laugh at him. They were a wonderful brown, with little, golden specks in them, like the freckles he had seen in wood-violets. Her lips parted. Between their bewitching redness he

e girl's lips tightened a little, and the warmth went out of her eyes, leavin

I shall get up and follow. I am quite sure I a

have a bit of boiled fish f

to know why you shot me, and what yo

hat he thought was a growing shadow of perplexity in her eyes. "Bateese says to fasten a big stone to your neck an

ed to murder me behind the

" she added, the soft glow flashing back into her eyes for an instant. "Not after the splendid work Nepapinas has done on your head. St. Pier

e gesture died. The glow went out of her eyes, and in its place came a light that was almost fear-or pain. She came nearer to Carrigan again, and somehow, looking up at her, he thought of the litt

thought it was some one else behind the rock. But I can not tell you more than that-ever. And I know it is impossible for

leaning away from his pillows so that

are of the po

nt Carrigan. I am out after Roger Audemard, a murderer. But my commission has n

duty-and in his eyes was the confession of it, like the glow of a subdued fire. The gir

ted. "Friends-in sp

born thing riding over all other things in his swiftly beat

ghter," she said, forcing the word