im Jasper
Lake," pointing up the Athabasca.

"You know Jasper Lake?" asked the engineer, glancing up for the first
time.

"_Oui_," said the old woman (Belle's step-father was half French); "know
'im ver' well."

Smith looked her over as a matter of habit, for he allowed no man or
woman to get by him with the least bit of information concerning the
country through which his imaginary line lay. Then he glanced at Belle
for fully five seconds, then back to his blue print. Nobody but a
he-nun, or a man already wedded to the woods, could do that, but to the
credit of the camp it will go down that the chief was the only man in
the outfit who failed to feel her presence. As for Jaquis, the alloyed
Siwash, he carried the scar of that first meeting for six months, and
may, for aught I know, take it with him to his little swinging grave.
Even Smith remembers to this day how she looked, standing there on her
two trim ankles, that disappeared into her hand-turned sandals or faded
in the flute and fringe of her fawn skin skirt. Her full bosom rose and
fell, and you could count the beat of her wild heart in the throb of
her throat. Her cheeks showed a faint flush of red through the dark
olive,--the flush of health and youth,--her nostrils dilated, like those
of an Ontario high-jumper, as she drank life from the dewy morn, while
her eye danced with the joy of being alive. Jaquis sized and summed her
up in the one word "magnific." But in that moment, when she caught the
keen, piercing eye of the engineer, the Belle had a stroke that comes
sooner or later to all these wild creatures of the wilderness, but comes
to most people but once in a lifetime. She never forgot the gleam of
that one glance, though the Silent one was innocent enough.

It was during the days that followed, when she sat and watched him at
his work, or followed him for hours in the mountain fastnesses, that the
Belle of Athabasca lost her heart.

When he came upon a bit of wild scenery and stopped to photograph it,
the Belle stood back of him, watching his every movement, and when he
passed on she followed, keeping always out of sight.

The Belle's mother haunted him. As often as he broke camp and climbed a
little higher upstream, the brown mother moved also, and with her the
Belle.

"What does this old woman want?" asked the engineer of Jaquis one
evening when, returning to his tent, he found the fat Cree and her
daughter camping on his trail.

"She want th