ing 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
nick-name 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 call him an Indian, too?
Eh! What's the matter? We're walking too fast. Stop a moment and rest.
There--there, lean on me!"

She was none too soon; for, after holding him upright a moment, his
limbs failed, and stooping gently she was obliged to support hi