y about to begin.

"We mak' him--yes?" he said, his parchment-like eyelids blinking his
enquiry.

"North." Keeko's answer came promptly. "Guess we follow the river till
the ice breaks up. Then we camp, and I make the rest by the water."

"Oh, yes. Him moose head. Yes? And him big hunter--Marcel?"

Keeko smiled into the dusky face of her faithful ally.

"That's so--if God wills it."

CHAPTER XVII

THE DEVOTION OF A GREAT WOMAN

The daylight was lengthening. Very slowly the lolling sun was returning
to life and power. A sense of revivifying was in the air. As yet the
grip of winter still held. The snow was still spread to the depth of
many feet upon the broad expanse of the valley of the Sleepers. But its
perfect hue was smirched with the lateness of the season. It had assumed
that pearly grey which denotes the coming of the great thaw.

Marcel was standing on the drifted bank of the little river, winding its
way towards the Northern hills. He was there for the purpose of
ascertaining the conditions prevailing. But his purpose had been
forgotten.

Erect, motionless, superb in his physical greatness, he was gazing out
at the wall of western hills, heedless of that which he looked upon. He
was absorbed in thought that was reaching out far, far beyond the hills
which barred his vision. It was somewhere out there where the eyeless
sockets of an old moose looked down upon the great river coming up out
of the south, cutting its way between the granite walls of the earth's
foundations.

Keeko! He was thinking, dreaming of the girl who had come to him in the
heart of the far-off woods, with all her woman's appeal to his youthful
manhood. He was thinking of her wonderful blue eyes, her radiant smile,
her amazing courage. They were the same thoughts which had lightened
even the darkest moments of the howling storms of winter and transformed
the deadly monotony of it all into something more than an endurance to
which the life of the Northern world condemned him.

But there was more than all this stirring him now. He was moved to
impatience, the impatience of headstrong youth. It was not new. He had
had to battle against it from the moment of his return to the fort. More
than all else in the world he desired to fling every caution, every
responsibility to the winds, and set out for the meeting-place over
which the old moose stood guard.

He knew it could not be. He knew it would be an act of the basest
ingrat