Angus McRae strode forward, eyes blazing.  He had married a Cree woman, had paid for her to her father seven ponies, a yard of tobacco, and a bottle of whiskey.  His own two-fisted sons were metis.  The Indian in them showed more plainly than the Celt.  Their father accepted the fact without resentment.  But there was in his heart a queer feeling about the little lass he had adopted.  Her light, springing step, the lift of the throat and the fearlessness of the eye, the instinct in her for cleanliness of mind and body, carried him back forty years to the land of heather, to a memory of the laird’s daughter whom he had worshiped with the hopeless adoration of a red-headed gillie.  It had been the one romance of his life, and somehow it had reincarnated itself in his love for the half-breed girl.  To him it seemed a contradiction of nature that Jessie should be related to the flat-footed squaws who were slaves to their lords.  He could not reconcile his heart to the knowledge that she was of mixed blood.  She was too fine, too dainty, of too free and imperious a spirit.

“Your horses are up the hill, Mr. West,” he said pointedly.

It is doubtful whether the trader heard.  He could not keep his desirous eyes from the girl.

“Is she a half or a quarter-breed?” he asked McRae.

“That’ll be her business and mine, sir.  Will you please tak the road?” The hunter spoke quietly, restraining himself from an outbreak.  But his voice carried an edge.

“By Gad, she’s some clipper,” West said, aloud to himself, just as though the girl had not been present.

“Will you leave my daughter oot o’ your talk, man?” warned the Scotchman.

“What’s ailin’ you?” West’s sulky, insolent eyes turned on the buffalo-hunter.  “A nitchie’s a nitchie.  Me, I talk straight.  But I aim to be reasonable too.  I don’t like a woman less because she’s got the devil in her.  Bully West knows how to tame ’em so they’ll eat outa his hand.  I’ve took a fancy to yore girl.  Tha’s right, McRae.”

“You may go to the tent, Jessie,” the girl’s father told her.  He was holding his temper in leash with difficulty.

“Wait a mo.”  The big trader held out his arm to bar the way.  “Don’t push on yore reins, McRae.  I’m makin’ you a proposition.  Me, I’m lookin’ for a wife, an’ this here breed girl of yours suits me.  Give her to me an’ I’ll call the whole thing square.  Couldn’t say fairer than that, could I?”

The rugged hunter looked at the big malformed border ruffian with repulsion.  “Man, you gi’e me a scunner,” he said.  “Have done wi’ this foolishness an’ be gone.  The lass is no’ for you or the like o’ you.”

“Hell’s hinges, you ain’t standin’ there tellin’ me that a Cree breed is too good for Bully West, are you?” roared the big whiskey-runner.

“A hundred times too good for you.  I’d rather see the lass dead in her coffin than have her life ruined by you,” McRae answered in dead earnest.