then the Indian girl spoke, and at the first words of the soft,
rich voice, the rage died in her heart. She looked closely, and in the
dark, liquid eyes was a look the white girl will never forget.

She listened, and with few words and all the dramatic eloquence of the
pure Indian the half-breed girl told of the rescue from the river; of
her own love for M's'u' Bill, "The-Man-Who-Cannot-Die"; of his firm
rejection of that love; of her pursuit of him when he started for the
land of the white man; of the scene at the camp-fire when old
Wa-ha-ta-na-ta called him "The One Good White Man"; of the broken
knife; of The Promise; of her peril at the hand of Moncrossen, and of
the cold-blooded shooting of her brother.

And then she told of Bill's all-absorbing love for her, Ethel. And of
how he always loved her, even when he believed she hated and despised
him; of his deep hurt and the misery of his soul when he believed that
she was to marry another.

Until suddenly there in the moonlight the girl of the city saw for the
first time the bigness of the man--_her man_. She saw him as he was now
and as he had been in the making--the man who had been dubbed "Broadway
Bill, the sport"; the "souse," who had "soaked a cop" and then "beat it
in a taxi."

And then the man who, without name or explanation, had won the regard
of such a keen judge of men as Appleton, and who, under the stigma of
theft, held that regard without question; the man who beat the booze
game after he had lost his heart's desire, and had been sneered at as a
coward and a quitter; the man who having gained his heart's desire, in
the very bigness of him, had unhesitatingly risked wrecking his whole
life's happiness to keep his promise to an old, toothless, savage
crone; and who, in brute fashion, bare-fisted, had all but pounded the
life from the body of the hulking Moncrossen in defense of a woman's
honor.

And _this_ was the man who, eighteen short months before, had
turkey-trotted upon the sidewalk in front of a gay resort, and had
"pulled it too raw even for Broadway!"

The flood-gates of her soul opened, as is the way of women in all the
world. The great sobs came, and with them tears, and in the
tree-filtered moonlight the two girls--the tutored white girl and the
half-savage Indian--women both--wept in each other's arms.

* * * * *

Up the trail from the river, almost at their feet, wearily climbed a
man, dog-