Yellow Bird sat up, her little hands clenched about the thick braid of Sun Cloud’s hair.  She had conjured with the spirits and had let the soul go out of her body that she might learn the future for Neekewa, her white brother.  And they had told her that Roger McKay had done right to think of killing.

Their voices had whispered to her that he would not suffer more than he had already suffered—­and that in the Country Beyond he would find Nada the white girl, and happiness, and peace.  Yellow Bird did not disbelieve.  Her faith was illimitable.  The spirits would not lie.  But the unrest of the night was eating at her heart.  She tried to lift herself to the whisperings above the tepee top.  But they were unintelligible, like many voices mingling, and with them came a dull fear into her soul.

She put out a hand, as if to rouse Slim Buck.  Then she drew it back, and placed Sun Cloud’s braid away from her.  She rose to her feet so quietly that even in their restlessness they did not fully awake.  Through the tepee door she went, and stood up straight in the night, as if now she might hear more clearly, and understand.

For a space she breathed in the oppressive something that was in the air, and her eyes went east and west for sign of storm.  But there was no threat of storm.  The clouds were drifting slowly and softly, with starlight breaking through their rifts, and there was no moan of thunder or wail of wind far away.  Her heart, for a little, seemed to stop its beating, and her hands clasped tightly at her breast.  She began to understand, and a strange thrill crept into her.  The spirits had put a great burden upon the night so that it might drive sleep from her eyes.  They were warning her.  They were telling her of danger, approaching swiftly, almost impending.  And it was peril for the white man who was sleeping somewhere near.

Swiftly she began seeking for him, her naked little brown feet making no sound in the soft white sands of Wollaston.

And as she sought, the clouds thinned out above, and the stars shone through more clearly, as if to make easier for her the quest in the gloom.

Where he had made his bed of blankets in the sand, close beside a flat mass of water-washed sandstone, Jolly Roger lay half asleep.  Peter was wide awake.  His eyes gleamed brightly and watchfully.  His lank and bony body was tense and alert.  He did not whine or snap his jaws, though he heard the Indian dogs occasionally doing so.  The comradeship of a fugitive, ever on the watch for his fellow men, had made him silent and velvet-footed, and had sharpened his senses to the keenness of knives.  He, too, felt the impelling force of an approaching menace in this night of stillness and mystery, and he watched closely the restless movements of his master’s body, and listened with burning eyes to the name which he had spoken three times in the last five minutes of his sleep.