In the red glow of the log stood Joanne in her long white night robe.  She seemed to be swaying when he first saw her.  Her hands were clutched at her bosom, and she was staring—­staring out into the night beyond the burning log, and in her face was a look of terror.  He sprang toward her, and out of the gloom beyond her rushed Donald MacDonald.  With a cry she turned to Aldous and flung herself shivering and half-sobbing into his arms.  Gray-faced, his eyes burning like the smouldering coals in the fire, Donald MacDonald stood a step behind them, his long rifle in his hands.

“What is it?” cried Aldous.  “What has frightened you, Joanne?”

She was shuddering against his breast.

“It—­it must have been a dream,” she said.  “It—­it frightened me.  But it was so terrible, and I’m—­I’m sorry, John.  I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“What was it, dear?” insisted Aldous.

MacDonald had drawn very close.

Joanne raised her head.

“Please let me go back to bed, John.  It was only a dream, and I’ll tell it to you in the morning, when there’s sunshine—­and day.”

Something in MacDonald’s tense, listening attitude caught Aldous’ eyes.

“What was the dream?” he urged.

She looked from him to old Donald, and shivered.

“The flap of my tepee was open,” she said slowly.  “I thought I was awake.  I thought I could see the glow of the fire.  But it was a dream—­a dream, only it was horrible!  For as I looked I saw a face out there in the light, a white, searching face—­and it was his face!”

“Whose face?”

“Mortimer FitzHugh’s,” she shuddered.

Tenderly Aldous led her back to the tent.

“Yes, it was surely an unpleasant dream, dear,” he comforted her.  “Try and sleep again.  You must get all the rest you can.”

He closed the flap after her, and turned back toward MacDonald.  The old hunter had disappeared.  It was ten minutes before he came in from out of the darkness.  He went straight to Aldous.

“Johnny, you was asleep!”

“I’m afraid I was, Mac—­just for a minute.”

MacDonald’s fingers gripped his arm.

“Jus’ for a minute, Johnny—­an’ in that minute you lost the chance of your life!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean”—­and old Donald’s voice was filled with a low, choking tremble that Aldous had never heard in it before—­“I mean that it weren’t no dream, Johnny!  Mortimer FitzHugh was in this camp to-night!”

CHAPTER XXV

Donald MacDonald’s startling assertion that Mortimer FitzHugh had been in the camp, and that Joanne’s dream was not a dream, but reality, brought a gasp of astonishment and disbelief from Aldous.  Before he had recovered sufficiently from his amazement to speak, MacDonald was answering the question in his mind.