The girl laughed, but still she was uneasy in her mind.  She mechanically watched the tidy half-breed woman and the elderly Scotchwoman who had been her mother’s servant in the old Ontario days, as the two silently went on, at the far end of the long room, with the folding and putting away of linen.  Her eyes wandered with an unwonted wistfulness over the picturesque brown slabs of pine that constituted the walls, the heavy, rudely-dressed tie-beams of the roof over which were stacked various trim bundles of dried herbs, roots and furs, and from which hung substantial hams of bacon and bear’s meat.  As she looked over the heads of the little group on the broad benches round the fire, she saw the firelight and lamplight glint cheerfully on the old-fashioned muskets and flintlock pistols that decorated the walls—­relics of the old romantic days when the two companies of French and English adventurers traded into Hudson’s Bay.

She had an idea.  She would ask the sergeant of Mounted Police in charge of the detachment of four men, whose little post was within half-a-mile of the homestead, what he thought of the situation, and he would have to tell her.  Sergeant Pasmore was one of those men of few words who somehow seemed to know everything.  A man of rare courage she knew him to be, for had he not gained his promotion by capturing the dangerous renegade Indian, Thunder-child, single-handed?  She knew that Thunderchild had lately broken prison, and was somewhere in the neighbourhood waiting to have his revenge upon the sergeant.  Sergeant Pasmore was a man both feared and respected by all with whom he came in contact.  He was the embodiment of the law; he carried it, in fact, on the horn of his saddle in the shape of his Winchester rifle; a man who was supposed to be utterly devoid of sentiment, but who had been known to perform more than one kindly action.  Her father liked him, and many a time he had spent a long evening by the rancher’s great fireside.

As she thought of these things, she was suddenly startled by three firm knocks at the door.  Jacques rose from his seat, and opening it a few inches, looked out into the clear moonlight.  He paused a moment, then asked—­

“Who are you, and what you want?”

“How!” [Footnote:  Form of salutation in common use among the Indians and half-breeds.] responded a strange-voice.

“Aha!  Child-of-Light!” exclaimed Jacques.

And into the room strode a splendid specimen of a red man in all the glory of war paint and feathers.

CHAPTER II

TIDINGS OF ILL

   “Mislike me not for my complexion,
   The shadow’d livery of the burnished sun.”
      Merchant of Venice.

“How!  How!” said the rancher, looking up at the tall Indian.  “You are welcome to my fireside, Child-of-Light.  Sit down.”

He rose and gave him his hand.  With a simple dignity the fine-looking savage returned his salutation.