“Ah say ‘keel’.”
Bâtard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant.
“Ah lift de gun, so, like dat.” And suiting action to word, he sighted the pistol at Bâtard. Bâtard, with a single leap, sideways, landed around the corner of the cabin out of sight.
“Bless me!” he repeated at intervals. Leclère grinned proudly.
“But why does he not run away?”
The Frenchman’s shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means all things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.
“Then why do you not kill him?”
Again the shoulders went up.
“Mon père,” he said after a pause, “de taim is not yet. He is one beeg devil. Some taim Ah break heem, so an’ so, all to leetle bits. Hey? some taim. Bon!”
A day came when Leclère gathered his dogs together and floated down in a bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a commission from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the better part of a year. After that he poled up the Koyokuk to deserted Arctic City, and later came drifting back, from camp to camp, along the Yukon. And during the long months Bâtard was well lessoned. He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of fire, and, worst of all, the torture of music.