Dick pulled the girl roughly to the fireside, where he dropped her arm, leaving her downcast and submissive. He was angry all through with the powerless rage of the man whose attentions a woman has taken more seriously than he had intended. Suddenly he was involved more deeply than he had meant.

"Well, what do you think of that?" he cried.

"What you doing here?" asked Sam in Ojibway, although he knew what the answer would be.

She did not reply, however.

"Hell!" burst out Dick.

"Well, keep your hair on," advised Sam Bolton, with a grin. "You shouldn't be so attractive, Dicky."

The latter growled.

"Now you've got her, what you going to do with her?" pursued the older man.

"Do with her?" exploded Dick; "what in hell do you mean? I don't want her; she's none of my funeral. She's got to go back, of course."

"Oh, sure!" agreed Sam. "She's got to go back. Sure thing! It's only two days down stream, and then the Crees would have only four days' start and getting farther every minute. A mere ten days in the woods without an outfit. Too easy; especially for a woman. But of course you'll give her your outfit, Dick."

He mused, gazing into the flames, his eyes droll over this new complication introduced by his thoughtless comrade.

"Well, we can't have her with us," objected Dick, obstinately. "She'd hinder us, and bother us, and get in our way, and we'd have to feed her--we may have to starve ourselves;--and she's no damn _use_ to us. She can't go. I won't have it; I didn't bargain to lug a lot of squaws around on this trip. She came; I didn't ask her to. Let her get out of it the best way she can. She's an Injun. She can make it all right through the woods. And if she has a hard time, she _ought_ to."

"Nice mess, isn't it, Dick?" grinned the other.

"No mess about it. I haven't anything to do with such a fool trick. What did she expect to gain tagging us through the woods that way half a mile to the rear? She was just waiting 'till we got so far away from th' Crees that we couldn't send her back. I'll fool her on that, damn her!" He kicked a log back into place, sending the sparks eddying.

"I wonder if she's had anything to eat lately?" said Bolton.

"I don't care a damn whether she has or not," said Dick.

"Keep your hair on, my son," advised Sam again. "You're hot because you thought you'd got shut of th' whole affair, and now you find you haven't."

"You make me sick," commented Dick.

"Mebbe," admitted the woodsman. He fell silent, staring straight before him, emitting short puffs from his pipe. The girl stood where she had been thrust.

"I'll start her back in the morning," proffered Dick after a few moments. Then, as this elicited no remark, "We can stock her up with jerky, and there's no reason she shouldn't make it." Sam remained grimly silent. "Is there?" insisted Dick. He waited a minute for a reply. Then, as none came, "Hell!" he exclaimed, disgustedly, and turned away to sit on a log the other side of the fire with all the petulance of a child.

"Now look here, Sam," he broke out, after an interval. "We might as well get at this thing straight. We can't keep her with us, now, can we?"

Sam removed his pipe, blew a cloud straight before him, and replaced it.

Dick reddened slowly, got up with an incidental remark about damn fools, and began to spread his blankets beneath the lean-to shelter. He muttered to himself, angered at the dead opposition of circumstance which he could not push aside. Suddenly he seized the girl again by the arm.

"Why you come?" he demanded in Ojibway. "Where you get your blankets? Where you get your grub? How you make the Long Trail? What you do when we go far and fast? What we do with you now?" Then meeting nothing but the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her aside. "Stupid owl!" he growled.

He sat on the ground and began to take off his moccasins with ostentatious deliberation, abruptly indifferent to it all. Slowly he prepared for the night, yawning often, looking at the sky, arranging the fire, emphasising and delaying each of his movements as though to prove to himself that he acknowledged only the habitual. At last he turned in, his shoulder thrust aggressively toward the two motionless figures by the fire.

It was by now close to midnight. The big moon had long since slipped from behind the soli............