“In 1759?” repeated Wayland.  “I heard her father say that very year.”

“Yes, and a dark doursome race they are.  Lovatt:  Fraser MacDonald was his name; fought under Wolfe and joined the up country furhunters.  When he came back from his hunting one year, he found his wife had eloped with an officer of the regiment; so he took to the north woods an’ married an Indian girl and his son was the man o’ the iron arm, the piper for little Sir George in the thirties, who blew the bag pipes up Saskatchewan and over the mountains and down the Columbia and all round them lakes where y’r Holy Cross Forest is.  They were a’ dark fearsome men in their loves and hates.  This man married late in life, he had two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an’ your Donald here.  He never saw his father alive.  The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin’ me up at my Mission on Saskatchewan.  She came huntin’ heirs.  Angus had married an Indian woman; he’ll never go back, nor his sons.  They’re livin’ under a tent to-day.  What would they do wi’ a castle and liveried servants and tenants an’ things?  Donald, y’r sheep king man, married a white girl.  Some time after ’85 she left him for the part he took in the Rebellion.  She died after the child’s birth; and the father claimed the daughter.  He’s known they’d have to come for his daughter some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such shameful thing as y’ might think, if y’ve lived long enough in the West, t’ understand!  He has educated the daughter for the place.  As A guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn’t know who her mother was, or why her father had to leave Canada.  A guessed that much when y’r Indian woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night!  She doesn’t even know who that Indian woman is.”

“You came—­for her?” repeated Wayland slowly.  The night on the Ridge came back to him!  Calamity’s fear when the old frontiersman arrived; Bat’s threat to expose something; Eleanor’s perturbed letter; the father’s half furtive defiant existence.  He was too proud to ask more than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her life that she could not willingly share with him.  He sat gazing into the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of light.  It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked.  He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that forged eternally their beings into one.  But this, this was the Hand from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the Destiny Thing which Man’s Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder.  Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had foreseen:  the fighter must fight alone.  Love might send forth; but love must not be suffered to draw back.