aid, thinking of the possible
consequences of the alarm Brace had raised.

"Not the way _you_ came," she replied; "but one known only to myself."

He hesitated only a moment. "All right, then," he said finally; "let us
go at once. It's suffocating here, and I seem to feel this dead bark
crinkle under my feet."

She cast a rapid glance around her, and then seemed to sound with her
eyes the far-off depths of the aisles, beginning to grow pale with the
advancing day, but still holding a strange quiver of heat in the air.
When she had finished her half abstracted scrutiny of the distance, she
cast one backward glance at her own cabin and stopped.

"Will you wait a moment for me?" she asked gently.

"Yes--but--no tricks, Teresa! It isn't worth the time."

She looked him squarely in the eyes without a word.

"Enough," he said; "go!"

She was absent for some moments. He was beginning to become uneasy,
when she made her appearance again, clad in her old faded black dress.
Her face was very pale, and her eyes were swollen, but she placed his
hand on her shoulder, and bidding him not to fear to lean upon her, for
she was quite strong, led the way.

"You look more like yourself now, and yet--blast it all!--you don't
either," said Dunn, looking down upon her. "You've changed in some way.
What is it? Is it on account of that Injin? Couldn't you have found a
white man in his place?"

"I reckon he's neither worse nor better for that," she replied
bitterly; "and perhaps he wasn't as particular in his taste as a white
man might have been. But," she added, with a sudden spasm of her old
rage, "it's a lie; he's _not_ an Indian, no more than I am. Not unless
being born of a mother who scarcely knew him, of a father who never
even saw him, and being brought up among white men and wild beasts less
cruel than they were, could make him one!"

Dunn looked at her in surprise not unmixed with admiration. "If
Nellie," he thought, "could but love _me_ like that!" But he only said:

"For all that, he's an Injin. Why, look at his name. It ain't Low. It's
_L'Eau Dormante_, Sleeping Water, an Injin name."

"And what does that prove?" returned Teresa. "Only that Indians clap a
nickname on any stranger, white or red, who may camp with them. Why,
even his own father, a white man, the wretch who begot him and
abandoned him,--_he_ had an Indian name--_Loup Noir_."

"What name did you say?"

"_Le Loup Noir_, the Black Wolf. I suppose you'd