ss of the
First People--the daughter of a Cree chief. He held out his hand, and the
hand which Oachi gave to him was cold and lifeless. She smiled when he told
her that he had come to say good-bye, and when she spoke to him her voice
was as clear as the stream singing through the canon. His own voice
trembled. In spite of his mightiest effort a tightening fist seemed choking
him.

"I am coming back--some day," he managed.

Oachi smiled, with the glory of the morning sun in her eyes and hair. She
turned, still smiling, and pointed far to the west.

"And some day--the Valley of Silent Men will awaken," she said, and
reentered her father's tepee.

Out of the camp staggered Roscoe Cummins behind his Indian guide, a
blinding heat in his eyes. Once or twice a gulping sob rose in his throat,
and he clutched hard at his heart to beat himself into submission to the
great law of life as it had been made for him.

An hour later the two came to a stream where there was a canoe. Because of
rapids and the fierceness of the spring floods, portages were many, and
progress slow during the whole of that day. They had made twenty miles when
the sun began sinking in the west, and they struck camp. After their supper
of meat the Cree rolled himself in his blanket and slept. But for long
hours Roscoe sat beside their fire. Night dropped about him, a splendid
night filled with sweet breaths and stars and a new moon, and with strange
sounds which came to him now in a language which he was beginning to
understand. From far away there floated faintly to his ears the lonely cry
of a wolf, and it no longer made him shudder, but filled him with the
mysterious longing of the cry itself. It was the mate-song of the beast of
prey, sending up its message to the stars--crying out to all the
wilderness for a response to its loneliness. Night birds twittered about
him. A loon laughed in its mocking joy. An owl hooted down at him from the
black top of a tall spruce. From out of starvation and death the wilderness
had awakened. Its sounds spoke to him still of grief, of the suffering that
would never know end; and yet there trembled in them a note of happiness
and of content. Beside the campfire it came to him that in this world he
had discovered two things--a suffering that he had never known, and a peace
he had never known. And Oachi stood for them both. He thought of her until
drowsiness drew a pale film over his eyes. The birch crackled more and mor