In the weeks and months following the plague at Five Fingers Father Albanel did not forget his promise to Peter, and back in the shelter of the woods, where their secret was safe between them, he taught the boy "how to fight like a gentleman—if he had to fight at all." It was then Peter learned there was something more helpful than brute strength, and as his skill increased and he mastered one after another what the little missioner called "the tricks of the fighting game," his enthusiasm rose to a point where he could scarcely keep his secret from Mona. Their boxing-gloves, which Father Albanel had smuggled from the settlement, they kept securely hidden, and not until years later did Peter know that the holy man who was teaching him had at one time been regarded by fighting men as the handiest man with his fists between Fort William and Hudson Bay.

What he had learned he did not fully realize until early in June, when Aleck Curry and his father and the hateful black tug returned to the settlement. Using the influence of a brother who had been successful in politics, Izaak Curry had obtained timber concessions in several directions about Five Fingers, and now built[183] himself a cabin near the shore, but hidden back in the spruce. This he tenanted with a third brother and his wife, and with them Aleck lived while the tug was making its trips between Five Fingers and Fort William.

Aleck had grown still bigger, and in spite of Peter's resolution to make friends with him he would have none of it. His hatred for Peter was like some deadly thing that had poisoned every drop of blood in his veins, and Mona's growing beauty, and her quite open affection for his rival, stirred something that was more than hatred—more than brooding vindictiveness—in Aleck's heart. His father was rich, and he knew what that meant back in town; and his uncle was a power in politics, and had recently become Commissioner of Provincial Police. It enraged him that these facts carried no weight in Five Fingers. His own importance as the son of a rich man and the nephew of a Commissioner was utterly unrecognized here, while in town it had given him a position of first rank in spite of his bullying nature. This lack of appreciation, as he thought of it, he laid entirely at Peter's door, for it was Peter who had robbed him of his chances with Mona in the first place, and it was Peter who was keeping her away from him now.

So it was not long after Aleck's arrival before the climax came. It happened well out of sight of everybody, where Aleck had schemed that it should be, for he wanted no interference in his "beating up" of Peter.[184] In the end both boys returned to the settlement with bleeding noses and black eyes. Neither was whipped. Aleck was dumbfounded. That his size and weight and all the training he had given himself during the winter had failed to beat Peter was unbelievable.

For two weeks after the fight there was not a day, excepting Sundays, when Father Albanel and Peter did not "take a walk" in the woods together. And along with these secret sessions Peter took advantage of every opportunity to run and swim that he might add to his wind. Almost daily he accepted insults from Aleck in order to avoid a fight, and never a day passed that Father Albanel did not repeat his warning to Peter to postpone further combat as long as possible. But the time came when Aleck once more followed up insult with physical action, with the result that he suffered a defeat so completely decisive that in August he returned to Fort William, fairly laughed out of Five Fingers.

Mona now made up Peter's world, and in his heart she kept constantly burning the faith that his father would return. But when winter came again, and another spring, and there was still no word from Donald McRae, Peter came at times to believe that his father was gone out of his life forever.

Aleck Curry again returned to Five Fingers in this third summer of Peter's life there. He was nineteen now, and was commissioned by his father to take an interest in his lumber business along the coast. A year[185] had made a big change in him, and his hatred for Peter and his passion for Mona he kept more to himself. His father told Simon that in another year Aleck was going to join the provincial police, and would soon hold a commission in it....

Early in September, when Mona was in her sixteenth year, the event against which Peter had been steeling his heart for many months became a fact. Pierre and Josette had long planned that after Marie Antoinette's teaching in the little settlement school Mona should spend a year, and possibly two, under the tutelage of the Sisters in the Ursuline Convent in the city of Quebec. On the day Mona left, accompanied by Joe's wife, who went to see her safely settled in the distant city, Peter's world went as black as on that other day when his father disappeared out of his life.

The winter that followed was an endless one for Peter. Once each week, as surely as the weeks came round, he received a long letter from Mona, and five times during the winter he made the trip to the railroad settlement alone that he might not miss the love and cheer which came from her. And he was at the train to meet her, with Pierre and Josette and Marie Antoinette and Joe, when she came from the school in June.

At first he was dazed by the change in her, she had grown so much taller, and more beautiful, and he stood as if turned into wood while she greeted and kissed all the others. Then she turned to him, and her face was flooded with a color which he had never seen in it[186] before. And after that—he could never remember how it happened—their arms were around each other, and Mona was crying—crying until tears blinded her—and he was kissing her, and she was kissing him, and then ran away from him to hug all the others again.

This summer in Five Fingers decided the lives of Peter and Mona. She was almost seventeen. She would go to school one more year, because that was the desire of Josette and Marie Antoinette. She would be nearly eighteen then. And when she was nineteen—on her nineteenth birthday, if Peter liked it that way—she would marry him.

During the second year of her absence Peter devoted every energy of soul and body toward making himself worthy of her. He worked and planned and studied hard under Marie Antoinette and Father Albanel. During this year several changes came to Five Fingers. Simon McQuarrie ended his dealings with Izaak Curry, and to rid their paradise of a bad memory Adette Clamart deliberately set fire to the Curry shack after he had gone, so that nothing remained but a square of ash and charred timbers. "And the wild phlox will cover that next summer," said Adette with a grim little shrug of her pretty shoulders.

Aleck Curry joined the police. In a day and a night, it seemed, he sprang into a great bulk of a man, heavy-faced, huge-shouldered, a giant in strength and physique, and with a hatred for Peter in his heart that had grown more merciless with the passing of years.[187] He saw Mona each summer, and when she returned from her second year at school her beauty stirred in him a passion which submerged all other instincts and desires. He became a watchful, waiting beast, hiding the flame that was consuming him, preparing himself for the opportunity which he was determined should some day come his way.

As each week brought nearer the day of their own supreme happiness Mona and Peter no longer sensed this menace, or even though............