She prattled on, chanting the happy burden of her love, while he strove to grip himself in the effort, somehow, to wound her with the truth.  This, at the very first, was the golden opportunity.

“But, Labiskwee, listen,” he began.  “Are you sure you learned from Four Eyes all the story of the love of Paolo and Francesca?”

She clasped her hands and laughed with an immense certitude of gladness.  “Oh!  There is more!  I knew there must be more and more of love!  I have thought much since I lighted my fire.  I have—­”

And then Snass strode in to the fire through the falling snowflakes, and Smoke’s opportunity was lost.

“Good evening,” Snass burred gruffly.  “Your partner has made a mess of it.  I am glad you had better sense.”

“You might tell me what’s happened,” Smoke urged.

The flash of white teeth through the stained beard was not pleasant.  “Certainly, I’ll tell you.  Your partner has killed one of my people.  That sniveling shrimp, McCan, deserted at the first shot.  He’ll never run away again.  But my hunters have got your partner in the mountains, and they’ll get him.  He’ll never make the Yukon basin.  As for you, from now on you sleep at my fire.  And there’ll be no more scouting with the young men.  I shall have my eye on you.”

Smoke’s new situation at Snass’s fire was embarrassing.  He saw more of Labiskwee than ever.  In its sweetness and innocence, the frankness of her love was terrible.  Her glances were love glances; every look was a caress.  A score of times he nerved himself to tell her of Joy Gastell, and a score of times he discovered that he was a coward.  The damnable part of it was that Labiskwee was so delightful.  She was good to look upon.  Despite the hurt to his self-esteem of every moment spent with her, he pleasured in every such moment.  For the first time in his life he was really learning woman, and so clear was Labiskwee’s soul, so appalling in its innocence and ignorance, that he could not misread a line of it.  All the pristine goodness of her sex was in her, uncultured by the conventionality of knowledge or the deceit of self-protection.  In memory he reread his Schopenhauer and knew beyond all cavil that the sad philosopher was wrong.  To know woman, as Smoke came to know Labiskwee, was to know that all woman-haters were sick men.

Labiskwee was wonderful, and yet, beside her face in the flesh burned the vision of the face of Joy Gastell.  Joy had control, restraint, all the feminine inhibitions of civilization, yet, by the trick of his fancy and the living preachment of the woman before him, Joy Gastell was stripped to a goodness at par with Labiskwee’s.  The one but appreciated the other, and all women of all the world appreciated by what Smoke saw in the soul of Labiskwee at Snass’s fire in the snow-land.