s it will help explain."

Jean looked up inquiringly.

"Up here in the North, Miss Jean, it is the custom of the young bucks
to buy any little girl who takes his fancy. He pays for her while he
is strong and a good hunter, you see. When the girl grows up he takes
her for his wife."

There was a gasp of astonishment from Ellen and her sister, but Kilbuck
went on:

"One hundred dollars is a mighty good price to pay for a wife,
but Swimming Wolf, my little lady, came to me yesterday with
four black fox skins, which are worth perhaps three thousand
dollars. He wanted to know if I would arrange with the Big White
Man--your brother-in-law--to take them in payment for the _shawut
clate_, the White-Girl-Who-Makes-Singing-Birds-in-the-Little-Brown-Box."

Jean lifted her chin with a laugh in which amusement and embarrassment
were equally mingled. "How quaintly ridiculous, Ellen, to describe my
violin playing in such a way! But mercy," she added, after they had
all laughed over the incident, "I must run away upstairs and put on
some footwear. If I had kept on my shoes and stockings, as I should
have done, Swimming Wolf might not have called me 'little squaw with
white feet'!"

Kilbuck, satisfied with himself, had settled back once more against his
cushions and as she turned to say a parting word to him, was regarding
her with half-closed eyes. The firelight played on her slim, white
ankles and soft little feet. He surveyed her with a look that slowly,
appraisingly, stripped her body of its garments and swept her from her
bare feet to her face and back again. The girl caught it. Conscious,
for the first time of him--his savage reality as other than a
middle-aged man--of her own womanhood, she flushed violently.
Shrinking back she reached for Loll's hand, and stammering an
incoherent excuse, ran from the room.

Ellen, unconscious of what had happened, measured off a row of stitches
in the knitting she had again taken up. "Jean certainly seems to be
tumbling in and out of adventures," she remarked. "Sometimes, Shane, I
wonder if we did right in bringing her with us."

"Nonsense, Ellen. A year up here will make a different girl of
her--help her break away from the cut and dried sameness of school
life. Darned if it doesn't make me tired to see all the young women
turned out of the same mould."

As Boreland spoke the door leading into the store opened slowly, and
into the room sauntered Kayak Bill. He seated