It was a
strange sickness. I will not trouble you with all the details. You are
anxious for the story--the tragedy--which alone will count with you
gentlemen of the law. It came out in his fever, and in the fits of sanity
into which he at times succeeded in rousing himself. His name, he said,
was Joseph Brecht. For two years he had lived in that sulphur hell. He
had, by accident, found the spring of fresh, sweet water trickling out of
the hill--another miracle for which I have not tried to account; he built
his cabin; for two years he had gone with his canoe to the shore of the
great Slave, forty miles distant, for the food he ate. But WHY was he
here? That was the story that came bit by bit, half in his fever, half in
his sanity. I will tell it in my own words. He was a Government man,
mapping out the last timber lines along the edge of the Great Barren,
when he first met Andre Beauvais and his wife, Marie. An accident took
him to their cabin, a sprained leg. Andre was a fox-hunter, and it was
when he was coming home from one of his trips that he found Joseph Brecht
helpless in the deep snow, and carried him on his shoulders to his cabin.
Ah, gentlemen, it was the old story--the story old as time. In his sanity
he told us about Marie, I hovering over him closely, M'sieu sitting back
in the shadows. She was like some wonderful wildflower, French, a little
Indian. He told us how her long black hair would stream in a shining
cascade, soft as the breast of a swan, to her knees and below; how it
would hang again in two great, lustrous braids, and how her eyes were
limpid pools that set his soul afire, and how her slim, beautiful body
filled him with a monstrous desire.
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