CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the
forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the
cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper. There was not
another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in
wickedness--unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles
north, and who was Jacques's rival in several things. A giant in
size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half-
hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him--if he
had a soul at all--Le Beau was a "throw-back" of the worst sort.
In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all
the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.
It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had
she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself,
the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have
been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual
beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes--trembling at
his approach and a slave in his presence--she was, like his dogs,
the PROPERTY of The Brute. And the woman had a baby. One had
already died; and it was the thought that this one might die, as
the other had died, that brought at times the new flash of fire
into her dark eyes.
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