It was a
face that one would remember--not pleasantly, perhaps, but as a fixture
in a shifting memory of things; a face strong with a brute strength,
implacable in its hard lines, emotionless almost, and beyond that, a
mystery.
It was the best known face in all that part of the northland which
reaches up from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and westward to Fond du
Lac and the Wholdais country. For ten years Breault had made that trip
twice a year with the northern mails. In all its reaches there was not a
cabin he did not know, a face he had not seen, or a name he could not
speak; yet there was not a man, woman, or child who welcomed him except
for what he brought. But the government had found its faith in him
justified. The police at their lonely outposts had come to regard his
comings and goings as dependable as day and night. They blessed him for
his punctuality, and not one of them missed him when he was gone. A
strange man was Breault.
With his back against a tree, where he had propped himself after the
first shock of the bullet in his lung, he took a last look at life with a
passionless imperturbability. If there was any emotion at all in his face
it was one of vindictiveness--an emotion roused by an intense and
terrible hatred that in this hour saw the fulfilment of its vengeance.
Few men nursed a hatred as Breault had nursed his. And it gave him
strength now, when another man would have died.
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