Then I'll live in your love for aye.
Then if you still are true, my love,
It will be our wedding day."

The dogs, bristling and growling, drew in closer to the firelight. There
was a monotonous crunch-crunch of webbed shoes, and between each crunch
the dragging forward of the heel of the shoe like the sound of sifting
sugar. Sigmund broke off from his song to hurl oaths and firewood at the
animals. Then the light was parted by a fur-clad figure, and an Indian
girl slipped out of the webs, threw back the hood of her squirrel-skin
_parka_, and stood in their midst. Sigmund and the men on the bearskin
greeted her as "Sipsu," with the customary "Hello," but Hitchcock made
room on the sled that she might sit beside him.

"And how goes it, Sipsu?" he asked, talking, after her fashion, in broken
English and bastard Chinook. "Is the hunger still mighty in the camp?
and has the witch doctor yet found the cause wherefore game is scarce and
no moose in the land?"

"Yes; even so. There is little game, and we prepare to eat the dogs.
Also has the witch doctor found the cause of all this evil, and to-morrow
will he make sacrifice and cleanse the camp."

"And what does the sacrifice chance to be?--a new-born babe or some poor
devil of a squaw, old and shaky, who is a care to the tribe and better
out of the way?"

"It chanced not that wise; for the need was great, and he chose none
other than the chief's daughter; none other than I, Sipsu."

"Hell!" The word rose slowly to Hitchcock's lips, and brimmed over full
and deep, in a way which bespoke wonder and consideration.

"Wherefore we stand by a forking of the trail, you and I," she went on
calmly, "and I have come that we may look once more upon each other, and
once more only."

She was born of primitive stock, and primitive had been her traditions
and her days; so she regarded life stoically, and human sacrifice as part
of the natural order. The powers which ruled the day-light and the dark,
the flood and the frost, the bursting of the bud and the withering of the
leaf, were angry and in need of propitiation. This they exacted in many
ways,--death in the bad water, through the treacherous ice-crust, by the
grip of the grizzly, or a wasting sickness which fell upon a man in his
own lodge till he coughed, and the life of his lungs went out through his
mouth and nostrils. Likewise did the powers receive sacrifice. It was
all one. And the witch doctor was ve