“Try to sleep, Sakewawin—­try to sleep....”

It was many hours later when he awoke.  Hands seemed to be dragging him forcibly out of a place in which he was very comfortable, and which he did not want to leave, and a voice was accompanying the hands with an annoying insistency—­a voice which was growing more and more familiar to him as his sleeping senses were roused.  He opened his eyes.  It was day, and Marge was on her knees at his side, tugging at his breast with her hands and staring wildly into his face.

“Wake, Sakewawin—­wake, wake!” he heard her crying.  “Oh, my God, you must wake! Sakewawin—­Sakewawin—­they have found our trail—­and I can see them coming up the valley!”

CHAPTER XXVI

Scarcely had David sensed the Girl’s words of warning than he was on his feet.  And now, when he saw her, he thanked God that his head was clear, and that he could fight.  Even yesterday, when she had stood before the fighting bears, and he had fought Brokaw, she had not been whiter than she was now.  Her face told him of their danger before he had seen it with his own eyes.  It told him that their peril was appallingly near and there was no chance of escaping it.  He saw for the first time that his bed on the ground had been close to the wall of an old cabin which was in a little dip in the sloping face of the mountain.  Before he could take in more, or discover a visible sign of their enemies, Marge had caught his hand and was drawing him to the end of the shack.  She did not speak as she pointed downward.  In the edge of the valley, just beginning the ascent, were eight or ten men.  He could not determine their exact number for as he looked they were already disappearing under the face of the lower dip in the mountain.  They were not more than four or five hundred yards away.  It would take them a matter of twenty minutes to make the ascent to the cabin.

He looked at Marge.  Despairingly she pointed to the mountain behind them.  For a quarter of a mile it was a sheer wall of red sandstone.  Their one way of flight lay downward, practically into the faces of their enemies.

“I was going to rouse you before it was light, Sakewawin,” she explained in a voice that was dead with hopelessness.  “I kept awake for hours, and then I fell asleep.  Baree awakened me, and now—­it is too late.”

“Yes, too late to run!” said David.

A flash of fire leaped into her eyes.

“You mean....”

“We can fight!” he cried.  “Good God, Marge—­if only I had my own rifle now!” He thrust a hand into his pocket and drew forth the cartridges she had given him.  “Thirty-twos!  And only eleven of them!  It’s got to be a short range for us.  We can’t put up a running fight for they’d keep out of range of this little pea-shooter and fill me as full of holes as a sieve!”

She was tugging at his arm.