The woman made only an inarticulate sound of welcome and motioned Hugh to come in. Like all Indians she preferred to converse through grunts and signs rather than by means of such English as she had at her command. When Hugh had entered she made no further comment, merely pointed silently at a bunk in the corner.

There, half propped up amid a mass of torn and dirty blankets, lay Half-Breed Jake. He did not move or speak when Hugh came near, but his little pale eyes turned quickly and his heavy black brows knitted in a scowl. The boy stood looking from one to another, puzzled, not yet knowing the meaning of that signal flying above the roof. At last the Indian woman, seeing his bewilderment, condescended to explain.

“I think—dying,” she remarked briefly in her thick English.

Jake’s pale eyes flickered at the words, but still he did not speak. Hugh went closer to look at him and saw that his hands and feet were clumsily wound with rags and that the dirty bandage had slipped down from one wrist, showing the angry discoloration of flesh that had been frozen. He asked Laughing Mary many questions, but received no answers but shakings of the head.

Finally he unbuckled his revolver, took off his cap and mackinaw and turned his attention to doing what he could for the helpless man. He had a feeling of intense repulsion when first he touched him, but none the less he bathed the swollen hands and feet and rebandaged them. He had a certain knack in such matters, inherited from his father and increased by such training as he had got in helping him. He set the filthy mass of rags in order to make some semblance of a bed; he built up the fire and showed the woman how to make civilized broth from the abundant deer’s meat in the storeroom.

As she stood stirring the pot he made another attempt to question her, trying again and again to get some explanation of how affairs had come to such a pass. But Laughing Mary merely jerked her head toward the bunk and said:

“Old—live hard—die.”

Thus she summed up what was, to her, the most ordinary thing in life.

It was the second time that he had tended a sick person in that house, so that Hugh already knew the full resources of the Jasper Peak cabin. In John Edmonds’ behalf he had worked feverishly, feeling nervous, excited, starting at every sound from his patient, wondering and puzzled as to what to do next. Now he felt himself entirely calm, at no loss what to do even though the state of this man was far more desperate than the other’s. He realized how much even a small amount of experience can do and how immeasurably older he had grown even in the month that had passed since he had been in this same place.

He came and went steadily until at last he had done all he could, then he sat down by the fire to wait, and to watch for results. Laughing Mary sat on her heels on the floor opposite him, nodding with drowsiness while both of them were watched unwaveringly, as the long hours passed, by the pale eyes of that helpless figure in the bunk, the broken, ruined Pirate of Jasper Peak.

And Laughing Mary, since no one pressed her for her story, or disturbed her dim, wandering mind by questions, finally began to speak. She startled Hugh first by rising suddenly, fetching something from the corner and flinging it upon his knee.

“Should be yours—make all the trouble,” she said brokenly.

Hugh, in wonder, held it up to the firelight. It was the brown bear’s skin!

He had learned by now that it was better to say nothing and so sat silent, without question or comment for a long time. He was rewarded by her telling him the whole truth at last in abrupt, queerly-spoken sentences, uttered at long intervals, often after an hour had gone by without a word. Little by little he was able to piece together all the facts that had puzzled him so long and to learn the truth about that adventure in which he had so unexpectedly become involved.

As he listened he knew at last that the vital figure in the whole affair was Laughing Mary. Nothing had happened as it should and every plan had gone awry, merely through the strange irresponsibility of an Indian woman’s mind. He and the Edmonds boys who did not know her well, and Oscar and Linda and Half-Breed Jake who did, had all been equally deceived. They had been drawn together by a strange web of circumstance of which she was the center. They had all of them had their own ambitions and hopes and misgivings and fears, and the rock they had all split upon was Laughing Mary.

Jake, it seemed, had long ago formed the plan of setting the two brothers adrift in the forest and of casting suspicion on John Edmonds’ memory. He had applied to the Indian Kaniska to help him, but the man had refused on account of his friendship for John. So the matter had apparently ended until one night, passing through Two Rivers, Jake had shown the Indians his furs and Laughing Mary had seen the brown bear’s skin.

Indians have still so much of the child in them that, when they see something they greatly desire, they will barter away their last property on earth to gain possession of it. With just such longing did the woman covet the bear skin. Jake’s price was her husband’s help in his scheme against the Edmonds and that was the bargain they finally made. Certainly she had not realized fully what Jake had in mind, or known, when she lent herself to do his bidding, what she had really done.

Only when the days passed and the Edmonds boys did not come back, when she discovered, moreover, that Jake was withholding the bear skin and had no intention of really giving it to her, did she begin to see in the depths of her fumbling, clouded mind, what it was she had brought about. She had gained possession of the coveted skin by threatening to tell the whole truth to Hugh, as the Edmonds’ friend, and she had learned, from the consternation of both Jake and her husband, just how ugly a deed they had accomplished between them.

She had learned more of the gravity of the matter when Hugh went through Two Rivers to seek help from Oscar Dansk; she had sat brooding by the fire day after day, more and more repentant yet never knowing what to do. She had finally come through the forest to learn for herself how matters stood and had arrived the night of the fire, just before the storm. She had been imprisoned in the cabin with Jake during those five days of fierce snowfall and she made Hugh understand, even in her halting English, that it was much the same as being within the same four walls with a madman. Her husband had returned to Two Rivers, so that she was alone with Jake and must listen hour after hour to the tumult of words that she scarcely understood. All his hopes of holding the valley, of keeping Oscar from establishing his claim, of proving that no one could successfully defy him, all this must stand or fall by whether the boys could hold the cottage and Oscar Dansk could register his claim.

At first he had been certain that they would go the moment their stores were destroyed. When he had learned from the smoke in their chimney and the steady light in their windows that they were to stay, his fury knew no bounds. Even during the storm, in which no ordinary man could walk abroad and live, he went forth every night to go close to the cottage on the hill and see if its defenders were not weakening. It had been the last stab to Laughing Mary’s dumbly repentant heart to hear that the boys were starving in the cabin opposite and it had been she who, the moment the snowfall cleared, had robbed Jake’s larder and toiled across the valley to bring them food.

Jake had already been behaving strangely that night, his rage, excitement and the long life of hardships and excesses had probably brought him near to the breaking point. He had tried to follow Laughing Mary, had floundered into a drift and had lain there in the fearful cold until she found him and dragged him home. His desperate fury at what she had done made her fear to come near him, and his terrible, helpless suffering from his frozen hands and feet made her feel that she must call for aid.

“When white man give up—wave white flag,” she said and pointed upward toward where she had raised the signal on the roof. That was the end of her story.

To all of it Jake had listened, with never a change of expression, never moving his eyes from Hugh, powerless to interrupt or to deny. Only when the Indian woman once mentioned Linda Ingmarsson’s name there was a change, a momentary wincing and a quivering of those steady eyes. Perhaps Hugh’s sensibilities had been sharpened by his recent experiences, for certainly he guessed quickly and as surely as though some one had told him that Jake must have loved Linda long ago, but that his bullying ways had failed before her courageous scorn of him.

“Old—live hard—die,” said Laughing Mary again when she came to the end. Such was her only comment on the fall of that once-feared master of Jasper Peak.

Hugh sat mus............