In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper.

There was not another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in wickedness--unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles north, and who was Jacques's rival in several things.

A giant in size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half-hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him--if he had a soul at all--Le Beau was a "throw-back" of the worst sort.

In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.
It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife.

Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been.