and almost pulled trigger ere he knew her.

"The woman! Don't shoot!" he cried. "See! She is unarmed!"

The Crees never heard, nor Michael and his brother _voyageur_, nor Van
Brunt, who was keeping one shell continuously in the air. But Thom
bore straight on, unharmed, at the heels of a skin-clad hunter who had
veered in before her from the side. Fairfax emptied his magazine into
the men to right and left of her, and swung his rifle to meet the big
hunter. But the man, seeming to recognize him, swerved suddenly aside
and plunged his spear into the body of Michael. On the moment Thom had
one arm passed around her husband's neck, and twisting half about,
with voice and gesture was splitting the mass of charging warriors.
A score of men hurled past on either side, and Fairfax, for a brief
instant's space, stood looking upon her and her bronze beauty,
thrilling, exulting, stirred to unknown deeps, visioning strange
things, dreaming, immortally dreaming. Snatches and scraps of
old-world philosophies and new-world ethics floated through his mind,
and things wonderfully concrete and woefully incongruous--hunting
scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the
glittering of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a
fleeting shimmer of glistening test-tubes, long rows of book-lined
shelves, the throb of machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment
of forgotten song, faces of dear women and old chums, a lonely
watercourse amid upstanding peaks, a shattered boat on a pebbly
strand, quiet moonlit fields, fat vales, the smell of hay....

A hunter, struck between the eyes with a rifle-ball, pitched forward
lifeless, and with the momentum of his charge slid along the ground.
Fairfax came back to himself. His comrades, those that lived, had been
swept far back among the trees beyond. He could hear the fierce "Hia!
Hia!" of the hunters as they closed in and cut and thrust with their
weapons of bone and ivory. The cries of the stricken men smote him
like blows. He knew the fight was over, the cause was lost, but all
his race traditions and race loyalty impelled him into the welter that
he might die at least with his kind.

"My man! My man!" Thom cried. "Thou art safe!"

He tried to struggle on, but her dead weight clogged his steps.

"There is no need! They are dead, and life be good!"

She held him close around the neck and twined her limbs about his till
he tripped and stumbled, reeled violently t