“How he would bait me,” he went on presently, “if he knew that killing him is the one thing I desire to avoid, at any cost! I hope it doesn’t come to that. It would be only just, but I have no wish to mete out justice to him. His miserable life is safe from me, for her sake—no, I’ll be honest: for my own. I want him to live, till I can force him to tell her a few truths that she will never believe except from his own lips. I was a seven times fool for not doing that long before we reached Benton. I could have forestalled all this. But I didn’t suspect he was tolling her on—for a purpose.” He stopped again. It was not the first time that Barreau had touched upon that theme, and always his tongue had been stricken with a semi-paralysis just short of complete revelation. In a general way it was plain enough to me, from the verbal collisions between himself and Montell on that same subject. And though I was humanly curious enough to want the particulars at first hand, I made no effort to draw forth his story. Hence I was surprised when he took up the thread of the conversation where he had left off. “One reads of these peculiar situations in books,” he rested his chin in the palms of his hands and stared abstractedly at me, “but they are seldom encountered in everyday living. I dare say the world is full of women, good women, beautiful, brilliant women, that I might have won. Yet I must fall victim to an insane craving for an elfin-faced, hot-tempered sprite who will have none of me. Six or seven years ago she was a big-eyed school-girl, with a mop of unruly hair. Then all at once, she grew up, and—and I’ve been the captive of her bow and spear ever since. Love—the old, primal instinct to mate! It’s a brutal force, Bob, when it focuses all a man’s being on one particular woman. I never told her, but I’m sure she knew; I know she did. And she—well, a man never can tell what a woman thinks or feels or will do or say, or whether she means what she says when she says it. I don’t know. But I’ve thought that she did care—only she wouldn’t admit it until I made her. She’s the type that wouldn’t give herself to even the man she loved without a struggle. And I’m just savage enough to be glad of that. I’ve only been waiting till this spring and the end of this fur deal, so that we would have the wherewith to live, before I cornered her and fought it out. “But I’ve waited too long, I’m afraid. You see, Montell has always been against me; that is, he has secretly been cutting the ground from under my feet since he learned that I wanted _her_. The old fool looks into his own heart and seeing perfect bliss in an alliance with ‘blood’ and ‘money,’ straightway determines that these two will insure her future happiness—oh, I can read him, like an open book. He’d move the heavens to bring about what he’d term ‘a good match.’