Dorothy was congratulating herself upon her success, and was in the act of heaving a sigh of relief, when suddenly the rifle, which for the moment she held loosely in her right hand, was snatched from her grasp.  At the same moment an arm was thrust round her throat, and she was thrown roughly on the snow.

CHAPTER XV

CHECKMATED

For a minute or two Dorothy struggled to free herself from her burly captor, but it was the struggle of the gazelle with the tiger, and the tiger prevailed.  He laughed brutally, and put his knee upon her chest.

Even then she managed to slide her hand down to her side, where, after the manner of most people in that land, she carried a sheath-knife.  This she succeeded in drawing, but the half-breed saw the gleam of the steel and caught her wrist with his vice-like fingers.

“Ho, Leon!” he yelled; “coom quick, and bring ze rope!”

It was a wonderful change that had come over the cross-eyed one.  A few minutes before and he had been an abject coward; now he was the blustering bully and villain, with his worst passions roused, and ready to take any risks to gratify his thirst for revenge.

As for Dorothy, she saw the futility of struggling, and lay still.  What could have happened to her father and Jacques that they did not come up?  Surely they must be near at hand.  Was God going to allow these men, whose lives she and her father had spared, to prevail?  She did not doubt that they meant to put her cruelly to death.  She breathed a prayer for Divine aid, and had a strange presentiment that she was to be helped in some mysterious way.

In a minute or two Leon was also upon the roof.  In his hand he held some strips of undressed buck-skin and a jack-knife.  He seemed to have forgotten all about his late peril in the paramount question of how they were to revenge themselves upon the girl who a short time before had outwitted them.  The cross-eyed one hated her because she had rapped him over the knuckles and given him a bad five minutes when she had possession of the gun.  Leon was furious because she had brought about his introduction to Bruin so cleverly, and given him beyond doubt the worst ten minutes he ever had in his life.  Like most gentlemen of their stamp, they quite lost sight of the fact that they themselves had been the aggressors, and that, had it not been for the girl’s goodness of heart, they would in all probability have both been killed.

Perhaps the strangest feature of the situation to Dorothy was that Leon did not seem to resent his worthy mate’s late secession from the path of loyalty, or, to put it more plainly, his cold-bloodedness in laying him the odds in favour of the bear.  Probably they knew each other so well and were so accustomed to be kicked when down that Leon took the affair as a matter of course.  Dorothy rightly concluded, however, that this seeming indifference was merely the outcome of the cunning half-breed nature, which never forgot an insult and never repaid it until the handle end of the whip was assured.