And
Andre Beauvais must have remained with his dead. For it was many hours
later before he took up the trail of the man whom he made solemn oath to
his God to kill. Like a hunted hare, Joseph Brecht eluded him, and it was
weeks before the fox-trapper came upon him. Andre Beauvais scorned to
kill him from ambush. He wanted to choke his life out slowly, with his
two hands, and he attacked him openly and fairly.
And in that cabin--gasping for breath, dying as he thought, Joseph Brecht
said to us: "It was one or the other. He had the best of me. I drew my
revolver again--and killed him, killed Andre Beauvais, as I had killed
his wife, Marie!"
Here in the South Joseph Brecht might not have been a bad man, gentlemen.
In every man's heart there is a devil, but we do not know the man as bad
until the devil is roused. And passion, the mad passion for a woman, had
roused him. Now that it had made twice a murderer of him the devil slunk
back into his hiding, and the man who had once been the clean-living,
red-blooded Joseph Brecht was only a husk without a heart, slinking from
place to place in the evasion of justice. For you men of the Royal
Mounted Police were on his trail. You would have caught him, but you did
not think of seeking for him in the Sulphur Hell. For two years he had
lived there, and when he finished his story he was sitting on the edge of
the cot, quite sane, gentlemen.
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