a wolf howled.

At first a sense of bewilderment held him. Then in a rush came back the
memory of what had happened. He listened intently. Back and forth, back
and forth somewhere near went a soft footstep, the swish and glide of
a moccasin. He strained his eyes, which smarted terribly, into the
darkness, and presently descried a tall form pacing slowly up against
the skyline of his vision and back again into the shadows. A single
feather slanted against the stars. A guard pacing the place of captives.

With a slight movement McElroy tried to lift a hand.

It was immovable. He tried the other. It likewise refused his will.

So with both feet when he attempted, ever so cautiously, to move them.

He was bound hand and foot, and with cruel tightness, for with that tiny
slipping of his muscles there set up all through him such a tingling and
aching as was almost unbearable.

His head seemed a lump of lead, glued to whatever it lay upon, and big
as a buttertub.

Turning his eyes far as he could to the right, he looked long in that
direction. Faintly, after a while, he picked out the straight line of
the stockade top, the rising tower at the corner. The line of the wall
faded out in darkness the other way, strain as he might. To the left
were the ragged tops of the tepees, their two longer sticks pointing
above the others.

From the sound of the river, he must be between it and the stockade
gate.

Presently his numbed hearing became conscious of a sound somewhere near,
a sound that had rung so ceaselessly since his waking that it had seemed
the background for the lesser noise of the sentry's slipping moccasin.
It was the weird, unending, unbeginning wail of the women, the
death-song of the tribe mourning the passing of a chief, the voices of
some four hundred squaws blending indescribably.

McElroy listened.

With consciousness of that his mind grew clearer and he began to think.

What a fool he had been!

Once more had he played like an unbalanced boy at the game of love.

What right had he to strike De Courtenay for kissing the woman whom he
had won with his red flowers and his curls before the populace? That he
himself had fancied for a brief space that she was his was no excuse for
plunging like a boy at his rival's throat. If he had held his peace, all
would be well now and the old chief would not be lying stiff and stark
somewhere in the shadowed camp, the women wailing without fires.

It was no balm