“I’d like to hear it, of course. But, look yonder! Did you ever see anything like that?” Margot was proud of the surprises she was able to offer this stranger in her woods, and pointed outward over the lake. They had just come to an open place on the shore and the water spread before them, sparkling in the sunlight. Something was crossing the smooth surface, heading straight for their island, and of a nature to make Adrian cry out: “Oh! for a gun!” VIII KING MADOC “If you had one you should not use it! Are you a dreadful hunter?” Margot had turned upon her guest with a defiant fear. As near as she had ever come to hating anything she hated the men, of whom she had heard, who used this wonderful northland as a murder ground. That was what she named it in her uncompromising judgment of those who killed for the sake of killing, for the lust of blood that was in them. “Yes; I reckon I am a ‘dreadful’ hunter, for I am a mighty poor shot. But I’d like a try at that fellow. What horns! what a head! and how can that fellow in the canoe keep so close to him, yet not finish him?” Adrian was so excited he could not stand still. His eyes gleamed, his hands clenched, and his whole appearance was changed; greatly for the worse, the girl thought, regarding him with disgust. “Finish him? That’s King Madoc, Pierre’s trained moose. You’d be finished yourself, I fear, if you harmed that splendid creature. Pierre’s a lazy fellow, mostly, but he spent a long time teaching Madoc; and with his temper--I’m thankful you lost your gun.” “Do you never shoot things up here? I saw you giving the fox and herons what looked like meat. You had a stew for supper, and fish for breakfast. I don’t mean to be impertinent, but the sight of that big game--whew!” “Yes; we do kill things, or have them killed, when it is necessary for food. Never in sport. Man is almost the only animal who does that. It’s all terrible, seems to me. Everything preys upon something else, weaker than itself. Sometimes when I think of it, my dinner chokes me. It’s so easy to take life, and only God can create it. But uncle says it is also God’s law to take what is provided, and that there is no mistake, even if it seems such to me.” But there Margot perceived that Adrian was not listening. Instead, he was watching, with the intensest interest, the closer approach of the canoe, in which sat idle Pierre, holding the reins of a harness attached to his aquatic steed. The moose swam easily, with powerful strokes, and Pierre was singing a gay melody, richer in his unique possession than any king. “Indeed, it’s not one other has a king for a bow man,” he often asserted. When he touched the shore and the great animal stood shaking his wet hide, Adrian’s astonishment found vent in a whirlwind of questions that Pierre answered at his leisure and after his kind. But he walked first toward Margot and offered her a great bunch of trailing arbutus flowers, saying: