Suddenly a fresh fear attacked him.  “Nesis,” he asked, “how will you explain being away overnight?  They will connect it with my escape.  What will they do to you?”

She turned her head, showing him a painful little smile.  “You not think of that before,” she murmured.  “I not care what they do by me.  You not love me.”

He strode to her and clapped a rough hand on her shoulder.  “Here, I couldn’t have them hurt you!” he cried harshly.  “You baby!  You come with me.  I’m in as bad as I can be already.  A little more or less won’t make any difference.  I’ll chance it, anyway.  You come with me!”

“Oh, my Angleysman!” she breathed, and sank a little limp heap at his feet.

Ambrose blew up the forgotten fire and made tea.  Nesis quickly revived.  Having made up his mind to take her, he put the best possible face on it.

There were to be no more reproaches.  Her pitiful anxiety not to anger him again made him wince.  Her eyes never left his face.  If he so much as frowned at an uncomfortable thought they became tragic.

“Look here, I’m not a brute!” he cried, exasperated.

Nesis looked foolish, and quickly turned her head away.

Over their tea and bannock they became almost cheerful.  Motion had made them both hungry.

Ambrose glanced at their slender store.  “We’ll never hang out to the lake at this rate,” he said laughing.

“I set rabbit snare when we sleep,” Nesis said quickly.  “I catch fish.  I shoot wild duck.”

“Shall we leave one of the canoes?” asked Ambrose.

She shook her head vigorously.  “Each tak’ one.  Maybe one bus’ in rapids.  You sleep in your canoe now.  I pull you.”

Ambrose shook his head.  “No sleep until to-night,” he said.

Ambrose was lighting his pipe and Nesis was gathering up the things when suddenly Job sprang up, barking furiously.  At the same moment half a score of dark faces rose above the bank behind them, and gun-barrels stuck up.

Among the ten was a distorted, snarling, yellow face.  Ambrose snatched up his own gun.  Nesis uttered a gasping cry; such a sound of terror Ambrose had never heard.

“Shoot me!” she gasped, crawling toward him.  “You shoot me!  Angleysman, quick!  Shoot me!”

Her heartrending cries had so confused him, he was seized before he could raise his gun.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE ALARM.

Ambrose was pacing his log prison once more.  The earth had been filled in, the hole in the floor roughly repaired, and now his jailers took turns in patrolling around the shack.

Imprisonment was doubly hard now.  Day and night Nesis’s strange cries of terror rang in his ears.  He knew something about the Indians’ ideas of punishing women.  His imagination never ceased to suggest terrible things that might have befallen her.