hen there weren't any laws, or you had to
make 'em yourself. You've come from where the courthouse and the
police take care of you, and if a feller kills your father, sees to it
that he's caught and strung up. It's not your business to do it, and
so you've got to thinking that the man that takes it into his own hands
is a desperate kind of criminal. Out here in those days you wiped out
such scores yourself or no one did. It seems to you that Godin did a
pretty low down thing, but he thought he was doing the right thing for
him. He'd had a wrong done him and he'd got to square it. And it
didn't matter to him that the chief wasn't the man. Kill an Indian and
it's the tribe's business to settle the account. The Blackfeet killed
his father and it was Godin's business to kill a Blackfeet whenever he
got the chance. I guess when he saw the chief riding out to meet him
what he felt most was, that it was the best chance he'd ever get."

The faces turned toward Courant--a white man like themselves! So deep
was their disapproving astonishment that nobody could say anything.
For a space they could only stare at him as though he, too, were
suddenly dropping veils that had hidden unsuspected, baleful depths.

Then argument broke out and the clamor of voices was loud on the night.
Courant bore the brunt of the attack, Zavier's ideas being scanty, his
mode of procedure a persistent, reiteration of his original
proposition. Interruptions were furnished in a sudden, cracked laugh
from Daddy John, and phrases of dissent or approval from Glen and Bella
stretching their ears from the front of the tent. Only Lucy said
nothing, her head wrapped in a shawl, her face down-drooped and pale.

Late that night Susan was waked by whispering sounds which wound
stealthily through her sleep feeling for her consciousness. At first
she lay with her eyes shut, breathing softly, till the sounds
percolated through the stupor of her fatigue and she woke,
disentangling them from dreams. She threw back her blankets and sat
alert thinking of Indians.

The moon was full, silver tides lapping in below the tent's rim. She
stole to the flap listening, then drew it softly open. Her tent had
been pitched beneath a group of trees which made a splash of shadow
broken with mottlings of moonlight. In the depths of this shadow she
discerned two figures, the white flecks and slivers sliding along the
dark oblong of their shapes as they strayed with loi