She lay awake, staring up at the blue of the sky and waiting for Canim to sink into the first deep sleep.  When this came about, she wormed slowly and carefully away, tucked the robe around him, and stood up.  At her second step, Bash growled savagely.  She whispered persuasively to him and glanced at the man.  Canim was snoring profoundly.  Then she turned, and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail.

Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed.  Bored by the duties put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosey cabin on the edge of the diggings.  Here, aided and abetted by her friend and companion, Myrtle Giddings, she played at living close to the soil, and cultivated the primitive with refined abandon.

She strove to get away from the generations of culture and parlor selection, and sought the earth-grip her ancestors had forfeited.  Likewise she induced mental states which she fondly believed to approximate those of the stone-folk, and just now, as she put up her hair for the pillow, she was indulging her fancy with a palaeolithic wooing.  The details consisted principally of cave-dwellings and cracked marrow-bones, intersprinkled with fierce carnivora, hairy mammoths, and combats with rude flaked knives of flint; but the sensations were delicious.  And as Evelyn Van Wyck fled through the sombre forest aisles before the too arduous advances of her slant-browed, skin-clad wooer, the door of the cabin opened, without the courtesy of a knock, and a skin-clad woman, savage and primitive, came in.

“Mercy!”

With a leap that would have done credit to a cave-woman, Miss Giddings landed in safety behind the table.  But Mrs. Van Wyck held her ground.  She noticed that the intruder was laboring under a strong excitement, and cast a swift glance backward to assure herself that the way was clear to the bunk, where the big Colt’s revolver lay beneath a pillow.

“Greeting, O Woman of the Wondrous Hair,” said Li Wan.

But she said it in her own tongue, the tongue spoken in but a little corner of the earth, and the women did not understand.

“Shall I go for help?” Miss Giddings quavered.

“The poor creature is harmless, I think,” Mrs. Van Wyck replied.  “And just look at her skin-clothes, ragged and trail-worn and all that.  They are certainly unique.  I shall buy them for my collection.  Get my sack, Myrtle, please, and set up the scales.”

Li Wan followed the shaping of the lips, but the words were unintelligible, and then, and for the first time, she realized, in a moment of suspense and indecision, that there was no medium of communication between them.

And at the passion of her dumbness she cried out, with arms stretched wide apart, “O Woman, thou art sister of mine!”

The tears coursed down her cheeks as she yearned toward them, and the break in her voice carried the sorrow she could not utter.  But Miss Giddings was trembling, and even Mrs. Van Wyck was disturbed.