He drew the toboggan up against a heavy stand of spruce, and taking a snowshoe shovel-wise fell to baring the earth for a fire base. I took my skinning knife and went to the fallen moose. Jessie moved about, gathering dry twigs to start a fire.
Once at the moose and hastily flaying the hide from the steaming meat my attention became centered on the task. For a time I was absorbed in the problem of getting a hind quarter skinned and slashed clear before my fingers froze. Happening at length to glance campward, I saw in the firelight Barreau towering over Jessie, talking, his speech punctuated by an occasional gesture. His voice carried faintly to me. I stood up and watched. Reason hid its head, abashed, crowded into the background by a swift flood of passion. I could not think coherently. I could only stand there blinking, furious—over what I did not quite know, nor pause to inquire of myself. For the nonce I was as primitive in my emotions as any naked cave-dweller that ever saw his mate threatened by another male. And when I saw her shrink from him, saw him catch at her arm, I plunged for the fire.
“You damned cub!” he flashed, and struck at me as I rushed at him. I had no very distinct idea of what I was going to do when I ran at him, except that I would make him leave her alone. But when he smashed at me with that wolf-like drawing apart of his lips—I knew then. I was going to kill him, to take his head in my hands and batter it against one of those rough-barked trees. I evaded the first swing of his fist by a quick turn of my head. After that I do not recollect the progress of events with any degree of clearness, except that I gave and took blows while the forest reeled drunkenly about me. The same fierce rage in which I had fought that last fight with Tupper burned in my heart. I wanted to rend and destroy, and nothing short of that would satisfy. And presently I had Barreau down in the snow, smashing insanely at his face with one hand, choking the breath out of him with the other. This I remember; remember, too, hearing a cry behind me. With that my recollection of the struggle blurs completely.
I was lying beside the fire, Jessie rubbing my forehead with snow in lieu of water, when I again became cognizant of my surroundings. Barreau stood on the other side of the fire, putting on fresh wood.
“I’m sorry, sorry, Bob,” she whispered, and her eyes were moist. “But you know I couldn’t stand by and see you—it would have been murder.”
I sat up at that. Across the top of my head a great welt was now risen. My face, I could feel, was puffed and bruised. I looked at Barreau more closely; his features were battered even worse than mine.
“Did you hit me with an axe, or was it a tree?” I asked peevishly. “That is the way my head feels.”
“The rifle,” she stammered. “I—it was—I didn’t want to hurt you, Bob, but the rifle was so heavy. I couldn’t make you stop any other way; you wouldn’t listen to me, even.”
So that was the way of it! I got to my feet. Save a dull ache in my head and the smarting of my bruised face, I felt equal to anything—and the physical pain was as nothing to the hurt of my pride. To be felled by a woman—the woman I loved—I did love her, and therein lay the hurt of her action. I could hardly understand it, and yet—strange paradox—I did not trouble myself to understand. My brain was in no condition for solving problems of that sort. I was not concerned with the why; the fact was enough.
If I had been the unformed boy who cowered before those two hairy-fisted slave-drivers aboard the New Moon—but I was not; I never could be again. The Trouble Trail had hardened more than my bone and sinew; and the last seven days of it, the dreary plodding over unbroken wastes, amid forbidding woods, utter silence, and cold bitter beyond Words, had keyed me to a fearful pitch. There was a kink to my mental processes; I saw things awry. In all the world there seemed to be none left but us three; two men and a woman, and each of us desiring the woman so that we were ready to fly at each other’s throats. Standing there by the fire I could see how it would be, I thought. Unless the unseen enemy who hovered about us cut it short with his rifle, we were foredoomed to maddening weeks, perhaps months, of each other’s company. Though she had jeered at him and flaunted her contempt for him at both MacLeod and the post, Jessie had put by that hostile, bitter spirit. To me, it seemed as if she were in deadly fear of Barreau. She shrank from him, both his word and look. And I must stand like a buffer between. Weeks of suspicion, of trifling, jealous actions, of simmering hate that would bubble up in hot words and sudden blows; I did not like the prospect.