GER ZONE

She stood on the crown of the hill, silhouetted against a sky-line of
deepest blue. Already the sun was sinking in a crotch of the plains
which rolled to the horizon edge like waves of a great land sea. Its
reflected fires were in her dark, stormy eyes. Its long, slanted rays
were a spotlight for the tall, slim figure, straight as that of a boy.

The girl's gaze was fastened on a wisp of smoke rising lazily from a
hollow of the crumpled hills. That floating film told of a camp-fire
of buffalo chips. There was a little knitted frown of worry on her
forehead, for imagination could fill in details of what the coulee
held: the white canvas tops of prairie schooners, some spans of oxen
grazing near, a group of blatant, profane whiskey-smugglers from
Montana, and in the wagons a cargo of liquor to debauch the Bloods and
Piegans near Fort Whoop-Up.

Sleeping Dawn was a child of impulse. She had all youth's capacity for
passionate indignation and none of the wisdom of age which tempers
the eager desire of the hour. These whiskey-traders were ruining her
people. More than threescore Blackfeet braves had been killed within
the year in drunken brawls among themselves. The plains Indians would
sell their souls for fire-water. When the craze was on them, they
would exchange furs, buffalo robes, ponies, even their wives and
daughters for a bottle of the poison.

In the sunset glow she stood rigid and resentful, one small fist
clenched, the other fast to the barrel of the rifle she carried. The
evils of the trade came close to her. Fergus McRae still carried the
gash from a knife thrust earned in a drunken brawl. It was likely that
to-morrow he would cut the trail of the wagon wheels and again make
a bee-line for liquor and trouble. The swift blaze of revolt found
expression in the stamp of her moccasined foot.

As dusk fell over the plains, Sleeping Dawn moved forward lightly,
swiftly, toward the camp in the hollow of the hills. She had no
definite purpose except to spy the lay-out, to make sure that her
fears were justified. But through the hinterland of her consciousness
rebellious thoughts were racing. These smugglers were wholly outside
the law. It was her right to frustrate them if she could.

Noiselessly she skirted the ridge above the coulee, moving through
the bunch grass with the wary care she had learned as a child in the
lodges of the tribe.

Three men crouched on their heels in the glow of a camp-fire