t that Long-Hair's wound was neither a broken bone nor a
cut artery. The flesh of his leg, midway between the hip and the knee,
was pierced; the bullet had bored a neat hole clean through. Father
Beret took the case in hand, and with no little surgical skill
proceeded to set the big Indian upon his feet again. The affair had to
be cleverly managed. Food, medicines and clothing were surreptitiously
borne across the river; a bed of grass was kept fresh under Long-Hair's
back; his wound was regularly dressed; and finally his weapons--a
tomahawk, a knife, a strong bow and a quiver of arrows--which he had
hidden on the night of his bold theft, were brought to him.

"Now go and sin no more," said good Father Beret; but he well knew that
his words were mere puffs of articulate wind in the ear of the grim and
silent savage, who limped away with an air of stately dignity into the
wilderness.

A load fell from Alice's mind when Father Beret informed her of
Long-Hair's recovery and departure. Day and night the dread lest some
of the men should find out his hiding-place and kill him had depressed
and worried her. And now, when it was all over, there still hovered
like an elusive shadow in her consciousness a vague haunting impression
of the incident's immense significance as an influence in her life. To
feel that she had saved a man from death was a new sensation of itself;
but the man and the circumstances were picturesque; they invited
imagination; they furnished an atmosphere of romance dear to all young
and healthy natures, and somehow stirred her soul with a strange appeal.

Long-Hair's imperturbable calmness, his stolid, immobile countenance,
the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the
soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on
the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by
the romances she had read in M. Roussillon's mildewed books.

Long-Hair was not a young man; but it would have been impossible to
guess near his age. His form and face simply showed long experience and
immeasurable vigor. Alice remembered with a shuddering sensation the
look he gave her when she took the locket from his hand. It was of but
a second's duration, yet it seemed to search every nook of her being
with its subtle power.

Romancers have made much of their Indian heroes, picturing them as
models of manly beauty and nobility; but all fiction must be taken with
liberal pinc