the bastard
race of his companions, and a certain resemblance between himself and
the woman spoke of relationship.

The three talked long and seriously, and finally Victor returned alone
to the store. Again he took up his stand in the doorway and remained
gazing out upon the valley of the Little Choyeuse Creek, and the more
distant crags of the foothills beyond.

His face was serious; serious even for the wild, where all levity seems
out of place, and laughter jars upon the solemnity of the life and death
struggle for existence which is for ever being fought out there. On his
brow was a pucker of deep thought, whilst his eyes shone with a look
which seemed to have gathered from his surroundings much of the cunning
which belongs to the creatures of the forest. His usual expression of
good-fellowship had passed; and in its place appeared a hungry,
avaricious look which, although always there, was generally hidden
behind a superficial geniality. Victor had hitherto lived fairly
honestly because there was little or no temptation to do otherwise where
his trading-post was stationed. But it was not his nature to do so. And
as he stood gazing out upon the rugged picture before him he knew he was
quite unobserved; and so the rough soul within him was laid bare to the
grey light of the world.

CHAPTER IV.

THE HOODED MAN

The mere suggestion of the possibility of a woman's presence had rudely
broken up the even calm of Ralph and Nick Westley's lives. To turn back
to the peace of their mountain home without an effort to discover so
fair and strange a creature as this White Squaw would have been
impossible.

These men had known no real youth. They had fought the battle of life
from the earliest childhood, they had lived lives as dispassionate and
cold as the glaciers of their mountain home. Recreation was almost
unknown to them. Toil, unremitting, arduous, had been their lot. Thus
Nature had been defied; and now she was coming back on them as
inevitably as the sun rises and sets, and the seasons come and go. They
failed to realize their danger; they had no understanding of the
passions that moved them, and so they hurried headlong upon the trail
that was to lead them they knew not whither, but which was shadowed by
disaster every foot of the way. To them temptation was irresistible for
they had never known the teaching of restraint; it was the passionate
rending of the bonds which had all too long stifled their yo