They ate their dinner in the sombre shadow of it.  Most of the afternoon Marge rode her bear.  It was sundown when they stopped for their last meal.  The Nest was still three miles farther on, and the stars were shining brilliantly before they came to the little, wooded plain in the edge of which Hauck had hidden away his place of trade.  When they were some hundred yards away they came over a knoll and David saw the glow of fires.  The girl stopped suddenly and her hand caught his arm.  He counted four of those fires in the open.  A fifth glowed faintly, as if back in timber.  Sounds came to them—­the slow, hollow booming of a tom-tom, and voices.  They could see shadows moving.  The girl’s fingers were pinching David’s arm.

“The Indians have come in,” she whispered.

There was a thrill of uneasiness in her words.  It was not fear.  He could see that she was puzzled, and that she had not expected to find fires or those moving shadows.  Her eyes were steady and shining as she looked at him.  It seemed to him that she had grown taller, and more like a woman, as they stood there.  Something in her face made him ask: 

“Why have they come?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She started down the knoll straight for the fires.  Tara and Baree filed behind them.  Beyond the glow of the camp a dark bulk took shape against the blackness of the forest.  David guessed that it was the Nest.  He made out a deep, low building, unlighted so far as he could see.  Then they entered into the fireglow.  Their appearance produced a strange and instant quiet.  The beating of the tom-tom ceased.  Voices died.  Dark faces stared—­and that was all.  There were about fifty of them about the fires, David figured.  And not a white man’s face among them.  They were all Indians.  A lean, night-eyed, sinister-looking lot.  He was conscious that they were scrutinizing him more than they were the girl.  He could almost feel the prick of their eyes.  With her head up, his companion walked between the fires and beyond them, looking neither to one side nor the other.  They turned the end of the huge log building and on this side it was glowing dimly with light, and David faintly heard voices.  The girl passed swiftly into a hollow of gloom, calling softly to Tara.  The bear followed her, a grotesque, slowly moving hulk, and David waited.  He heard the clink of a chain.  A moment later she returned to him.

“There is a light in Hauck’s room,” she said.  “His council room, he calls it—­where he makes bargains.  I hope they are both there, Sakewawin—­both Hauck and Brokaw.”  She seized his hand, and held it tightly as she led him deeper into darkness.  “I wonder why so many of the Indians are in?  I did not know they were coming.  It is the wrong time of year for—­a crowd like that!”