Southward, presently, up the rivers hurrying to the great bay at the north, and at last out upon the broad waters of Winnipeg, and never for an hour had McElroy's wandering soul come back to his suffering body. Day by day Maren tended him, feeding him as one feeds a helpless babe, shielding him from the sun by her own shadow when the branches gathered at morn withered ere noon, wetting the fair head with its waving sunburnt hair with water dipped from overside, and praying constantly for his life.
As they neared the southern end, where Winnipeg narrows like the neck of a bottle, his tongue loosened from its silence and he began to babble and talk in broken sentences, and it was all about De Courtenay and a remorse that ate the troubled soul.
“I owe you apologies, M'sieu,—'tis a sorry plight and I alone am to blame. And yet I have a score,—gladly would I take my will of you for that one fault,—another time,—another place. Still have I no right, save as one man who,—But I have a plan,—one may escape,—listen—when I grapple with this guard, do you make for the river—with all speed—My God! My God! M'sieu! Why did you not run?” And so he muttered and sighed, and Maren bent above with wide eyes.
Something there was between these two, some enmity that followed even into the land of shadows and yet held them gentlemen through it all, offering and rejecting some chance of escape. A weary, weary tangle.
Again he would fancy himself back in De Seviere and always there was De Courtenay with his smiling face and tantalizing beauty.
“Welcome, M'sieu, to our post! Seldom do we meet so gay a guest!”
Often the wandering words would stumble among his accounts at the factory and he would give directions to the clerks, and then Ridgar's name would come, only to carry him instantly to the camp of the savages on Deer River.
“Edmonton,—friend of my heart,—alone! and you pass me without speech! Ah,—that look! That look! I'd stake my soul—”
And once in the cool twilight of an ended day, with the tall trees above and the river lapping below, he cried out her name,
“Maren!” and once again, “Maren!” with a world of change between the two words.