All his old strength came back to him now. He felt no fear. He smiled down into her face, and the silken touch of her hair set his heart leaping and the love into his eyes.
“I will take her out there,” he said. “But she is all right— Isobel.” He spoke her name almost pleadingly. “She is all right. She will not take the fever.”
He picked up the child and carried her out into the larger room. Pierre and his wife were at the door. They were dressed for travel, as he had seen them come in off the trap line the evening before. He dropped Isobel and sprang in front of them.
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You are not going away! You cannot go!” He turned almost fiercely upon the woman. “She will die— if you do not stay and care for her. You shall not run away!”
“It is the plague,” said Pierre. “It is death to remain!”
“You shall stay!” said MacVeigh, still speaking to Pierre’s wife. “You are the one woman— the only woman— within a hundred miles. She will die without you. You shall stay if I have to tie you!”
With the quickness of a cat Pierre raised the butt of the heavy dog-whip which he held in his hand and it came down with a sickening thud on Billy’s head. As he staggered into the middle of the cabin floor, groping blindly for a moment before he fell, he heard a strange, terrified cry, and in the open inner door he saw the white-robed figure of Isobel Deane. Then he sank down into a pit of blackness.
It was Isobel’s face that he first saw when he came from out of that black pit. He knew that it was her voice calling to him before he had opened his eyes. He felt the touch of her hands, and when he looked up her loose, soft hair swept his breast. His head was bolstered up, and so he could look straight into her face. It frightened him. He knew now what she had been saying to him as he lay there upon the floor.
“You must get up! You must go!” he heard her mooning. “You must take my baby away. And you— you— must go!”
He pulled himself half erect, then rose to his feet, swaying a little. He came to her then, with the look in his face she had first seen out on the Barren when he had told her that he was going with her through the forest.