He felt the quiver in her voice.  She was quite excited, he knew.  And yet not about the Indians, nor the strangeness of their presence.  It was her triumph that made her tremble in the darkness, a wonderful anticipation of the greatest event that had ever happened in her life.  She hoped that Hauck and Brokaw were in that room!  She would confront them there, with him.  That was it.  She felt her bondage—­her prisonment—­in this savage place was ended; and she was eager to find them, and let them know that she was no longer afraid, or alone—­no longer need obey or fear them.  He felt the thrill of it in the hot, fierce little clasp of her hand.  He saw it glowing in her eyes when they passed through the light of a window.  Then they turned again, at the back of the building.  They paused at a door.  Not a ray of light broke the gloom here.  The stars seemed to make the blackness deeper.  Her fingers tightened.

“You must be careful,” he said.  “And—­remember.”

“I will,” she whispered.

It was his last warning.  The door opened slowly, with a creaking sound, and they entered into a long, gloomy hall, illumined by a single oil lamp that sputtered and smoked in its bracket on one of the walls.  The hall gave him an idea of the immensity of the building.  From the far end of it, through a partly open door, came a reek of tobacco smoke, and loud voices—­a burst of coarse laughter, a sudden volley of curses that died away in a still louder roar of merriment.  Some one closed the door from within.  The girl was staring toward the end of the hall, and shuddering.

“That is the way it has been—­growing worse and worse since Nisikoos died,” she said.  “In there the white men who come down from the north, drink, and gamble, and quarrel.  They are always quarrelling.  This room is ours—­Nisikoos’ and mine.”  She touched with her hand a door near which they were standing.  Then she pointed to another.  There were half a dozen doors up and down the hall.  “And that is Hauck’s.”

He threw off his pack, placed it on the floor, with his rifle across it.  When he straightened, the girl was listening at the door of Hauck’s room.  Beckoning to him she knocked on it lightly, and then opened it.  David entered close behind her.  It was a rather large room—­his one impression as he crossed the threshold.  In the centre of it was a table, and over the table hung an oil lamp with a tin reflector.  In the light of this lamp sat two men.  In his first glance he made up his mind which was Hauck and which was Brokaw.  It was Brokaw, he thought, who was facing them as they entered—­a man he could hate even if he had never heard of him before.  Big.  Loose-shouldered.  A carnivorous-looking giant with a mottled, reddish face and bleary eyes that had an amazed and watery stare in them.  Apparently the girl’s knock had not been heard, for it was a moment before the other man swung slowly about in his chair so that