Sam removed his pipe, blew a cloud straight before him, and replaced it.

Dick reddened slowly, got up with an incidental remark about damn fools, and began to spread his blankets beneath the lean-to shelter.  He muttered to himself, angered at the dead opposition of circumstance which he could not push aside.  Suddenly he seized the girl again by the arm.

“Why you come?” he demanded in Ojibway.  “Where you get your blankets?  Where you get your grub?  How you make the Long Trail?  What you do when we go far and fast?  What we do with you now?” Then meeting nothing but the stolidity with which the Indian always conceals pain, he flung her aside.  “Stupid owl!” he growled.

He sat on the ground and began to take off his moccasins with ostentatious deliberation, abruptly indifferent to it all.  Slowly he prepared for the night, yawning often, looking at the sky, arranging the fire, emphasising and delaying each of his movements as though to prove to himself that he acknowledged only the habitual.  At last he turned in, his shoulder thrust aggressively toward the two motionless figures by the fire.

It was by now close to midnight.  The big moon had long since slipped from behind the solitary wolf on the hill.  Yet Sam Bolton made no move toward his blankets, and the girl did not stir from the downcast attitude into which she had first fallen.  The old woodsman looked at the situation with steady eyes.  He realised to the full what Dick Herron’s thoughtlessness had brought on them.  A woman, even a savage woman inured to the wilderness, was a hindrance.  She could not travel as fast nor as far; she could not bear the same burdens, endure the same hardship; she would consume her share of the provisions.  And before this expedition into the Silent Places should be finished the journeying might require the speed of a course after quarry, the packing would come finally to the men’s back, the winter would have to be met in the open, and the North, lavish during these summer months, sold her sustenance dear when the snows fell.  The time might come when these men would have to arm for the struggle.  Cruelty, harshness, relentlessness, selfishness, singleness of purpose, hardness of heart they would have perforce to assume.  And when they stripped for such a struggle, Sam Bolton knew that among other things this woman would have to go.  If the need arose, she would have to die; for this quest was greater than the life of any woman or any man.  Would it not be better to send her back through certain hardship now, rather than carry her on to a possible death in the White Silence.  For the North as yet but skirmished.  Her true power lay behind the snows and the ice.

The girl stood in the same attitude.  Sam Bolton spoke to her.

“May-may-gwan.”

“Little Father.”

“Why have you followed us?”

The girl did not reply.

“Sister,” said the woodsman, kindly, “I am an old man.  You have called me Father.  Why have you followed us?”