, who crouched with her two daughters by the lodge fire.

"Said I not that he would bring us luck? And, being bitten, did they
bite, my brother?" he asked mischievously.

"A little. It did not hurt at the time."

One of the two girls rose from beside the fire.

"Show me your hands, Netawis," she said.

Netawis--that is to say, John a Cleeve--stretched out his lacerated
hands to the firelight. As he did so his blanket-cloak fell back,
showing a necklace of wampum about his throat and another looser
string dangling against the stained skin of his breast. On his
outstretched wrists two silver bangles twinkled, and two broad bands
of silver on the upper arms.

The girl fetched a bladder of beaver-fat and anointed his hands, her
own trembling a little. Azoka was husband-high, and had been
conscious for some weeks of a bird in her breast, which stirred and
began to flutter whenever she and Netawis drew close. At first, when
he had been fit for little but to make kites for the children, she
had despised him and wondered at her father's liking. But Netawis
did not seem to care whether folks despised him or not; and this
piqued her. Whatever had to be learnt he learned humbly, and now the
young men had ceased to speak of him as a good-for-nothing, Azoka
began to think that his differing from them was not wholly against
him; and all the women acknowledged him to be slim and handsome.

"Many thanks, cousin," said Netawis as she bound up the wounds.
Then he began to talk cheerfully over his shoulder to Menehwehna.
"Five washes I tried, and all were empty; but by the sixth the water
bubbled. Then I wished that I had you with me, for I knew that my
hands would suffer." He smiled; this was one of his un-Indian tricks.

"It was well done, brother," said Menehwehna, and his eyes sought
those of his wife Meshu-kwa who, still crouching by the fire, gazed
across it at the youth and the girl.

"But that is not all. While I was at work the dogs left me.
At first I did not miss them; and then, finding them gone, I made
sure they had run home in scorn of my hunting. But no; their tracks
led me to a tree, not far up the stream, and there I found them.
They were not barking, but sometimes they would nose around the trunk
and sometimes fall back to a little distance and sit whining and
trembling while they stared up at it."

"And the tracks around the tree?"

"I could find none but what the dogs themselves had made. I ta