a cloud
of fire, it saw the light craft already cutting the cool waters of
Winnipeg. When it sank into the western woods the bobbing dot was still
shooting forward.

Child of the wilderness by birth was Dupre, child of the wilderness by
dream and desire was Maren, and its simple courage was inborn in both.

The Indians were a day and night ahead, hurrying by dawn and dusk to the
north, that the body of the dead chief, cured like a mummy by the
smoke curling from the big tepee at every stop, might have burial, the
earth-bound spirit begin its journey to the shadowy hunting-grounds.

When McElroy took his last look backward at the blue lake from the
northern end, Maren and Dupre were making their last camp before the Big
Bend on the eastern shore.

"How soon, think you, M'sieu?" she asked that night, standing beside the
little fire; "how soon will they come,--the H. B. C.'s from York?"

"To-morrow, most like, or in a few days at most."

This evening luck had deserted his fishing, so the trapper took a rifle
and went into the woods after a fool-hen. Thoughts kept him company;
thoughts of love and its strangeness, of the odd decrees of Fate and the
helplessness of man. How all the world had changed with its coming,
this love which hail been born in an hour what time he had listened to a
woman's voice beside the stockade wall, and how the very soul within him
had changed also.

Where had been lightness and the recklessness of youth there was now a
wistful tenderness so vast that it covered his life as the pearly mist
covered the world at dawn.

Where he had taken all of joy that post and settlement, friend and foe
could give, lived for naught but his sparkling pleasures, he was now
possessed of a great yearning to give to this woman, this goddess of the
black braids; to give, only to give to her; to give of his strength, of
his overwhelming love; aye, of even his heart's blood itself as he had
told her in the beginning.

He was long in finding a fat grouse this evening, and when he returned
night was thick on forest and shore.

Light of tread in his moccasins, Dupre came quietly out not far from the
blaze of the small fire, and stopped among the shoulder-high brush that
fringed the forest.

In the glow of the fire Maren knelt before a green stake set upright in
the earth, from a fork of which there hung a black iron crucifix, its
ivory Christ gleaming in the light. On either side of this pitiful altar
there fl