ith sleep when he took her in his arms
and kissed her, but she was deliciously alive, and glad, and happy. In one
hand she had brought a brush and in the other a comb.

"You slept like a log," he cried happily. "It can't be that you had very
bad dreams, little wife?"

"I had a beautiful dream, John," she laughed softly, and the colour flooded
up into her face.

She unplaited the thick silken strands of her braid and began brushing her
hair in the firelight, while Aldous sliced the bacon. Some of the slices
were thick, and some were thin, for he could not keep his eyes from her as
she stood there like a goddess, buried almost to her knees in that wondrous
mantle. He found himself whistling with a very light heart as she braided
her hair, and afterward plunged her face in a bath of cold water he had
brought from the lake. From that bath she emerged like a glowing Naiad.
Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks were pink and her lips full and red. Damp
little tendrils of hair clung adorably about her face and neck. For another
full minute Aldous paused in his labours, and he wondered if MacDonald was
watching them from the clump of timber. The bacon was sputtering when
Joanne ran to it and rescued it from burning.

Dawn followed quickly after that first break of day in the east, but not
until one could see a full rifle-shot away did MacDonald return to the
camp. Breakfast was waiting, and as soon as he had finished the old hunter
went after the horses. It was five o'clock, and bars of the sun were
shooting over the tops of the mountains when once more they were in the
saddle and on their way.

Most of this day Aldous headed the outfit up the valley. On the pretext of
searching for game MacDonald rode so far in advance that only twice during
the forenoon was he in sight. When they stopped to camp for the night his
horse was almost exhausted, and MacDonald himself showed signs of
tremendous physical effort. Aldous could not question him before Joanne. He
waited. And MacDonald was strangely silent.

The proof of MacDonald's prediction concerning Joanne was in evidence this
second night. Every bone in her body ached, and she was so tired that she
made no objection to going to her bed as soon as it was dark.

"It always happens like this," consoled old Donald, as she bade him
good-night. "To-morrow you'll begin gettin' broke in, an' the next day you
won't have any lameness at all."

She limped to the tepee with John's arm snugly a