“Ah-h-h!” he softly hissed through his teeth; then he felt on the crust at his feet, and found fresh scratches and little places where bits of ice had cracked under some weight. Slowly he worked his way along the line of traps, finding each one sprung as he came to it.
The spruce trees stood less thickly here, and a weird, dim gray light shone on the snow between their trunks. Tritou listened again; far away he heard the faint _click-click_ of snow-shoes. His hold on the rifle tightened, and he looked again to be sure that it was cocked, and advanced more carefully than ever; then he stopped again; not far in front of him he heard the thud of a deadfall as it struck the threshold of a trap, and then the clicking moved on; so did he, now bending almost double. The woods grew more and more open as the edge of a barren was approached, and the moonlight trickled on to the snow freely in places.
Tritou stopped and knelt on one knee, raising the rifle to his shoulder as he did so. One hundred yards away, in an open spot, stood a tall figure; it loomed up in the moonlight clear and sharp.
The figure swayed, tottered, then gathered itself and disappeared in the shadows.
“Blessé! Woun’, by gar!” said Tritou, with great satisfaction, as he hastened to the place where the figure had stood; he hurried carefully, with his rifle ready for another shot. Nothing stirred anywhere; Tritou bent over in the open space. “Du sang!” he said, as he saw the dark spots spreading over the crust here in blotches, and there, close to the woods, in a thin streak. He thought for a moment, “Ah go back for ze dog’; he no go far; Ah shoot for zat beeg hearrt Ah hear so mooch h’about!” He chuckled, and turned back for the sledge.
Jules Verbaux had had bad luck with his traps; the Company’s Indians had destroyed two lines of them entirely, so he started out on a foraging expedition against their traps. “An eye for an eye,” thought Jules. He selected Tritou’s line to plunder, because he had hated Tritou ever since that day in the woods when he heard him say that he, Tritou, was going to kill Verbaux for “dix dollaires et des fines blankeets.”
Once he reaped the harvest of fur from the line marked “T,” and he, unseen, had watched Tritou as Tritou watched for him on the second and third reapings. Yesterday morning he had laughed when Tritou struck out for the post, and had followed him for five miles; but as Tritou kept steadily on, he came back, ate his supper, and went down the line of traps for the fourth time. He was going along slowly, springing the deadfalls and taking the fur he found in them, when suddenly he thought he heard something; he stopped and listened. A sharp, burning pain seized him under the left arm, and the shock sent his wits flying for an instant; then he heard snow-shoes coming, and gathering his great strength, he sped into the forest. His side pained him cruelly, and his breath came and went in gasps for a few minutes; he opened his heavy jacket as he travelled and put his hand under the two shirts, and felt a little warm hole near the armpit; he felt further, and found another hole higher up on the front of his shoulder. “Dat notting, dat!” he chuckled, with great relief, and moved his arm up and down. “Ah t’ink Ah’m feenesh dat taime certainlee. Tak’ care, Tritou!” he said to himself as he tore off two pieces of his shirt and stuffed them in the little holes, effectually stopping the flow of blood. The old sign of the pannikin came back to him. “Dey goin’ try, dey goin’ comme near, mais dey not goin’ have success.” He repeated his own words of four months ago.