rk fearsome
men in their loves and hates. This man married late in life, he had
two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an' your Donald here. He never saw
his father alive. The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but
the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin' me up at
my Mission on Saskatchewan. She came huntin' heirs. Angus had married
an Indian woman; he'll never go back, nor his sons. They're livin'
under a tent to-day. What would they do wi' a castle and liveried
servants and tenants an' things? Donald, y'r sheep king man, married a
white girl. Some time after '85 she left him for the part he took in
the Rebellion. She died after the child's birth; and the father
claimed the daughter. He's known they'd have to come for his daughter
some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such
shameful thing as y' might think, if y've lived long enough in the
West, t' understand! He has educated the daughter for the place. As A
guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn't know who her mother was, or why
her father had to leave Canada. A guessed that much when y'r Indian
woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night! She
doesn't even know who that Indian woman is."

"You came--for her?" repeated Wayland slowly. The night on the Ridge
came back to him! Calamity's fear when the old frontiersman arrived;
Bat's threat to expose something; Eleanor's perturbed letter; the
father's half furtive defiant existence. He was too proud to ask more
than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her
life that she could not willingly share with him. He sat gazing into
the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of
light. It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen
his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked.
He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his
weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that
forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand
from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the
Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder.
Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it
affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had
foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but
love must not be suffered to draw back.

"Why do y