Page:Toilers of the Trails.djvu/200

 vigil for his return. The agony of fear she had endured was plainly written on the drawn face.

"You see de Weendigo?" she gasped,

"Oua, I see heem," laughed the hardy Frenchman, taking her in his arms. "I shoot, and he run lak snow-shoe rabbit for de swamp. I mak' bad shot for de light. Eet ees only beeg luciree. I get heem some day in de trap." And he patted her shoulders reassuringly.

Marie's travels took her no farther than her rabbit and ptarmigan snares in the neighboring forest, so she did not know that in size the tracks of the beast dwarfed those of a lynx, and he did not intend she should.

The day following Hertel beat through the swamp, but so many tracks led out of it over the watershed that he gave up all idea of immediate pursuit. Returning to the shack he overhauled two bear-traps, the steel jaws of which bristled with vicious teeth, harnessed a husky to the sled, and started for his marten cabanes across the river. There, before two of the stick houses, he buried in the snow the traps with their log clogs in the manner that he hid lynx-traps to take the pilfering wolverines that had already harassed his lines. If the night-wailer followed down this trap-line again, he would not escape the hidden steel jaws gaping under the snow. Then on a line of fisher-traps Hertel erected three log, which would crush the life from a three-hundred-pound bear.

"Eef he got bone to break, dees weel break dem," chuckled the trapper as he turned homeward.