"Yes, sick from an empty belly, and this, and this!" He showed a forearm done up in a bloody rag, and pointed to his neck, from which the skin was peeling. "I was gone ten days with that red cloth you gave me; and when I came back, if there wasn't the horror itself grinning at me from the top of my own shanty! I tried to get in, but my wife barred the door, and said that she would shoot me if I didn't get back into the woods. I tried to steal in at night through a window, and she drenched me in hot water. I built a wigwam at the edge of the forest, and stayed there for five days. Hon-gree! Blessed saints, I had no matches, no grub; and when I got close enough to yell these things to her, she kept her word and plunked me through a crack in the door, so that I lost a pint of blood from this arm."
"I'll give you something to eat," laughed Jan, undoing his pack. "How long has the red flag been up?"
"I've lost all count of time, but it's twelve days, if an hour, and I swear it's going to take all winter to get it down!"
"It's not the plague. Go back and tell your wife so."
"And get shot for my pains!" groaned Croisset, digging into meat and biscuit. "I'm bound for Lac Bain, if you'll give me a dozen matches. That whisky-jack will remain with me until I die, for when I ate him I forgot to take out his insides!"
"You're a lucky man, Croisset. It's good proof that she loves you."
"If bullets and hot water and an empty belly are proofs, she loves me a great deal, Jan Thoreau! Though I don't believe she meant to hit me. It was a woman's bad aim."
Jan left him beside a good fire, and turned into the southwest to burn Langlois and his cabin. The red flag still floated where he had seen it weeks before. The windows were thicker with frost. He shouted, beat upon the door with the butt of his rifle and broke in the windows. The silence of death quickened the beating of his heart when he stopped to listen. There was no doubt that Langlois lay dead in his little home.
Jan brought dry brushwood from the forest, and piled it high against the logs. Upon his sledge he sat and watched the fire until the cabin was a furnace of leaping flame.
He continued westward. At the head of the Porcupine he found the remains of three burned wigwams, and from one of them he dug out charred bones. Down the Porcupine he went slowly, doubling to the east and west, until, at its junction with Gray Otter Creek, he met a Cree, who told him that twenty miles farther on there was an abandoned village of six teepees. Toward these he boldly set forth, praying as he went that the angels were guarding Mélisse at Post Lac Bain.