During the afternoon he passed out of the scrub into a rougher country.  His progress was slower, but more comfortable, for at times he found himself protected from the wind.  A gloom darker and more sombre than that of the storm was falling about him when he came to what appeared to be the end of the Barren.  The earth dropped away from under his feet, and far below him, in a ravine shut out from wind and storm, he saw the black tops of thick spruce.  What life was left in him leaped joyously, and he began to scramble downward.  His eyes were no longer fit to judge distance or chance, and he slipped.  He slipped a dozen times in the first five minutes, and then there came the time when he did not make a recovery, but plunged down the side of the mountain like a rock.  He stopped with a terrific jar, and for the first time during the fall he wanted to cry out with pain.  But the voice that he heard did not come from his own lips.  It was another voice—­and then two, three, many of them.  His dazed eyes caught glimpses of dark objects floundering in the deep snow about him, and just beyond these objects were four or five tall mounds of snow, like tents, arranged in a circle.  A number of times that winter Roscoe had seen mounds of snow like these, and he knew what they meant.  He had fallen into an Indian village.  He tried to call out the words of greeting that Rameses had taught him, but he had no tongue.  Then the floundering figures caught him up, and he was carried to the circle of snow-mounds.  The last that he knew was that warmth was entering his lungs, and that once again there came to him the low, sweet music of a Cree girl’s voice.

It was a face that he first saw after that, a face that seemed to come to him slowly from out of night, approaching nearer and nearer until he knew that it was a girl’s face, with great, dark, shining eyes whose lustre suffused him with warmth and a strange happiness.  It was a face of wonderful beauty, he thought—­of a wild sort of beauty, yet with something so gentle in the shining eyes that he sighed restfully.  In these first moments of his returning consciousness the whimsical thought came to him that he was dying, and the face was a part of a pleasant dream.  If that were not so he had fallen at last among friends.  His eyes opened wider, he moved, and the face drew back.  Movement stimulated returning life, and reason rehabilitated itself in great bounds.  In a dozen flashes he went over all that had happened up to the point where he had fallen down the mountain and into the Cree camp.  Straight above him he saw a funnel-like peak through which there drifted a blue film of smoke.  He was in a wigwam.  It was warm and exceedingly comfortable.  Wondering if he was hurt, he moved.  The movement drew a sharp exclamation of pain from him.  It was the first real sound he had made, and in an instant the face was over him again.  He saw it plainly this time, with its dark eyes and oval cheeks framed between two great braids of black hair.  A hand touched his brow cool and gentle, and a sweet voice soothed him in half a dozen musical words.  The girl was a Cree.