"Here they come--off to the Woods!" Mooswa answered, going himself to the Shack door and rattling his horns against the boards. The noise wakened Whisky-Jack, who had curled up for his night's sleep under the eave.
"Thieves!--Hello, Mooswa!" he piped, craning his neck around the corner, and seeing the big horned head.
Inside a faint querulous voice asked impatiently, "Is that you, François, or is it the angels with wood? If it is, throw it down the chimney, please--I'm too sick to get up."
Mooswa "whuffed," blowing the wind through his blood-coated nostrils with a sound The Boy knew, and scraped his horn up and down the door again. There was a muffled, slipping noise of some one crawling to the door. The bar dropped, Mooswa pushed it gently open, staggered in, and plumped down exhausted on the floor.
Carcajou had heaped the fire-place well with wood for the night--dry Tamarack to make it blaze, and green Poplar to make it last; the bright light shone on Mooswa's blood-matted body and revealed to Roderick his terrible condition.
"Mooswa, Mooswa!" he cried, dragging himself close and putting his arm around the big nose, "who has done this? You are wounded." Just then two men, with the blood-thirst of the chase hot in their hearts, glided to the door on snow-shoes. One had thrust forward a rifle, but his companion knocked it up with his arm. "What would you shoot?" he asked.
"I don't know," answered the other, his Winchester almost falling from shaking fingers, as he caught sight of a small boy-figure huddled against the animal's head. "Is it a banshee, Donald?" he continued, in a frightened, husky whisper.
"Is that you, François?" cried Rod, sitting up in his eagerness, as the voices came to him from the outer dusk.
"Great Powers!" exclaimed the man Donald, stepping through the door, "that's Factor McGregor's kid, Rod. I heard he was down here somewhere trapping with that Breed, François. What's the matter, Laddie?" the thick Scotch voice burred.
"Well, I'm hanged if I ever outspanned anything like this," said the other man; "it's like that thing we used to read, 'Babes in the Woods.'"