he rubbed his hand over the deer-flap, and waited.  Slowly it was drawn back, and Oachi came out.  He had not seen her since the night he had driven her from him, and he had planned to say things in this last moment which he might have said then.  But words stumbled on his lips.  Oachi was changed.  She seemed taller.  Her beautiful eyes looked at him clearly and proudly.  For the first time she was to him Oachi, the “Sun Child,” a princess of the First People—­the daughter of a Cree chief.  He held out his hand, and the hand which Oachi gave to him was cold and lifeless.  She smiled when he told her that he had come to say good-bye, and when she spoke to him her voice was as clear as the stream singing through the canon.  His own voice trembled.  In spite of his mightiest effort a tightening fist seemed choking him.

“I am coming back—­some day,” he managed.

Oachi smiled, with the glory of the morning sun in her eyes and hair.  She turned, still smiling, and pointed far to the west.

“And some day—­the Valley of Silent Men will awaken,” she said, and reentered her father’s tepee.

Out of the camp staggered Roscoe Cummins behind his Indian guide, a blinding heat in his eyes.  Once or twice a gulping sob rose in his throat, and he clutched hard at his heart to beat himself into submission to the great law of life as it had been made for him.

An hour later the two came to a stream where there was a canoe.  Because of rapids and the fierceness of the spring floods, portages were many, and progress slow during the whole of that day.  They had made twenty miles when the sun began sinking in the west, and they struck camp.  After their supper of meat the Cree rolled himself in his blanket and slept.  But for long hours Roscoe sat beside their fire.  Night dropped about him, a splendid night filled with sweet breaths and stars and a new moon, and with strange sounds which came to him now in a language which he was beginning to understand.  From far away there floated faintly to his ears the lonely cry of a wolf, and it no longer made him shudder, but filled him with the mysterious longing of the cry itself.  It was the mate-song of the beast of prey, sending up its message to the stars—­crying out to all the wilderness for a response to its loneliness.  Night birds twittered about him.  A loon laughed in its mocking joy.  An owl hooted down at him from the black top of a tall spruce.  From out of starvation and death the wilderness had awakened.  Its sounds spoke to him still of grief, of the suffering that would never know end; and yet there trembled in them a note of happiness and of content.  Beside the campfire it came to him that in this world he had discovered two things—­a suffering that he had never known, and a peace he had never known.  And Oachi stood for them both.  He thought of her until drowsiness drew a pale film over his eyes.  The birch crackled more and more faintly in the fire and sounds died away.  The stillness of sleep fell