story of the hottest battle that ever was fought.

To be sure, she had as yet refrained from using words against him; but how
long would she refrain? That question he had asked himself until, in
despair, a loop-hole from her quiet vengeance had occurred to him, and he
had asked her to marry him.

"You never could--would marry any one else," he said, pleadingly.

"Oh, couldn't I?"

"And I couldn't, either, Lavina," he continued, looking at her
sentimentally. But Lavina knew better.

"You would, if anybody would have you," she retorted. "I know I reached
here just in time to keep poor Lorena Jane from being made a victim of.
You would have been a tyrant over her, with your great pretensions, if I
hadn't stopped it. You always were tyrannical, Alf Leek; and the only time
you're humble as you ought to be is when you meet some one who can
tyrannize over you. You are one of the sort that needs it."

"That's why I asked you to marry me," he remarked, meekly.

And after a moment she said:

"Well, thinking of it from that point of view, I guess I will."

Far up on the heights, a man lying there alone saw the canoe with the man
and the woman in it, and it brought back to him keen rushes of memory from
the summer time that had been. It was only a year ago that 'Tana had
stepped into his canoe, and gone with him to the new life of the
settlement. How brave she had been! how daring! He liked best to remember
her as she had been then, with all the storms and sunshine of her face. He
liked to remember that she had said she would be cook for him, but for no
other man. Of course her words were a child's words, soon forgotten by
her. But all her words and looks and their journeys made him love the
land he had known her in. They were all the treasures he had with which to
comfort his loneliness.

And when in the twilight he descended to the camp, Joe--or his own
longings--had won.

"I will send the telegram for you, old fellow," he said, and that was all.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

AGAIN ON THE KOOTENAI.

Another canoe, with a woman in it, skimmed over the waters in the twilight
that evening--a woman with all the gladness of youth in her bright eyes,
and an eagerness for the north country that far outstripped the speed of
the boat.

Each dark tree-trunk as it loomed up from the shores, each glint of the
after-glow as it lighted the ripples, each whisper of the fresh, soft wind
of the mountains, was to her as a special w