“You little devil!” he cried between set teeth.

He flung away any scruples he might have had and pinned fast her flying arms.  The slim, muscular body still writhed in vain contortions till he clamped it fast between knees from which not even an untamed cayuse could free itself.

She gave up struggling.  They glared at each other, panting from their exertions.  Her eyes still flamed defiance, but back of it he read fear, a horrified and paralyzing terror.  To the white traders along the border a half-breed girl was a squaw, and a squaw was property just as a horse or a dog was.

For the first time she spoke, and in English.  Her voice came bell-clear and not in the guttural of the tribes.

“Let me up!” It was an imperative, urgent, threatening.

He still held her in the vice, his face close to her flaming eyes.  “You little devil,” he said again.

“Let me up!” she repeated wildly.  “Let me up, I tell you.”

“Like blazes I will.  You’re through biting and knifing me for one night.”  He had tasted no liquor all day, but there was the note of drunkenness in his voice.

The terror in her grew.  “If you don’t let me up—­”

“You’ll do what?” he jeered.

Her furious upheaval took him by surprise.  She had unseated him and was scrambling to her feet before he had her by the shoulders.

The girl ducked her head in an effort to wrench free.  She could as easily have escaped from steel cuffs as from the grip of his brown fingers.

“You’d better let me go!” she cried.  “You don’t know who I am.”

“Nor care,” he flung back.  “You’re a nitchie, and you smashed our kegs.  That’s enough for me.”

“I’m no such thing a nitchie[1],” she denied indignantly.

[Footnote 1:  In the vernacular of the Northwest Indians were “nitchies.” (W.M.R.)]

The instinct of self-preservation was moving in her.  She had played into the hands of this man and his companions.  The traders made their own laws and set their own standards.  The value of a squaw of the Blackfeet was no more than that of the liquor she had destroyed.  It would be in character for them to keep her as a chattel captured in war.

“The daughter of a squaw-man then,” he said, and there was in his voice the contempt of the white man for the half-breed.

“I’m Jessie McRae,” she said proudly.

Among the Indians she went by her tribal name of Sleeping Dawn, but always with the whites she used the one her adopted father had given her.  It increased their respect for her.  Just now she was in desperate need of every ounce that would weigh in the scales.

“Daughter of Angus McRae?” he asked, astonished.

“Yes.”

“His woman’s a Cree?”

“His wife is,” the girl corrected.

“What you doin’ here?”

“Father’s camp is near.  He’s hunting hides.”