She sighed.
But her sigh was gone on the instant. She could still feel the hurt of the Wolf’s crushing fingers, first on her arms, then on the soft flesh of her shoulders. Then the brutal way he had hurled her from him, as if she were something he hated and loathed.
Marry him? Marry the Wolf? Would she? Never, never, never! He could go to penitentiary. It would be she who sent him there, not Sinclair. And after five years, when he came out, she would be a wife. Ernie Sinclair would be her husband, the father of her child. And maybe even, by that time, the Wolf would find her crowned by a generous motherhood.
It would be triumph. What a triumph for all he had done to her. Yes, it certainly would be a triumph.
But even as Annette thought of her triumph that queer stirring in the deep of her heart became more insistent, and her pretty brows frowned the more surely.
It was at that moment it came. That which she had been awaiting. It was a light shining through the snowfall outside. The office window of the store had lit up. And she knew that the Wolf and Pideau had foregathered to complete their plans for the conveyance of those five hundred gallons of liquor.
She turned from her window. She picked up her fur coat. She clad herself against the storm. Then, closing down the stove damper for safety, she passed out of the home of the wolf pack.
Pideau was lounging back in his hard square chair in the office of the store. His ill-shod feet were thrust up on the desk which was the repository for such accountings as his partnership with the Wolf necessitated. His mood was more than usually suspicious. He was chewing, and the cuspidor, more than a yard away from him, testified revoltingly to his habit.
The Wolf was in happier heart than he had known for a long time. He was contentedly smoking, sprawled in a low rocker-chair. He understood Pideau. He read the working of his mind beyond all doubt, and it disturbed him not at all.