"Come close," said the girl, motioning with a certain nervousness to her. She was not the brave, indifferent little girl she had been of old. "Come close--some one might listen, somewhere. I've been so sick--I've dreamed so many things that I can't tell some days what is dream and what is true. I lie here and think and think, but it will not come clear. Listen! I think sometimes you and I hunted for tracks--a white man's tracks--across there where the high ferns are. You showed them to me, and then we came back when the moon shone, and it was light like day, and I picked white flowers. Some days I think of it--of the tracks, long, slim tracks, with the boot heel. Then my head hurts, and I think maybe we never found the tracks, maybe it is only a dream, like--like other things!" She did not ask if it were so, but she leaned forward with all of eager question in her eyes. It was the first time she had shown strong interest in anything. But, having aroused from her listlessness to speak of the ghosts of fancy haunting her, she seemed quickened to anxiety by the picture her own words conjured up. "Ah! those tracks in the black mud and that face above the ledge!" "It is true," said the squaw, "and not a dream. The track of the white man was there, and the moon was in the sky, as you say." "Ah!" and the evidently unwelcome truth made her clench her fingers together despairingly; she had hoped so that it was a dream. The truth of it banished her lethargy, made her think as nothing else had. "Ah! it was so, then; and the face--the face was real, was--" "I saw no face," said the squaw. "But I did--yes, I did," she muttered. "I saw it like the face of a white devil!" Then she checked herself and glanced at the Indian woman, whose dark, heavy face appeared so stupid. Still, one never could tell by the looks of an Indian how much or how little he knows of the thing you want to know; and after a moment's scrutiny, the girl asked: "Did you learn more of the tracks?--learn who the white man was that made them?" The woman shook her head. "You sick--much sick," she explained. "All time Dan he say: 'Stay here by white girl's bed. Never leave.' So I not get out again, and the rain come wash all track away." "Does Dan know?--did you tell him?" "No, Dan never ask--never talk to me, only say, 'Take care 'Tana,' that all." The girl asked no more, but lay there on her couch, filled with dry moss and covered with skins of the mountain wolf. Her eyes closed as though she were asleep; but the squaw knew better, and after a little, she said doubtfully: "Maybe Akkomi know." "Akkomi!" and the eyes opened wide and slant. "That is so. I should have remembered. But oh, all the thoughts in my brain have been so muddled. You have heard something, then? Tell me."