side. When she returned a man
followed in after her. He was old and bent, and his face was thin. His
cheek-bones shone, so tightly was the skin drawn over them. And behind him
came a younger man, as straight as a tree, with strong shoulders, and a
head set like a piece of bronze sculpture. Roscoe thought of Ransom and of
his words about old Rameses:

"You will find something in his face which will recall what I have said,
and make you think of the First People."

The second man carried in his hand a frozen fish, which he gave to the
woman. And as he gave it to her he spoke words in Cree which Roscoe
understood.

"It is the last fish."

For a moment some terrible hand gripped at Roscoe's heart and stopped its
beating. He saw the woman take the fish and cut it into two equal parts
with a knife, and one of these parts he saw her drop into a pot of boiling
water which hung over the stone fireplace built under the vent in the wall.
The girl went up and stood beside the older woman, with her back turned to
him. He opened his eyes wide, and stared. The girl was tall and slender, as
lithely and as beautifully formed as one of the northern lilies that thrust
their slender stems from between the mountain rocks. Her two heavy braids
fell down her back almost to her knees. And this girl, the woman, the two
men _were dividing with him their last fish_!

He made an effort and sat up. The younger man came to him, and put a bear
skin at his back. He had picked up some of the patois of half-blood French
and English.

"You seek," he said, "you hurt--you hungr'. You have eat soon."

He motioned with his hand to the boiling pot. There was not a ficker of
animation in his splendid face. There was something godlike in his
immobility, something that was awesome in the way he moved and breathed.
His voice, too, it seemed to Roscoe, was filled with the old, old mystery
of the beginning of things, of history that was long dead and lost for all
time. And it came upon Roscoe now, like a flood of rare knowledge
descending from a mysterious source, that he had at last discovered the key
to new life, and that through the blindness of reason, through starvation
and death, fate had led him to the Great Truth that was dying with the last
sons of the First People. For the half of the last fish was brought to
him, and he ate; and when the knowledge that he was eating life away from
these people choked him, and he thrust a part of it back, the girl