told
her a great deal. Yet she was not afraid, unless it was fear of what had
been in his mind.

"I am ready," she reminded him.

"We must wait for Stampede," he said, reason returning to him. "He
should be here sometime tonight, or in the morning. Now that Rossland is
off my nerves, I can see how necessary it is to have someone like
Stampede between us and--"

He did not finish, but what he had intended to say was quite clear to
her. She stood in the doorway, and he felt an almost uncontrollable
desire to take her in his arms again.

"He is between here and Tanana," she said with a little gesture of her
head.

"Rossland told you that?"

"Yes. And there are others with him, so many that he was amused when I
told him you would not let them take me away."

"Then you were not afraid that I--I might let them have you?"

"I have always been sure of what you would do since I opened that
second letter at Ellen McCormick's, Alan!"

He caught the flash of her eyes, the gladness in them, and she was gone
before he could find another word to say. Keok and Nawadlook were
approaching hesitatingly, but now they hurried to meet her, Keok still
grimly clutching the long knife; and beyond them, at the little window
under the roof, he saw the ghostly face of old Sokwenna, like a
death's-head on guard. His blood ran a little faster. The emptiness of
the tundras, the illimitable spaces without sign of human life, the vast
stage waiting for its impending drama, with its sunshine, its song of
birds, its whisper and breath of growing flowers, struck a new note in
him, and he looked again at the little window where Sokwenna sat like a
spirit from another world, warning him in his silent and lifeless stare
of something menacing and deadly creeping upon them out of that space
which seemed so free of all evil. He beckoned to him and then entered
his cabin, waiting while Sokwenna crawled down from his post and came
hobbling over the open, a crooked figure, bent like a baboon, witch-like
in his great age, yet with sunken eyes that gleamed like little points
of flame, and a quickness of movement that made Alan shiver as he
watched him through the window.

In a moment the old man entered. He was mumbling. He was saying, in that
jumble of sound which it was difficult for even Alan to understand--and
which Sokwenna had never given up for the missionaries' teachings--that
he could hear feet and smell blood; and that the feet were many, and