The girl spoke to Morse.  “Onistah is my brother.  I too thank you,” she said stiffly.

“Your brother!  He’s not Angus McRae’s son, is he?”

“No.  And I’m not his daughter—­really.  I’ll tell you about that,” she said with a touch of the defensive defiance that always came into her manner when the subject of her birth was referred to.

She did, later, over the camp-fire.

It is fortunate that desire and opportunity do not always march together.  The constable and Morse had both been dead men if Bully West could have killed with a wish.  Sleeping Dawn would have been on the road to an existence worse than death.  Instead, they sat in front of the coals of buffalo chips while the big smuggler and his companions rode away from an ignominious field of battle.

When the constable and his prisoner had first struck camp, there had been two of them.  Now there were six.  For in addition to Jessie McRae, the Blackfoot, and Barney, another had come out of the night and hailed them with a “Hello, the camp!” This last self-invited guest was Brad Stearns, who had not ridden to Whoop-Up as he had announced, but had watched events from a distance on the chance that he might be of help to Tom Morse.

Jessie agreed with Beresford that she must stay in camp till morning.  There was nothing else for her to do.  She could not very well ride the night out with Onistah on the road back to the fort.  But she stayed with great reluctance.

Her modesty was in arms.  Never before had she, a girl alone, been forced to make camp with five men as companions, all but one of them 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.”