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At last the doctor whispered to Sewell, “It’s no use; he must have the brandy, or he can’t live an hour.”

Sewell weakened; the tears fell down his rough, hard cheeks. “It’ll ruin him–it’s ruin or death.”

“Trust a little more in God and in the man’s strength. Let us give him the chance. Force it down his throat–he’s not responsible,” said the physician, to whom saving life was more than all else.

Suddenly there appeared at the bedside Arrowhead, gaunt and weak, his face swollen, the skin of it broken by the whips of storm.

“He is my brother,” he said, and, stooping, laid both hands, which he had held before the fire for a long time, on Jim’s heart. “Take his feet, his hands, his legs, and his head in your hands,” he said to them all. “Life is in us; we will give him life.”

He knelt down and kept both hands on Jim’s heart, while the others, even the doctor, awed by his act, did as they were bidden. “Shut your eyes. Let your life go into him. Think of him, and him alone. Now!” said Arrowhead, in a strange voice.

He murmured, and continued murmuring, his body drawing closer and closer to Jim’s body, while in the deep silence, broken only by the chanting of his low, monotonous voice, the others pressed Jim’s hands and head and feet and legs–six men under the command of a heathen murderer.

The minutes passed. The color came back to Jim’s face, the skin of his hands filled up, they ceased twitching, his pulse got stronger, his eyes opened with a new light in them.

“I’m living, anyhow,” he said, at last, with a faint smile. “I’m hungry–broth, please.”

The fight was won, and Arrowhead, the pagan murderer, drew over to the fire and crouched down beside it, his back to the bed, impassive and still. They brought him a bowl of broth and bread, which he drank slowly, and placed the empty bowl between his knees. He sat there through the night, though they tried to make him lie down.

As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder and said, “He is sleeping now.”

“I hear my brother breathe,” answered Arrowhead. “He will live.”

All night he had listened, and had heard Jim’s breath as only a man who has lived in waste places can hear. “He will live. What I take with one hand I give with the other.”

He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life. And when he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not what to do.

But Arrowhead was never sentenced, for, at the end of the first day’s trial, he lay down to sleep and never waked again. He was found the next morning still and cold, and there was clasped in his hands a little doll which Nancy had given him on one of her many visits to the prison during her father’s long illness. They found a piece of paper in his belt with these words in the Cree language: “With my hands on his heart at the post I gave him the life that was in me, saving but a little until now. Arrowhead, the chief, goes to find life again by the well at the root of the tree. How!”

V

On the evening of the day that Arrowhead made his journey to “the well at the root of the tree” a stranger knocked at the door of Captain Templeton’s cottage; then, without awaiting admittance, entered.

Jim was sitting with Nancy on his knee, her head against his shoulder, Sally at his side, her face alight with some inner joy. Before the knock came to the door Jim had just said, “Why do your eyes shine so, Sally? What’s in your mind?” She had been about to answer, to say to him what had been swelling her heart with pride, though she had not meant to tell him what he had forgotten–not till midnight. But the figure that entered the room, a big man with deep-set eyes, a man of power who had carried everything before him in the battle of life, answered for her.