ped quickly towards
her, his movements surprising in their vigor. He looked down into the
woman's handsome, but now lined, face, and his eyes shone with a
burning fire tremendously compelling.

Ailsa felt the influence he wielded. She read the strength of the
man's emotion. She knew that for once she was being permitted a sight
of the man behind his mask of smiling serenity. Nor were these things
without effect. Furthermore, her own sense warned her that in the best
interests of their affairs, of the girl, herself, Murray McTavish was
certainly the husband for Jessie. But even so there was more than
reluctance. There was desperate distaste. The romantic vision of John
Kars, the wealthiest mine owner in Leaping Horse, the perfect
adventurer of the northern trail, rose before her eyes, and made her
hesitate. In the end, however, she thrust it aside and rose from her
chair, and held out her hand.

"I can promise no result," she said seriously, and she knew it was
subterfuge, "I'll do my best. Anyway, your cause shan't suffer at my
hands. Will that do?"

Murray McTavish took her warm hand in both of his. He held it tightly
for a few seconds.

"My thanks begin from now, ma'am," he said. "I guess they'll go right
on to--the end."

CHAPTER VII

AT SNAKE RIVER LANDING

Jessie Mowbray left the Mission House as the last of the small crowd of
copper-hued pappooses bundled pell-mell in the direction of the teepees
and cabins of their dusky parents.

For a few moments she stood there in the open with pensive eyes
following the movements of scurrying, toddling legs, many of them
encased in the minutest of buckskin, chap-like pantaloons and the
tiniest of beaded moccasins. It was a sight that yielded her a
tenderness of emotion that struggled hard to dispel the cloud which her
father's death had caused to settle over the joyous spirit of her young
life.

In a measure it was not without success. The smallness of these Indian
children, their helplessness, appealed to her woman's heart as possibly
nothing else could have done. It mattered nothing to her that the
fathers and mothers of these tots belonged to a low type of race
without scruple, or honesty, or decency, or any one of the better
features of the aboriginal. They were as low, perhaps lower than many
of the beasts of the field. But these "pappooses," so quaint and
small, so very helpless, were entirely dependent upon the succor of
Father Jos