As they passed out the factory door, they brushed by Maren Le Moyne, where she had drawn aside, still wistfully watching the comers from the wilderness.

The young factor’s eyes went to her face and for a moment held her glance.

Instantly, with that deep look, the girl’s hand shot forth and touched his arm, a light touch with the deftness of strength held in abeyance, and McElroy felt his flesh tingle beneath it.

“M’sieu,” she said, “where do they come from, how far in the west?”

“Not far, Ma’amselle,—­only from the Lower Saskatchewan.  The Assiniboines are our nearest tribe, living along the country from the Hare Hills to the parting of the twin rivers above the Qui Appelle.  Hold they interest for you?”

“Nay,” she said, shaking her black head, “not if they come not far, other than that excited by their strangeness.  I thank you.”

She drew back, and McElroy, perforce, followed his way to the encampment, but he thought not this time of the red flower.

Only within him was roused that same desire which had prompted De Courtenay to snatch the bloom from the stockade wall,—­a longing to give her something, to offer homage to this tall young woman with the wondrous face of beauty and wistful strength.  Since she was but a child had men who looked upon her felt this same longing, this stirring of the worshipper within.  But few had dared the wall of quietness about her; therefore, she had remained apart.  Only Prix Laroux of all those who had seen her grow into her magnificent womanhood at Grand Portage had come to her with his gift of faith and tied himself to hand for life, and he came not with the love of man but rather as one who follows a goddess.  Yet it was that aching desire to serve her which sent him.

And now it gripped the young factor of Fort de Seviere and he looked among the Assiniboines for a gift.

Here a squaw held forth to him a garment that took his eye at once.

Of doeskin it was, soft and white as a lady’s hand, and cut after the fashion of the Indian woman’s dress, in a single piece from throat to ankle, the sleeves straight from the shoulder, and at edge and seam, sewed with thorn and sinew, rippled and fluttered a heavy fringe the length of a man’s hand.

Across the breast there gleamed and glittered a solid plastron of the beadwork so justly famed for its beauty of colour and design, which came from the hands of none save the women of this tribe, and at hem and elbow, above the dangling fringe, there ran a heavy band of it.  Above the hips there hung a belt made of the brilliant stained quills of the porcupine.

The factor took the beautiful thing in his hands, and the purpose in his mind crystallised.

In a swift moment he had bargained with the silent woman for a price that astonished her and was back within the post, walking hurriedly toward the cabin of the Baptistes.