"But father said one-fifty."

"Your father is wrong in this instance."

Colina frowned ominously.

"How do you know?" she demanded.

"I know the price of flour at the different posts," he said
deprecatingly. "I know the risks that must be allowed for and the fair
profit one expects."

"Do you mean to say that father is unfair?" she cried.

He was silent. An unlucky word had betrayed him. He could have bitten
his tongue. Still, he reflected sullenly, it was bound to come. You
can't make black white, however tenderly you describe it.

Colina sprang to her feet.

"Unfair!" she cried. "That is to say a cheat! You can say it while he
is lying up-stairs desperately wounded!"

"Colina, be reasonable," he implored. "The fact that he is suffering
can't make a wrong right."

"There is no wrong!" she cried. "What do you know about conditions
here?"

"They come to my camp," he said simply, "one after another to beg me to
help them."

"And you were not above it," she flashed back, "murderers and others!"

An honest anger fired Ambrose's eyes. "You're talking wildly," he said
sternly. "I'm trying to help you."

Colina laughed.

With a great effort he commanded his temper, "What do you see yourself
in your rides about the settlement?" he asked. "Poverty and
wretchedness! How do you explain it when times are good--when this is
known as the richest post in the north?"

Colina would have none of his reasoning. "These are just the dangerous
ideas my father warned me against!" she cried passionately. "This is
how you make the natives discontented and unruly!"

"You will not listen to me!" he cried in despair.

"Listen to you! I see him lying there--helpless. I am sick with
compassion for him and with hatred against the creatures who did it.
And you dare to attack him, to excuse them! I will not endure it!"

"I am not attacking him. Right or wrong, he has brought about a
disastrous situation. He's the first to suffer. We're all standing on
the edge of a volcano. We are five whites here, and three hundred
miles from the nearest of our kind. If we want to save him and save
ourselves we've got to face the facts."

Of this Colina heard one sentence. "Do you mean, to say that father
brought this on himself?" she demanded, breathlessly angry.

Ambrose made a helpless gesture.

"I am to understand that you justify the breed?" she persisted.

"You have no right to put words into my mouth!"