that death in battle was the glory of
the Indian. That no real Sioux would submit to starvation.

This time his words were received with definite acclamation. So he
proceeded to his plans.

Half an hour later the last of the stores was being consumed by men who
had not had an adequate meal for many days.

The aurora lit the night sky. The northern night had set in to the
fantastic measure of the ghostly dance of the polar spirits. The air
was still, and the temperature had fallen headlong. The pitiless cold
was searching all the warm life left vulnerable to its attack. The
shadowed eyes of night looked down upon the world through a gray
twilight of calculated melancholy.

The cold peace of the elements was unshared by the striving human
creatures peopling the great white wilderness over which it brooded.
War to the death was being fought out under the eyes of the dancing
lights, and the twinkling contentment of the pallid world of stars.

A small bluff of lank trees reared its tousled snow-crowned head above
the white heart of a wide valley. It was where the gorge of the Bell
River opened out upon low banks. It was where the only trail of the
region headed westwards. The bowels of the bluff were defended by a
meagre undergrowth, which served little better purpose than to
partially conceal them. About this bluff a ring of savages had formed.
Low-type savages of smallish stature, and of little better intelligence
than the predatory creatures who roamed the wild.

With every passing moment the ring drew closer, foot by foot, yard by
yard.

Inside the bluff prone forms lay hidden under the scrub. And only the
flash of rifle, and the biting echoes of its report, told of the epic
defence that was being put up. But for all the effort the movement of
the defenders, before the closing ring, was retrograde, always
retrograde towards the centre.

Slowly but inevitably the ring grew smaller about the bluff. Numbers
of its ranks dropped out, and still forms littered the ground over
which it had passed. But each and every gap thus made was
automatically closed as the human ring drew in.

The last phase began. The ring was no longer visible outside the
bluff. It had passed the outer limits, and entered the scrub. In the
centre, in the very heart of it, six Indians and a white man crouched
back to back--always facing the advancing enemy. Volley after volley
was flung wildly at them from every side, regar