n he had not had the experience? Now it was different. He did truly
love two women, and though most of the time he was quite convinced that
he loved Joy Gastell more, there were other moments when he felt with
equal certainty that he loved Labiskwee more.

"There must be many women in the world," she said one day. "And women
like men. Many women must have liked you. Tell me."

He did not reply.

"Tell me," she insisted.

"I have never married," he evaded.

"And there is no one else? No other Iseult out there beyond the
mountains?"

Then it was that Smoke knew himself a coward. He lied. Reluctantly he
did it, but he lied. He shook his head with a slow indulgent smile, and
in his face was more of fondness than he dreamed as he noted Labiskwee's
swift joy-transfiguration.

He excused himself to himself. His reasoning was jesuitical beyond
dispute, and yet he was not Spartan enough to strike this child-woman a
quivering heart-stroke.

Snass, too, was a perturbing factor in the problem. Little escaped his
black eyes, and he spoke significantly.

"No man cares to see his daughter married," he said to Smoke. "At least,
no man of imagination. It hurts. The thought of it hurts, I tell you.
Just the same, in the natural order of life, Margaret must marry some
time."

A pause fell; Smoke caught himself wondering for the thousandth time
what Snass's history must be.

"I am a harsh, cruel man," Snass went on. "Yet the law is the law, and
I am just. Nay, here with this primitive people, I am the law and the
justice. Beyond my will no man goes. Also, I am a father, and all my
days I have been cursed with imagination."

Whither his monologue tended, Smoke did not learn, for it was
interrupted by a burst of chiding and silvery laughter from Labiskwee's
tent, where she played with a new-caught wolf-cub. A spasm of pain
twitched Snass's face.

"I can stand it," he muttered grimly. "Margaret must be married, and it
is my fortune, and hers, that you are here. I had little hopes of Four
Eyes. McCan was so hopeless I turned him over to a squaw who had lighted
her fire twenty seasons. If it hadn't been you, it would have been an
Indian. Libash might have become the father of my grandchildren."

And then Labiskwee came from her tent to the fire, the wolf-cub in her
arms, drawn as by a magnet, to gaze upon the man, in her eyes the love
that art had never taught to hide.

* * * * *