“Did he send you to smash our whiskey-barrels?”

“Angus McRae never hides behind a woman,” she said, her chin up.

That was true.  Morse knew it, though he had never met McRae.  His reputation had gone all over the Northland as a fearless fighting man honest as daylight and stern as the Day of Judgment.  If this girl was a daughter of the old Scot, not even a whiskey-trader could safely lay hands on her.  For back of Angus was a group of buffalo-hunters related to him by blood over whom he held half-patriarchal sway.

“Why did you do it?” Morse demanded.

The question struck a spark of spirit from her.  “Because you’re ruining my people—­destroying them with your fire-water.”

He was taken wholly by surprise.  “Do you mean you destroyed our property for that reason?”

She nodded, sullenly.

“But we don’t trade with the Crees,” he persisted.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was of the Blackfoot tribe and not of the Crees, but again for reasons of policy she was less than candid.  Till she was safely out of the woods, it was better this man should not know she was only an adopted daughter of Angus McRae.  She offered another reason, and with a flare of passion which he was to learn as a characteristic of her.

“You make trouble for my brother Fergus.  He shot Akokotos (Many Horses) in the leg when the fire-water burned in him.  He was stabbed by a Piegan brave who did not know what he was doing.  Fergus is good.  He minds his own business.  But you steal away his brains.  Then he runs wild.  It was you, not Fergus, that shot Akokotos.  The Great Spirit knows you whiskey-traders, and not my poor people who destroy each other, are the real murderers.”

Her logic was feminine and personal, from his viewpoint wholly unfair.  Moreover, one of her charges did not happen to be literally true.

“We never sold whiskey to your brother—­not our outfit.  It was Jackson’s, maybe.  Anyhow, nobody made him buy it.  He was free to take it or leave it.”

“A wolf doesn’t have to eat the poisoned meat in a trap, but it eats and dies,” she retorted swiftly and bitterly.

Adroitly she had put him on the defensive.  Her words had the sting of barbed darts.

“We’re not talking of wolves.”

“No, but of Blackfeet and Bloods and Sarcees,” she burst out, again with that flare of feminine ferocity so out of character in an Indian woman or the daughter of one.  “D’you think I don’t know how you Americans talk?  A good Indian is a dead Indian.  No wonder we hate you all.  No wonder the tribes fight you to the death.”

He had no answer for this.  It was true.  He had been brought up in a land of Indian wars and he had accepted without question the common view that the Sioux, the Crows, and the Cheyennes, with all their blood brothers, were menaces to civilization.  The case for the natives he had never studied.  How great a part broken pledges and callous injustice had done to drive the tribes to the war-path he did not know.  Few of the actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs of the red men.