"Do you know what name the Indians have given to that old man?" asked Granger in an awe-struck voice.
"How should I know? I think you called him Beorn."
"Yes, but his other name is the _Man with the Dead Soul_."
They stared at one another in silence, striving not to realise the meaning of those words; yet their meaning was unavoidable.
Both knew the legend of the _loup-garou_, the grim tradition of the peasants of Quebec which the _coureurs des bois_ have carried with them into every part of Canada. Often in the Klondike, when seated round the stove on a winter's night, they had heard it retold by French-Canadians, in low excited whispers, with swift and frightened turnings of the head. They had laughed at it in the daylight: yet at night, when the tale was in the telling, it had seemed very real to them. Then there had come that Christmas-Eve, when Jacques La France had been found dead in his shack, with a hole in his neck, just outside of Dawson City. Little Baptiste had owned with tears to the crime, and had excused himself saying that he had been compelled to the shooting because Jacques was his dearest friend, and Jacques had become a _loup-garou_ through not attending the Easter Sacrament for seven years; as everybody knew, only by the inflicting of a bloody wound on his beast's body could his soul be saved from hell.
The jury who had tried him had been composed mostly of French-Canadians. When it had been proved to them that wolf tracks had been found before the dead man's threshold, they had acquitted Baptiste, and had apologised for his arrest, in defiance of the judge's disapproval.
Two and a half years at Murder Point had made Granger undogmatic on problems of metempsychosis, and of the extent to which the barriers which hedge in Man's spiritual life may be pushed back.
It seemed not unlikely to him that there were men whose souls, consciously or unconsciously, either by reason of their crimes or for the better accomplishment of an evil desire, could go out from their bodies while they slept, and be changed into the forms of beasts of prey between sunset and dawn-rise. At all events, this was a phenomenon which could not be disproved, and there were many who believed it true.