rescue you." He paused to let that sink in, then
continued: "Besides, you won't see a white face before spring; then
only by accident. No one in the North, outside of a few Indians, has
ever seen this cabin or knows where it stands."

She sat there, dumb, raging inwardly. For the minute she could have
killed Roaring Bill. She who had been so sure in her independence
carried, whether or no, into the heart of the wilderness at the whim of
a man who stood a self-confessed rowdy, in ill repute among his own
kind. There was a slumbering devil in Miss Hazel Weir, and it took
little to wake her temper. She looked at Bill Wagstaff, and her breast
heaved. He was responsible, and he could sit coolly talking about it.
The resentment that had smoldered against Andrew Bush and Jack Barrow
concentrated on Roaring Bill as the arch offender of them all. And
lest she yield to a savage impulse to scream at him, she got up and ran
into the bedroom, slammed the door shut behind her, and threw herself
across the bed to muffle the sound of her crying in a pillow.

After a time she lifted her head. Outside, the wind whistled gustily
around the cabin corners. In the hushed intervals she heard a steady
pad, pad, sounding sometimes close by her door, again faintly at the
far end of the room. A beam of light shone through the generous
latchstring hole in the door. Stealing softly over, she peeped through
this hole. From end to end of the big room and back again Roaring Bill
paced slowly, looking straight ahead of him with a fixed, absent stare,
his teeth closed on his nether lip. Hazel blinked wonderingly. Many
an hour in the last three months she had walked the floor like that,
biting her lip in mental agony. And then, while she was looking, Bill
abruptly extinguished the candles. In the red gleam from the hearth
she saw him go into the kitchen, closing the door softly. After that
there was no sound but the swirl of the storm brushing at her window.

CHAPTER XI

WINTER--AND A TRUCE

In line with Roaring Bill's forecast, the weather cleared for a brief
span, and then winter shut down in earnest. Successive falls of snow
overlaid the earth with a three-foot covering, loose and feathery in
the depths of the forest, piled in hard, undulating windrows in the
scattered openings. Daily the cold increased, till a half-inch layer
of frost stood on the cabin panes. The cold, intense, unremitting,
lorded it over a vast real