Muckluck was standing still, looking at the Boy with none of the kindness a woman ought to show to one who had just befriended her sex.

“Did you see that?”

She nodded.  “See that any day.”

The Boy stopped, appalled at the thought of woman in a perpetual state of siege.

“Brute! hound!” he flung out towards Joe’s ighloo.

“No,” says Muckluck firmly; “Joe all right.”

“You say that, after what’s happened this morning?” Muckluck declined to take the verdict back.  “Did you see him strike her?”

“No hurt.”

“Oh, didn’t it?  He threw her down, as hard as he could, on the ice.”

“She get up again.”

He despised Muckluck in that moment.

“You weren’t sorry to see another girl treated so?”

She smiled.

“What if it had been you?”

“Oh, he not do that to me.”

“Why not?  You can’t tell.”

“Oh, yes.”  She spoke with unruffled serenity.

“It will very likely be you the next time.”  The Boy took a brutal pleasure in presenting the hideous probability.

“No,” she returned unmoved.  “Joe savvy I no marry Pymeut.”

The Boy stared, mystified by the lack of sequence.  “Poor Anna doesn’t want to marry that Pymeut.”

Muckluck nodded.

The Boy gave her up.  Perversity was not confined to the civilized of her sex.  He walked on to find the Colonel.  Muckluck followed, but the Boy wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t look at her.

“You like my Holy Cross clo’es?” she inquired.  “Me—­I look like your kind of girls now, huh?” No answer, but she kept up with him.  “See?” She held up proudly a medallion, or coin of some sort, hung on a narrow strip of raw-hide.

He meant not to look at it at all, and he jerked his head away after the merest glance that showed him the ornament was tarnished silver, a little bigger than an American dollar, and bore no device familiar to his eyes.  He quickened his pace, and walked on with face averted.  The Colonel appeared just below the Kachime.

“Well, aren’t you ever comin’?” he called out.

“I’ve been ready this half-hour—­hangin’ about waitin’ for you.  That devil Joe,” he went on, lowering his voice as he came up and speaking hurriedly, “has been trying to drag Yagorsha’s girl into his ighloo.  They’ve just had a fight out yonder on the ice.  I got her away, but not before he’d thrown her down and given her a bloody face.  We ought to tell old Yagorsha, hey?”

Muckluck chuckled.  The Boy turned on her angrily, and saw her staring back at Joe’s ighloo.  There, sauntering calmly past the abhorred trap, was the story-teller’s daughter.  Past it?  No.  She actually halted and busied herself with her legging thong.

“That girl must be an imbecile!” Or was it the apparition of her father, up at the Kachime entrance, that inspired such temerity?