.

* * * * *

The next morning at sunrise Abe Hawley and the girl he had waited for so
long started on the North trail together, MacFee, master of the troopers
and justice of the peace, handing over the marriage lines.

THE STROKE OF THE HOUR

"They won't come to-night--sure."

The girl looked again toward the west, where, here and there, bare poles,
or branches of trees, or slips of underbrush, marked a road made across
the plains through the snow. The sun was going down golden red, folding up
the sky a wide, soft curtain of pink and mauve and deep purple merging
into the fathomless blue, where already the stars were beginning to
quiver. The house stood on the edge of a little forest, which had boldly
asserted itself in the wide flatness. At this point in the west the
prairie merged into an undulating territory, where hill and wood rolled
away from the banks of the Saskatchewan, making another England in beauty.
The forest was a sort of advance-post of that land of beauty.

Yet there was beauty, too, on this prairie, though there was nothing to
the east but snow and the forest so far as eye could see. Nobility and
peace and power brooded over the white world.

As the girl looked, it seemed as though the bosom of the land rose and
fell. She had felt this vibrating life beat beneath the frozen surface.
Now, as she gazed, she smiled sadly to herself, with drooping eyelids
looking out from beneath strong brows.

"I know you--I know you," she said, aloud. "You've got to take your toll.
And when you're lying asleep like that, or pretending to, you reach
up--and kill. And yet you can be kind--ah, but you can be kind and
beautiful! But you must have your toll one way or t'other." She sighed and
paused; then, after a moment, looking along the trail--"I don't expect
they'll come to-night, and mebbe not to-morrow, if--if they stay for
_that_."

Her eyes closed, she shivered a little. Her lips drew tight, and her face
seemed suddenly to get thinner. "But dad wouldn't--no, he couldn't, not
considerin'--" Again she shut her eyes in pain.

Her face was now turned from the western road by which she had expected
her travellers, and toward the east, where already the snow was taking on
a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening toward night in
that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless
the half-circle was looking now.

"No one--not