ainter as the silence absorbed them.

She sat thus till the dawn came. Once or twice she started up to give
the alarm, but fell back. Under the tumult of her thoughts a
conviction lay that Lucy must follow her own wild way. In the welter
of confused emotion it was all that was clear. It may have come from
that sense of Lucy's detachment, that consciousness of cords and
feelers stretching out to a new life which commanded and held closer
than the old had ever done. All she knew was that Lucy was obeying
some instinct that was law to her, that was true for her to obey. If
they caught her and brought her back it would twist her life into a
broken form. Was it love? Was that what had drawn her over all
obstacles, away from the established joys and comforts, drawn her like
a magnet to such a desperate course? With wide eyes the girl saw the
whiteness of the dawn, and sat gripped in her resolution of silence,
fearful at the thought of what that mighty force must be.

CHAPTER V

The cross, drowsy bustle of the camp's uprising was suddenly broken by
a piercing cry. It came from Bella, who, standing by the mess chest,
was revealed to her astonished companions with a buffalo skull in her
hands, uttering as dolorous sounds as ever were emitted by that animal
in the agony of its death throes. Her words were unintelligible, but
on taking the skull from her the cause of her disturbance was made
known. Upon the frontal bone were a few words scrawled in
pencil--Lucy's farewell.

It came upon them like a thunderbolt, and they took it in different
ways--amazed silence, curses, angry questionings. The skull passed
from hand to hand till Courant dropped it and kicked it to one side
where Leff went after it, lifted it by the horns and stood spelling out
the words with a grin. The children, at first rejoicing in the new
excitement, soon recognized the note of dole, lifted up their voices
and filled the air with cries for Lucy upon whom, in times at
tribulation, they had come to look. Glen broke into savage anger,
called down curses on his sister-in-law, applying to her certain terms
of a scriptural simplicity till the doctor asked him to go afield and
vent his passion in the seclusion of the sage. Bella, sunk in heavy,
uncorseted despair upon the mess chest, gripped her children to her
knees as though an army of ravishers menaced the house of McMurdo. Her
words flowed with her tears, both together in a choked and b