Jessie’s heart was singing too, but she could not forbear a friendly gibe at him.  “I suppose Win Beresford wasn’t there at all.  He hadn’t a thing to do with it, had he?”

The old cowpuncher raised a protesting hand.  “I ain’t said a word against him.  Now have I, McRae?  Nothin’ a-tall.  All I done said was that I been tellin’ everybody Tom would sure enough bring back Bully West with him.”

The girl laughed.  “You’re daffy about that boy you brought up by hand.  I’ll not argue with you.”

“They’re both good lads,” the Scotchman summed up, and passed to his second bit of news.  “Onistah and Stokimatis are in frae the Blackfoot country.  They stoppit at the store, but they’ll be alang presently.  I had a word wi’ Onistah.  We’ll wait for him here.”

“Did he say what he’d found out?” Jessie cried.

“Only that he had brought back the truth.  That’ll be the lad knockin’ at the door.”

Jessie opened, to let in Onistah and his mother.  Stokimatis and the girl gravitated into each other’s arms, as is the way with women who are fond of each other.  The Indian is stolid, but Jessie had the habit of impetuosity, of letting her feelings sweep her into demonstration.  Even the native women she loved were not proof against it.

McRae questioned Stokimatis.

Without waste of words the mother of Onistah told the story she had traveled hundreds of miles to tell.

Sleeping Dawn was not the child of her sister.  When the attack had been made on the white trappers bound for Peace River, the mother of a baby had slipped the infant under an iron kettle.  After the massacre her sister had found the wailing little atom of humanity.  The Indian woman had recently lost her own child.  She hid the babe and afterward was permitted to adopt it.  When a few months later she died of smallpox, Stokimatis had inherited the care of the little one.  She had named it Sleeping Dawn.  Later, when the famine year came, she had sold the child to Angus McRae.

That was all she knew.  But it was enough for Jessie.  She did not know who her parents had been.  She never would know, beyond the fact that they were Americans and that her mother had been a beautiful girl whose eyes laughed and danced.  But this knowledge made a tremendous difference to her.  She belonged to the ruling race and not to the metis, just as much as Win Beresford and Tom Morse did.

She tried to hide her joy, was indeed ashamed of it.  For any expression of it seemed like a reproach to Matapi-Koma and Onistah and Stokimatis, to her brother Fergus and in a sense even to her father.  None the less her blood beat fast.  What she had just found out meant that she could aspire to the civilization of the whites, that she had before her an outlook, was not to be hampered by the limitations imposed upon her by race.

The heart in the girl sang a song of sunshine dancing on grass, of meadowlarks flinging out their carefree notes of joy.  Through it like a golden thread ran for a motif little melodies that had to do with a man who had staggered into Fort Desolation out of the frozen North, sick and starved and perhaps wounded, but still indomitably captain of his soul.