d looking into eyes shining half out of
tears at him. But he did not finish. She drew away from him, with a
lingering of her finger-tips on his arm, and the little heart-beat in
her throat revealed itself clearly again as on that night in his cabin.

"I have been thinking of you back there, every hour, every step," he
said, making a gesture toward the tundras over which he had come. "Then
I heard the firecrackers and saw the flag. It is almost as if I had
created you!"

A quick answer was on her lips, but she stopped it.

"And when I found you here, and you didn't fade away like a ghost, I
thought something was wrong with my head. Something must have been
wrong, I guess, or I wouldn't have done _that_. You see, it puzzled me
that a ghost should be setting off firecrackers--and I suppose that was
the first impulse I had of making sure you were real."

A voice came from the edge of the cottonwoods beyond them. It was a
clear, wild voice with a sweet trill in it. "_Maa-rie!_" it called.
"_Maa-rie!_"

"Supper," nodded the girl. "You are just in time. And then we are going
home in the twilight."

It made his heart thump, that casual way in which she spoke of his place
as home. She went ahead of him, with the sun glinting in the soft coils
of her hair, and he picked up his rifle and followed, eyes and soul
filled only with the beauty of her slim figure--a glory of life where
for a long time he had fashioned a spirit of the dead. They came into an
open, soft with grass and strewn with flowers, and in this open a man
was kneeling beside a fire no larger than his two hands, and at his
side, watching him, stood a girl with two braids of black hair rippling
down her back. It was Nawadlook who turned first and saw who it was with
Mary Standish, and from his right came an odd little screech that only
one person in the world could make, and that was Keok. She dropped the
armful of sticks she had gathered for the fire and made straight for
him, while Nawadlook, taller and less like a wild creature in the manner
of her coming, was only a moment behind. And then he was shaking hands
with Stampede, and Keok had slipped down among the flowers and was
crying. That was like Keok. She always cried when he went away, and
cried when he returned; and then, in another moment, it was Keok who was
laughing first, and Alan noticed she no longer wore her hair in braids,
as the quieter Nawadlook persisted in doing, but had it coiled about her