There was no wind, yet under the stars gray masses of cloud sped as if in flight.

There was no breeze in the treetops, yet they whispered and sighed.

In the strange spell of this midnight, heavy with its unrest, the wilderness lay half asleep, half awake, with the mysterious stillness of death enshrouding it.

At the edge of the white sands of Wollaston, whose broad water was like oil tonight, stood the tepees of Yellow Bird’s people.  Smoke-blackened and seasoned by wind and rain they were dark blotches sentineling the shore of the big lake.  Behind them, beyond the willows, were the Indian dogs.  From them came an occasional whine, a deep sigh, the snapping of a jaw, and in the gloom their bodies moved restlessly.  In the tepees was the spell of this same unrest.  Sleep was never quite sure of itself.  Men, women and little children twisted and rolled, or lay awake, and weird and distorted shapes and fancies came in dreams.

In her tepee Yellow Bird lay with her eyes wide open, staring at the gray blur of the smoke hole above.  Her husband was asleep.  Sun Cloud, tossing on her blankets, had flung one of her long braids so that it lay across her mother’s breast.  Yellow Bird’s slim fingers played with its silken strands as she looked straight up into nothingness.  Wide awake, she was thinking—­thinking as Slim Buck—­would never be able to think, back to the days when a white woman had been her goddess, and when a little white boy—­the woman’s son—­had called Yellow Bird “my fairy.”

In the gloom, with foreboding eating at her heart, Yellow Bird’s red lips parted in a smile as those days came back to her, for they were pleasing days to think about.  But after that the years sped swiftly in her mind until the day when the little boy—­a man grown—­came to save her tribe, and her own life, and the life of Sun Cloud, and of Slim Buck her husband.  Since then prosperity and happiness had been her lot.  The spirits had been good.  They had not let her grow old, but had kept her still beautiful.  And Sun Cloud, her little daughter, was beautiful, and Slim Buck was more than ever her god among men, and her people were happy.  And all this she owed to the man who was sleeping under the gloom of the sky outside, the hunted man, the outlaw, “the little boy grown up”—­Jolly Roger McKay.

As she listened, and stared up at the smoke hole, strange spirits were whispering to her, and Yellow Bird’s blood ran a little faster and her eyes grew bigger and brighter in the darkness.  They seemed to be accusing her.  They told her it was because of her that Roger McKay had come in that winter of starvation and death, and had robbed and almost killed, that she and Slim Buck and little Sun Cloud might live.  That was the beginning, and the thrill of it had got into the blood of Neekewa, her “little white brother grown up.”  And now he was out there, alone with his dog in the night—­and the red-coated avengers of the law were hunting him.  They wanted him for many things, but chiefly for the killing of a man.