“You don’t get me right, Mac,” answered the smuggler, swallowing his rage.  “I know yore religious notions.  We’ll stand up before a sky pilot and have this done right.  I aim to treat this girl handsome.”

Jessie had turned away at her father’s command.  Now she turned swiftly upon the trader, eyes flashing.  “I’d rather Father would drive a knife in my heart than let me be married to a wolfer!” she cried passionately.

His eyes, untrammeled by decency, narrowed to feast on the brown immature beauty of her youth.

“Tha’ so?” he jeered.  “Well, the time’s comin’ when you’ll go down on yore pretty knees an’ beg me not to leave you.  It’ll be me ‘n’ you one o’ these days.  Make up yore mind to that.”

“Never!  Never!  I’d die first!” she exploded.

Bully West showed his broken, tobacco-stained teeth in a mirthless grin.  “We’ll see about that, dearie.”

“March, lass.  Your mother’ll be needin’ you,” McRae said sharply.

The girl looked at West, then at Morse.  From the scorn of that glance she might have been a queen and they the riffraff of the land.  She walked to the tent.  Not once did she look back.

“You’ve had your answer both from her and me.  Let that be an end o’ it,” McRae said with finality.

The trader’s anger ripped out in a crackle of obscene oaths.  They garnished the questions that he snarled.  “Wha’s the matter with me?  Why ain’t I good enough for yore half-breed litter?”

It was a spark to gunpowder.  The oaths, the insult, the whole degrading episode, combined to drive McRae out of the self-restraint he had imposed on himself.  He took one step forward.  With a wide sweep of the clenched fist he buffeted the smuggler on the ear.  Taken by surprise, West went spinning against the wheel of a cart.

The man’s head sank between his shoulders and thrust forward.  A sound that might have come from an infuriated grizzly rumbled from the hairy throat.  His hand reached for a revolver.

Morse leaped like a crouched cat.  Both hands caught at West’s arm.  The old hunter was scarcely an instant behind him.  His fingers closed on the wrist just above the weapon.

“Hands off,” he ordered Morse.  “This is no’ your quarrel.”

The youngster’s eyes met the blazing blue ones of the Scot.  His fingers loosened their hold.  He stepped back.

The two big men strained.  One fought with every ounce of power in him to twist the arm from him till the cords and sinews strained; the other to prevent this and to free the wrist.  It was a test of sheer strength.

Each labored, breathing deep, his whole energy centered on cooerdinated effort of every muscle.  They struggled in silence except for the snarling grunts of the whiskey-runner.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the wrist began to turn from McRae.  Sweat beads gathered on West’s face.  He fought furiously to hold his own.  But the arm turned inexorably.