The priest sat down on the couch where the child lay, and
took the fevered hand in his own.
"Stay where you are, Bagot, just there where you are, and tell me what
your trouble is, and why your wife is not here.... Say all honestly--by
the name of the Christ!" he added, lifting up an iron crucifix that hung
on his breast.
Bagot sat down on a bench near the fireplace, the light playing on his
bronzed, powerful face, his eyes shining beneath his heavy brows like
two coals. After a moment he began:
"I don't know how it started. I'd lost a lot of pelts--stolen they were,
down on the Child o' Sin River. Well, she was hasty and nervous, like as
not--she always was brisker and more sudden than I am. I--I laid my
powder-horn and whiskey-flash--up there!"
He pointed to the little shrine of the Virgin, where now his candles
were burning. The priest's grave eyes did not change expression at all,
but looked out wisely, as though he understood everything before it was
told.
Bagot continued: "I didn't notice it, but she had put some flowers
there. She said something with an edge, her face all snapping angry,
threw the things down, and called me a heathen and a wicked heretic--and
I don't say now but she'd a right to do it. But I let out then, for them
stolen pelts was rasping me on the raw. I said something pretty rough,
and made as if I was goin' to break her in two--just fetched up my
hands, and went like this!--"
With a singular simplicity he made a wild gesture with his hands, and an
animal-like snarl came from his throat.
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