“Sure I know,” she said.  “Ev’rybody know.  If the police catch him he say he not mak’ all this trouble.  He say you mak’ him do it all.  Gordon Strange tell him say that.”

A great light broke on Ambrose.  “Of course!” he said.

“Goo’-by, Angleysman!” breathed Nesis.  “I come to-morrow night.”

CHAPTER XXIX.

NESIS.

After this, Ambrose’s dreary imprisonment took on a new color.  True, the hours next day threatened to drag more slowly than ever, but with the hope that it might be the last day he could bear it philosophically.

Hour after hour he paced his floor on springs.  “Tomorrow the free sky over my head!” he told himself.  “I’ll be doing something again!”

He watched the teepees with an added interest, wondering if any of the women’s figures he saw might be hers.  The most he could distinguish at the distance was the difference between fat and slender.

In the middle of the morning he saw Watusk ride forth, accompanied by four men that he guessed were the councilors.  Watusk now had a military aspect.

On his head he wore a pith helmet, and across the frock coat a broad red sash like a field marshal’s.  He and his henchmen climbed the trail leading back to Enterprise.

Later, Ambrose saw a party of women leave camp, carrying birch-bark receptacles that looked like school-book satchels.  They commenced to pick berries on the hillside.  Ambrose wondered if his little friend were among them.

They gradually circled the hill and approached his shack.  As they drew near he finally recognized Nesis in one who occasionally straightened her back and glanced toward his window.  She was slenderer than the others.

The shack stood on a little terrace of clean grass.  Above it and below stretched the rough hillside, covered with scrubby bushes and weeds.  It was in this rough ground that the women were gathering wild cranberries.

Coming to the edge of the grass, they paused with full satchels, talking idly, nibbling the fruit and casting inquisitive glances toward Ambrose’s prison.

There were eight of them, and Nesis stood out from the lot like a star.  The four men playing poker in the grass at one side paid no attention to them.

Nesis with a sly smile whispered in her neighbor’s ear.  The other girl grinned and nodded, the word was passed around, and they all came forward a little way in the grass with a timid air.

Their inquisitive eyes sought to pierce the obscurity of the shack.  Ambrose, not yet knowing what was expected of him, kept in the background.

The fat girl, prompted and nudged by Nesis, suddenly squalled something in Kakisa, which convulsed them all.  Ambrose had no difficulty in recognizing it as a derisive, flirtatious challenge.

Not to be outdone, he came to the window and answered in kind.  They could not contain their laughter at the sound of the comical English syllables.