“They were in Tara’s pack, Sakewawin,” she explained, her eyes glowing like sleepy pools in the fireglow.  “They were lost.”

He began then to tell her about Father Roland.  She listened, growing sleepier, her lashes drooping slowly until they formed dark curves on her cheeks.  He was close enough to marvel at their length, and as he watched them, quivering in her efforts to keep awake and listen to him, they seemed to him like the dark petals of two beautiful flowers closing slumbrously for the night.  It was a wonderful thing to see them open suddenly and find the full glory of the sleep-filled eyes on him for an instant, and then to watch them slowly close again as she fought valiantly to conquer her irresistible drowsiness, the merest dimpling of a smile on her lips.  The last time she opened them he had her picture in his hands, and was looking at it, quite close to her, with the fire lighting it up.  For a moment he thought the sight if it had awakened her completely.

“Throw it into the fire,” she said.  “Brokaw made me let him take it, and I hate it.  I hate Brokaw.  I hate the picture.  Burn it.”

“But I must keep it,” he protested.  “Burn it!  Why it’s....”

“You won’t want it—­after to-night.”

Her eyes were closing again, heavily, for the last time.

“Why?” he asked, bending over her.

“Because, Sakewawin ... you have me ... now,” came her voice, in drowsy softness; and then the long lashes lay quietly against her cheeks.

CHAPTER XX

He thought of her words a long time after she had fallen asleep.  Even in that last moment of her consciousness he had found her voice filled with a strange faith and a wonderful assurance as it had drifted away in a whisper.  He would not want the picture any more—­because he had her!  That was what she had said, and he knew it was her soul that had spoken to him as she had hovered that instant between consciousness and slumber.  He looked at her, sleeping under his eyes, and he felt upon him for the first time the weight of a sudden trouble, a gloomy foreboding—­and yet, under it all, like a fire banked beneath dead ash, was the warm thrill of his possession.  He had spread his blanket over her, and now he leaned over and drew back her thick curls.  They were warm and soft in his fingers, strangely sweet to touch, and for a moment or two he fondled them while he gazed steadily into the childish loveliness of her face, dimpled still by that shadow of a smile with which she had fallen asleep.  He was beginning to feel that he had accepted for himself a tremendous task, and that she, not much more than a child, had of course scarcely foreseen its possibilities.  Her faith in him was a pleasurable thing.  It was absolute.  He realized it more as the hours dragged on and he sat alone by the fire.  So great was it that she was going back fearlessly to those whom she hated and