nter? You can't drag a man off without something against him--just
because you want to _hang_ somebody!"

Some sound from Smith attracted her attention; she wheeled upon him, and,
with her thin arm outstretched as she pointed at him in scorn, she cried
shrilly:

"Why, I'd sooner think _you_ did it, than him!"

There was not so much as the flicker of an eyelid from Smith.

"I know you'd _sooner_ think I did it than him," he said, playing upon the
word. "You'd like to see _me_ get my neck stretched."

His bravado, his very insolence, was his protection.

"And maybe I'll have the chanst!" she retorted furiously.

Turning from him to the Indians, her voice dropped, the harsh language
taking on the soft accent of the squaws as she spoke to them in their own
tongue. Like many half-breeds, Susie seldom admitted that she either
understood or could speak the Indian language. She had an amusing fashion
of referring even to her relatives as "those Injuns"; but now, with hands
outstretched, she pleaded:

"We are all Indians together in this--friends of White Antelope! Our
hearts are down; they are heavy--so. You all know that he came from the
great Cree country with my father, and he has told us many times stories
of the big north woods, where they hunted and trapped. You know how he
watched me when I was little, and sat with his hand upon my head when I
had the big fever. He was like no one else to me except my father. He was
wise and good.

"I could kill with my own hand the man who killed White Antelope. I want
his blood as much as you. I'd like to see a stake driven through his
black heart on White Antelope's grave. But let us not be too quick because
the hate is hot in us. My heart tells me that the white man talks
straight. Let us wait--wait until we find the right one, and when we do we
will punish in our own way. You hear? _In our own way!_"

Smith understood something of her plea, and for the second time he paid
her courage tribute.

"She's a game kid all right," he said to himself, and a half-formed plan
for utilizing her gameness began to take definite shape.

That she had won, he knew before Running Rabbit recoiled his rope. After a
moment's talk among themselves, the Indians went to hitch the horses to
the wagon, to bring White Antelope's body home.

Smith was well aware that he had only to point to the saddle blanket, the
barest edge of which showed beneath the leather skirts of McArthur's
saddle, to ma