"Bless your heart, you don't want to see me beat out of a
breakfast, do you?" he smiled up at her, feeling all at once an
immense desire to pull her head down to him and kiss her. "But you
don't understand the situation, little girl. Now I've been eating
this confounded bannock"--he picked up a chunk of it to
demonstrate his point--"morning, noon and night until the sight of
it makes me almost cry for one of mother's green cucumber pickles.
I'm tired of it. Bram's fish is a treat. And this coffee, seeing
that you have turned it in that way--"

She sat opposite him while he ate, and he had the chance of
observing her closely while his meal progressed. It struck him
that she was growing prettier each time that he looked at her, and
he was more positive than ever that she was a stranger in the
northland. Again he told himself that she was not more than
twenty. Mentally he even went so far as to weigh her and would
have gambled that she would not have tipped a scale five pounds
one way or the other from a hundred and twenty. Some time he might
have seen the kind of violet-blue that was in her eyes, but he
could not remember it. She was lost--utterly lost at this far-end
of the earth. She was no more a part of it than a crepe de chine
ball dress or a bit of rose china. And there she was, sitting
opposite him, a bewitching mystery for him to solve. And she
WANTED to be solved! He could see it in her eyes, and in the
little beating throb at her throat. She was fighting, with him, to
find a way; a way to tell him who she was, and why she was here,
and what he must do for her.

Suddenly he thought of the golden snare. That, after all, he
believed to be the real key to the mystery. He rose quickly from