e between us, and in the silence of the night when we lay
beneath the stars and should have been one. It was there always. She
never spoke, but it sat by our fire and held us ever apart. She tried to
put it aside, but at such times it would rise up till I could read it in
the look of her eyes, in the very intake of her breath.

"So in the end she bore me a child, a woman-child, and died. Then I went
among my mother's people, that it might nurse at a warm breast and live.
But my hands were wet with the blood of men, look you, because of the
church, wet with the blood of men. And the Riders of the North came for
me, but my mother's brother, who was then chief in his own right, hid me
and gave me horses and food. And we went away, my woman-child and I,
even to the Hudson Bay Country, where white men were few and the
questions they asked not many. And I worked for the company a hunter, as
a guide, as a driver of dogs, till my woman-child was become a woman,
tall, and slender, and fair to the eye.

"You know the winter, long and lonely, breeding evil thoughts and bad
deeds. The Chief Factor was a hard man, and bold. And he was not such
that a woman would delight in looking upon. But he cast eyes upon my
woman-child who was become a woman. Mother of God! he sent me away on a
long trip with the dogs, that he might--you understand, he was a hard man
and without heart. She was most white, and her soul was white, and a
good woman, and--well, she died.

"It was bitter cold the night of my return, and I had been away months,
and the dogs were limping sore when I came to the fort. The Indians and
breeds looked on me in silence, and I felt the fear of I knew not what,
but I said nothing till the dogs were fed and I had eaten as a man with
work before him should. Then I spoke up, demanding the word, and they
shrank from me, afraid of my anger and what I should do; but the story
came out, the pitiful story, word for word and act for act, and they
marvelled that I should be so quiet.

"When they had done I went to the Factor's house, calmer than now in the
telling of it. He had been afraid and called upon the breeds to help
him; but they were not pleased with the deed, and had left him to lie on
the bed he had made. So he had fled to the house of the priest. Thither
I followed. But when I was come to that place, the priest stood in my
way, and spoke soft words, and said a man in anger should go neither to
the right