The Tales of the Wild North (39 Novels & Stories in One Volume). James Oliver Curwood

in the sun.

      "Ah!" said Jean softly, as a bullet sang over his head. "He fires at Jean de Gravois!" He dropped his whip, and there was the warm glow of happiness in his little dark face as he leveled his rifle over the backs of his Malemutes. "He fires at Jean de Gravois, and it is Jean who can hamstring a caribou at three hundred yards on the run!"

      For an instant, at the crack of his rifle, there was no movement ahead; then something rolled from the sledge and lay doubled up in the snow. A hundred yards beyond it, the huskies stopped in a rabble and turned to look at the approaching strangers.

      Beside it Jean stopped; and when he saw the face that stared up at him, he clutched his thin hands in his long black hair and cried out, in shrill amazement and horror:

      "The saints in Heaven, it is the missioner from Churchill!"

      He turned the man over, and found where his bullet had entered under one arm and come out from under the other. There was no spark of life left. The missioner was already dead.

      "The missioner from Churchill!" he gasped again.

      He looked up at the warm sun, and kicked the melting snow under his moccasined feet.

      "It will thaw very soon," he said to himself, looking again at the dead man, "and then he will go into the lake."

      He headed his Malemutes back to the forest. Then he ran out and cut the traces of the exhausted huskies, and with his whip scattered them in freedom over the ice.

      "Go to the wolves!" he shouted in Cree. "Hide yourselves from the post, or Jean de Gravois will cut out your tongues and take your skins off alive!"

      When he came back to the top of the mountain, Jean found Iowaka making hot coffee, while Jan was bundled up in furs near the fire.

      "It is as I said," she called. "He is alive!"

      Thus it happened that the return of Jean de Gravois to the post was even more dramatic than he had schemed it to be, for he brought back with him not only a beautiful wife from Churchill, but also the half dead Jan Thoreau from the scene of battle on the mountain. And in the mystery of it all he reveled for two days; for Jean de Gravois said not a word about the dead man on the lake beyond the forest, nor did the huskies come back into their bondage to give a hint of the missing missionary.