He went on to the tepee. The little open space in which they had built their hidden wigwam was flooded with sunshine that came through a break in the forest to the west. The tepee was still there. It did not seem very much changed to Baree. And rising from the ground in front of the tepee was what had come to him faintly on the still air—the smoke of a small fire. Over that fire was bending a person, and it did not strike Baree as amazing, or at all unexpected, that this person should have two great shining braids down her back. He whined, and at his whine the person grew a little rigid, and turned slowly.
Even then it seemed quite the most natural thing in the world that it should be Nepeese, and none other. He had lost her yesterday. Today he had found her. And in answer to his whine there came a sobbing cry straight out of the heart of the Willow.
Carvel found them there a few minutes later, the dog's head hugged close up against the Willow's breast, and the Willow was crying—crying like a little child, her face hidden from him on Baree's neck. He did not interrupt them, but waited; and as he waited something in the sobbing voice and the stillness of the forest seemed to whisper to him a bit of the story of the burned cabin and the two graves, and the meaning of the Call that had come to Baree from out of the south.
CHAPTER 31
That night there was a new campfire in the clearing. It was not a small fire, built with the fear that other eyes might see it, but a fire that sent its flames high. In the glow of it stood Carvel. And as the fire had changed from that small smoldering heap over which the Willow had cooked her dinner, so Carvel, the officially dead outlaw, had changed. The beard was gone from his face. He had thrown off his caribou-skin coat. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and there was a wild flush in his face that was not altogether the work of wind and sun and storm, and a glow in his eyes that had not been there for five years, perhaps never before. His eyes were on Nepeese.
She sat in the firelight, leaning a little toward the blaze, her wonderful hair warmly reflecting its mellow light. Carvel did not move while she was in that attitude. He seemed scarcely to breathe. The glow in his eyes grew deeper—the worship of a man for a woman. Suddenly Nepeese turned and caught him before he could turn his gaze. There was nothing to hide in her own eyes. Like her face, they were alight with a new hope and a new gladness. Carvel sat down beside her on the birch log, and in his hand he took one of her thick braids and crumpled it as he talked. At their feet, watching them, lay Baree.
"Tomorrow or the next day I am going to Lac Bain," he said, a hard and bitter note back of the gentle worship in his voice. "I will not come back until I have—killed him."
The Willow looked straight into the fire. For a time there was a silence broken only by the crackling of the flames, and in that silence Carvel's fingers weaved in and out of the silken strands of the Willow's hair. His thoughts flashed back. What a chance he had missed that day on Bush McTaggart's trap line—if he had only known! His jaws set hard as he saw in the red-hot heart of the fire the mental pictures of the day when the factor from Lac Bain had killed Pierrot. She had told him the whole story. Her flight. Her plunge to what she had thought was certain death in the icy torrent of the chasm. Her miraculous escape from the waters—and how she was discovered, nearly dead, by Tuboa, the toothless old Cree whom Pierrot out of pity had allowed to hunt in part of his domain. He felt within himself the tragedy and the horror of the one terrible hour in which the sun had gone out of the world for the Willow, and in the flames he could see faithful old Tuboa as he called on his last strength to bear Nepeese over the long miles that lay between the chasm and his cabin. He caught shifting visions of the weeks that followed in that cabin, weeks of hunger and of intense cold in which the Willow's life hung by a single thread. And at last, when the snows were deepest, Tuboa had died. Carvel's fingers clenched in the strands of the Willow's braid. A deep breath rose out of his chest, and he said, staring deep into the fire,
"Tomorrow I will go to Lac Bain."