“That is true,” conceded Sam.

“Listen, Little Father, take me with you.  I will drive the dogs, make the camp, cook the food.  Never will I complain.  If the food gets scarce, I will not ask for my share.  That I promise.”

“Much of what you say is true,” assented the woodsman, “but you forget you came to us of your free will and unwelcomed.  It would be better that you go to Missinaibie.”

“No,” replied the girl.

“If you hope to become the squaw of Jibiwanisi,” said Sam, bluntly, “you may as well give it up.”

The girl said nothing, but compressed her lips to a straight line.  After a moment she merely reiterated her original solution: 

“At Conjuror’s House I know the people.”

“I will think of it,” then concluded Sam.

Dick, however, could see no good in such an arrangement.  He did not care to discuss the matter at length, but preserved rather the attitude of a man who has shaken himself free of all the responsibility of an affair, and is mildly amused at the tribulations of another still involved in it.

“You’ll have a lot of trouble dragging a squaw all over the north,” he advised Sam, critically.  “Of course, we can’t turn her adrift here.  Wouldn’t do that to a dog.  But it strikes me it would even pay us to go out of our way to Missinaibie to get rid of her.  We could do that.”

“Well, I don’t know—­” doubted Sam.  “Of course—­”

“Oh, bring her along if you want to,” laughed Dick, “only it’s your funeral.  You’ll get into trouble, sure.  And don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

It might have been imagined by the respective attitudes of the two men that actually Sam had been responsible for the affair from the beginning.  Finally, laboriously, he decided that the girl should go.  She could be of assistance; there was small likelihood of the necessity for protracted hasty travel.

The weather was getting steadily colder.  Greasy-looking clouds drove down from the north-west.  Heavy winds swept by.  The days turned gray.  Under the shelter of trees the ground froze into hummocks, which did not thaw out.  The crisp leaves which had made the forest so noisy disintegrated into sodden silence.  A wildness was in the air, swooping down with the breeze, buffeting in the little whirlwinds and eddies, rocking back and forth in the tops of the storm-beaten trees.  Cold little waves lapped against the thin fringe of shore ice that crept day by day from the banks.  The water itself turned black.  Strange birds swirling down wind like leaves uttered weird notes of migration.  The wilderness hardened to steel.