cave. She had realized perfectly that Ben could not hope to
throw off the malady without nutritious food and she had not stinted
with him; and now, just when she had begun to hope for his recovery, she
shook the last precious cup of flour from the sack.

The rice and sugar were gone, long since. The honey she had hoarded to
give Ben--knowing its warming, nutritive value--not tasting a drop
herself. Of all their stores only a few pieces of jerked caribou
remained; she had used the rest to make rich broth for Ben, and there
was no way under heaven whereby they might procure more.

The rifle was broken. The last of the pistol shots was fired the day she
had prepared the poisoned cup for Ben.

Yet she still waged the fight, struggling with high courage and tireless
resolution against the frightful odds that opposed her. Her faith was as
of that nameless daughter of the Gileadite; and she could not yield. Not
ambition, not hatred--not even such fire of fury as had been wakened in
Wolf Darby's heart that first frenzied night on the hillside--could have
been the impulse for such fortitude and sacrifice as hers. It was not
one of these base passions--known in the full category to her rescuers
who were even now bearing down upon her valley--that kept the steel in
her thews and the steadfastness in her heart. She loved this man; her
love for him was as wholesome and as steadfast as her own self; and the
law of that love was to give him all she had.

There were few witnesses to this infinite giving of hers. Ben himself
still lingered in a strange stupor, remembering nothing, knowing neither
the girl nor himself. Perhaps the wild things saw her desperate efforts
to find food in the wilderness,--the long hours of weary searching for a
handful of berries that gave such little nourishment to his weakened
body, or for a few acorns stored for winter by bird or rodent. Sometimes
a great-antlered moose--an easy trophy if the rifle had been
unbroken--saw her searching for wocus like a lost thing in the tenacious
mud of the marshes; and almost nightly a silent wolf, pausing in his
hunting, gazed uneasily through the cavern maw. But mostly her long
hours of service in the cave, the chill nights that she sat beside Ben's
cot, the dreary mornings when she cooked her own scanty breakfast and
took her uneasy rest, the endless labor of fire-mending so that the cave
could be kept at an even heat went unobserved by mortal eyes. The
healing force