"Very soon you will be young again," she told it, and looked down into the coulée beyond, where two shacks lay like black thumb-marks on white paper. Jennifer caught her breath. One of those shacks held the ghost of the woman who was a weetigo. The other shack was Florestine's. Jennifer had seen Florestine in Grey Wolf; a tall, handsome breed with a very small baby in a moss-bag. Now the baby was dead, killed yesterday by Florestine's own hand, and in some horrible way this was connected with the weetigo. Jennifer turned sick, remembering how Ducane had been buttering his toast as he spoke of it that morning.
"The police will get hold of it to-day," he said. "Manslaughter, at the very least, of course. Maybe the girl was justified. She had to work for the kid."
"Where is her husband?" asked Jennifer, and Ducane laughed uproariously.
"Who knows," he said, and Jennifer's heart had surged up in a great wave of pity for Florestine.
She felt a reflex of that pity now in this silent world where tragedy had a way of lying so nakedly to the eye. Then, along the line of trail that snaked round to Grey Wolf, she saw something black that swung near, and very fast. A flash of light struck on brass harness; the stout lines of the barrack-sleigh shaped familiarly; and sharply, almost without her knowledge, Jennifer plunged down the snow-slope to reach the shack which was Florestine's before the chain of that unbreakable patrol should loop round it and pull it in.
On the level the way was rough with little snow-graves that buried hay-heaps, battered tins, broken harness, and loose lumber. But she stumbled over them with her heart in her throat; reached the crazy door first, and turned with her arm flung out as though to bar it against Tempest where he came up the trail behind her.
"You—you can't go in there," she said desperately.
Tempest's lips twitched in a brief smile. There was no door in all the North-West dared deny him entrance when he wished it. But his eyes were grave, for it was errands like this that bled the heart-blood out of him.
"What made you come?" he said gently.
