ld.

"See!" he said dramatically.

Over the bier of piled skins which held the wrapped and smoke-dried
figure of the dead chief there danced upon the darkness, eerie in
pale-green living fire, the ghost of the crested and sweeping head-dress
that he had worn in life.

There was never a word among them, but, with one accord, after one
awe-struck look at the ghostly thing, they fled the lodge in a mass.

For several moments Ridgar stood in the darkness as those outside peered
fearfully in, and, when the last moccasin had slipped silently away,
he reached up and took down the fearsome thing, folding it beside the
chief.

"We were wise together, old friend," he said sadly; "would I had your
knowledge and your power."

Outside the word was spreading wildly.

"The spirit of Negansahima rests not in the lodge! The medicine men have
not dreamed true! Silence in the camp while They who Dream repair to the
forest fastnesses and seek true wisdom!"

And while the sachems and the headmen, the beaters of the tom-toms, and
those who tended the Sacred fires of the Dreamers formed into procession
and slowly filed out into the forest, Edmonton Ridgar drew a long breath
of relief. Maren had postponed the sure culmination of the tests by her
clever feat, he had postponed it a little longer by his own. Full well
he knew that the girl could not go on forever after the manner of her
beginning. She knew the hatchet, but would she know the spear, the
arrow, and the Test of the Flaming Ring? Sooner or later she would fail,
and then would come the last orgy of the rites of a Skin for a Skin. He
thought of the whimsical fate which so oddly gave the "Pro pelle cutem"
of the H. B. C. to this unknown tribe of the North, and flayed one with
the other.

This night was the last wherein there lay one chance of help for the two
men and this woman who had so strangely followed from the post, and he
lay in the darkness of the death-lodge watching the hushing of the camp,
the loosing of the captives, the carrying of his factor, a limp
figure, to the lodge of captives on the edge, the leading thither of De
Courtenay and Maren.

"Fool woman!" he said in his heart; "sweet, brave, loving fool with the
woman's heart and the man's simple courage!"

CHAPTER XXIV THE STONE TO THE FOOT OF LOVE

Long Ridgar lay in the darkness listening to the hushed sounds that came
from lodge and dying fire--vague, awed sounds, that presently died
into silence as