almost strangers to her. The experience was one that shocked her sense
of fitness.

She was troubled and distressed, and she showed it. Her impulsiveness
had swept her into an adventure that might have been tragic, that
still held potentialities of disaster. For she could not forget the
look on West's face when he had sworn to get even with her. This man
was a terrible enemy, because of his boldness, his evil mind, and his
lack of restraining conscience.

Yet even now she could not blame herself for what she had done. The
constable's life was at stake. It had been necessary to move swiftly
and decisively.

Sitting before the fire, Sleeping Dawn began to tell her story. She
told it to Beresford as an apology for having ridden forty miles with
Onistah to save his life. It was, if he chose so to accept it, an
explanation of how she came to do so unwomanly a thing.

"Onistah's mother is my mother," she said. "When I was a baby my own
mother died. Stokimatis is her sister. I do not know who my father
was, but I have heard he was an American. Stokimatis took me to her
tepee and I lived there with her and Onistah till I was five or six.
Then Angus McRae saw me one day. He liked me, so he bought me for
three yards of tobacco, a looking-glass, and five wolf pelts."

It may perhaps have been by chance that the girl's eyes met those of
Morse. The blood burned beneath the tan of her dusky cheeks, but her
proud eyes did not flinch while she told the damning facts about her
parentage and life. She was of the métis, the child of an unknown