Van Brunt saw a head peer from behind a distant tree, and with a quick shot sent the man sprawling to the ground in a death struggle.  Michael potted a third, and Fairfax and the rest took a hand, firing at every exposure and into each clump of agitated brush.  In crossing one little swale out of cover, five of the tribesmen remained on their faces, and to the left, where the covering was sparse, a dozen men were struck.  But they took the punishment with sullen steadiness, coming on cautiously, deliberately, without haste and without lagging.

Ten minutes later, when they were quite close, all movement was suspended, the advance ceased abruptly, and the quietness that followed was portentous, threatening.  Only could be seen the green and gold of the woods, and undergrowth, shivering and trembling to the first faint puffs of the day-wind.  The wan white morning sun mottled the earth with long shadows and streaks of light.  A wounded man lifted his head and crawled painfully out of the swale, Michael following him with his rifle but forbearing to shoot.  A whistle ran along the invisible line from left to right, and a flight of arrows arched through the air.

“Get ready,” Van Brunt commanded, a new metallic note in his voice.  “Now!”

They broke cover simultaneously.  The forest heaved into sudden life.  A great yell went up, and the rifles barked back sharp defiance.  Tribesmen knew their deaths in mid-leap, and as they fell, their brothers surged over them in a roaring, irresistible wave.  In the forefront of the rush, hair flying and arms swinging free, flashing past the tree-trunks, and leaping the obstructing logs, came Thom.  Fairfax sighted on her and almost pulled trigger ere he knew her.

“The woman!  Don’t shoot!” he cried.  “See!  She is unarmed!”

The Crees never heard, nor Michael and his brother voyageur, nor Van Brunt, who was keeping one shell continuously in the air.  But Thom bore straight on, unharmed, at the heels of a skin-clad hunter who had veered in before her from the side.  Fairfax emptied his magazine into the men to right and left of her, and swung his rifle to meet the big hunter.  But the man, seeming to recognize him, swerved suddenly aside and plunged his spear into the body of Michael.  On the moment Thom had one arm passed around her husband’s neck, and twisting half about, with voice and gesture was splitting the mass of charging warriors.  A score of men hurled past on either side, and Fairfax, for a brief instant’s space, stood looking upon her and her bronze beauty, thrilling, exulting, stirred to unknown deeps, visioning strange things, dreaming, immortally dreaming.  Snatches and scraps of old-world philosophies and new-world ethics floated through his mind, and things wonderfully concrete and woefully incongruous—­hunting scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the glittering of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a fleeting shimmer of glistening test-tubes, long rows of book-lined shelves, the throb of machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment of forgotten song, faces of dear women and old chums, a lonely watercourse amid upstanding peaks, a shattered boat on a pebbly strand, quiet moonlit fields, fat vales, the smell of hay....