it faded again into the dark,
the mysterious half-dark, where the gradually deepening twilight
blended the distance into the enshrouding pall of gloom. Involuntarily
the girl shuddered and started nervously at the splash of an otter. A
billion mosquitoes droned their unceasing monotone. The low sound was
everywhere--among the branches of the gnarled banskian, above the
surface of the river, and on and on and on, to whine thinly between the
little stars.

It was not at all the woman who would conquer a wilderness, that
huddled in a dejected little heap at the foot of the banskian; but a
very miserable and depressed girl, who swallowed hard to keep down the
growing lump in her throat, and bit her lip, and stared with wide eyes
toward the southward. Hot tears--tears of bitter, heart-sickening
loneliness--filled her eyes and trickled unheeded down her cheeks
beneath the tightly drawn mosquito-net.

Darkness deepened, imperceptibly, surely, fore-shortening the horizon,
and by just so much increasing the distance that separated her from her
people.

"Poor fool moose-calf," she murmured, "you weren't satisfied to follow
the beaten trails. You had to find a land of your own--a land that----"

The whispered words trailed into silence, and to her mind's eye
appeared the face of the man who had spoken those words--the face of
Brute MacNair. She saw him as he stood that day and faced her among
the freshly chopped stumps of the clearing.

"He is rough and bearlike--boorish," she thought, as she remembered
that the man had not removed his hat in her presence. "He called me
names. He is uncouth, cynical, egotistical. He thinks he can scare me
into leaving his Indians alone." Her lips trembled and tightened. "I
am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among
the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering,
and uncompromising, and skeptical. And yet--" What gave her pause was
so intangible, so chaotic, in her own mind as to form itself into no
definite idea.

"He is brutish and brutal and bad!" she muttered aloud at the memory of
Lapierre's battered face, and immediately fell to comparing the two men.

Each seemed exactly what the other was not. Lapierre was handsome,
debonair, easy of speech, and graceful of movement; deferential,
earnest, at times even pensive, and the possessor of ideals; generous
and accommodating to a fault, if a trifle cynical; maligned, hated,
d