Years slipped by, bringing other children; Jacques, in whom the white blood of Lacombie was lost in the blending, and the girl who crouched at her side. Long after, from the lips of a passing _Bois brule_, she heard the story of Pierre's death--how, crazed by whisky and the taunts of a drunken companion, he had leaped upon a passing log and plunged into the foaming white chute of the dreaded Saw Tooth rapid through which no man had passed and lived. _Sacre._ He was brave! For he came nearly to the end of the rapid, standing upon his log--but, only nearly to the end--for there he was dashed and broken upon the rocks in the swirl of the leaping white-water, and here was she, his mother, gazing at other logs in the rush of other rapids. She started at the sudden clutch at her blanket and glanced sharply at the girl who strained forward upon the very edge of the bluff and stared, not at the rapid, but straight downward where a few logs revolved lazily in the grip of the shore eddy. The girl was pointing excitedly with a tapering white-brown finger to the fork of a great log where, caught on a sharp limb stub, was the striped sleeve of a mackinaw, from the end of which protruded a hand, while after the log, trailing sluggishly in the V of the fork, was the lifeless body of a man. As she looked a light of exultation gleamed in the sharp old eyes. Here was vengeance! For the life of her son--the life of a white man. She noted with satisfaction that the body was that of a large man. It was fitting so. For her Pierre had been tall, and broad, and strong--she would have been disappointed in the meaner price of a small man's life. Suddenly she leaped to her feet and ran swiftly along the bluff seeking a place to descend. Even among the men of the logs, who are bad, one man stands alone as the archfiend of them all. And now--it is possible, for he is a big man--she, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta, the mother of Pierre and of Jeanne, maybe is permitted to stoop close and breathe upon the dead face of this man the weird curse of the barren lands--almost forgotten, now, even among her own people--the blighting curse of the "Yaga Tah!" In the telling, the _Bois brule_ had mentioned the name of the drunken lumber-jack who had baited her Pierre to his death, and in the old woman's brain the name of Moncrossen was the symbol of all black deviltry. After the death of Lacombie, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta had stolen Jeanne from the mission that she might forget the ways of the white man, and returned to her people. Jeanne, whose soft skin, beneath the sun tan, was the white skin of Lacombie, and who was the most beautiful among all the women of the North, with her straight, lithe body, and dark, mysterious eyes--eyes which, in color, were the eyes of the wood folk, but in whose baffling, compelling depths slumbered the secrets of an alien race.