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“But if you will keep coming in such wild storms, there will not be many anniversaries.” Laughing, she poured out another glass of liqueur for him.

“Well, now, p’r’aps you’re right, and so the only thing to do is not to keep coming, but to stay–stay right where you are.”

The Indian woman could not see her daughter’s face, which was turned to the fire, but she herself smiled at John Alloway, and nodded her head approvingly. Here was the cure for her own trouble and loneliness. Pauline and she, who lived in different worlds, and yet were tied to each other by circumstances they could not control, would each work out her own destiny after her own nature, since John Alloway had come a-wooing. She would go back on the Warais, and Pauline would remain at the Portage, a white woman with her white man. She would go back to the smoky fires in the huddled lodges; to the venison stew and the snake dance; to the feasts of the medicine-men, and the long sleeps in the summer days, and the winter’s tales, and be at rest among her own people; and Pauline would have revenge of the wife of the prancing Reeve, and perhaps the people would forget who her mother was.

With these thoughts flying through her sluggish mind, she rose and moved heavily from the room, with a parting look of encouragement at Alloway, as though to say, a man that is bold is surest.

With her back to the man, Pauline watched her mother leave the room, saw the look she gave Alloway. When the door was closed she turned and looked Alloway in the eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked, suddenly.

He stirred in his seat nervously. “Why, fifty, about,” he answered, with confusion.

“Then you’ll be wise not to go looking for anniversaries in blizzards, when they’re few at the best,” she said, with a gentle and dangerous smile.

“Fifty–why, I’m as young as most men of thirty,” he responded, with an uncertain laugh. “I’d have come here to-day if it had been snowing pitchforks and chain-lightning. I made up my mind I would. You saved my life, that’s dead sure; and I’d be down among the moles if it wasn’t for you and that Piegan pony of yours. Piegan ponies are wonders in a storm–seem to know their way by instinct. You, too–why, I bin on the plains all my life, and was no better than a baby that day; but you–why, you had Piegan in you–why, yes–“

He stopped short for a moment, checked by the look in her face, then went blindly on: “And you’ve got Blackfoot in you, too; and you just felt your way through the tornado and over the blind prairie like a bird reaching for the hills. It was as easy to you as picking out a maverick in a bunch of steers to me. But I never could make out what you was doing on the prairie that terrible day. I’ve thought of it a hundred times. What was you doing, if it ain’t cheek to ask?”

“I was trying to lose a life,” she answered, quietly, her eyes dwelling on his face, yet not seeing him; for it all came back on her, the agony which had driven her out into the tempest to be lost evermore.

He laughed. “Well now, that’s good,” he said; “that’s what they call speaking sarcastic. You was out to save, and not to lose, a life; that was proved to the satisfaction of the court.” He paused and chuckled to himself, thinking he had been witty, and continued: “And I was that court, and my judgment was that the debt of that life you saved had to be paid to you within one calendar year, with interest at the usual per cent. for mortgages on good security. That was my judgment, and there’s no appeal from it. I am the great Justinian in this case!”