“No, no! Please go.” She stood a moment or two, shuddering, her hands over her face as if to shut from her sight a terrible thing, with a choking cry. “My God, it has come.” Gaspard turned from his wife, plunged into the underbrush and was lost to sight. The Indian woman ran to the other and, clutching her skirt, fell upon her knees crying, “Call him back, call him back quick. Let me call him back. You will lose him forever.” The white woman took her hands from her face, looked down upon the Indian and said in a voice from which all hope had died, “Why call him back? He is lost to me now.” “No, no,” said the other, springing to her feet and seizing the white woman’s arm. “He is yours, he is yours, only yours. Me! I am nothing to him. It was my fault, my mistake. I knew nothing. I went to him. But to him now I am nothing, nothing. Oh, let me call him back quick.” In her vehemence she shook the white woman violently. But to her violence there was no reaction. The wife slowly drew away from the grasp of the Indian woman, climbed somehow on to her pony, and, with the face of one stricken with her death wound, she set off slowly down the homeward trail. For a single moment the Indian woman followed her with scornful eyes. This supreme, this mad folly in a woman who would turn away from a man who so obviously and so passionately was hers, she could not understand. It was the madness of the white race. White women did not know how to love. She caught up her boy, ran with him to the chief. “Take him. Keep him till I return,” she said fiercely. “Where do you go?” said the chief sternly. “I go to save the man I love,” she breathed. “But who loves you not.” The chief’s tones were eloquent of scorn. “What matters that? Not for myself I go, but for him. To bring him back—to—her.” “Fool!” said the chief. “Yes, fool, fool,” she answered passionately. “But he will be safe—and—happy.” She hurried into her wigwam, snatched a few camp necessities and, swift as a deer, sped on the white man’s trail. CHAPTER VII For three days the Pine Croft Ranch was plunged in gloom. In her room the lady of the ranch lay, fighting back death till her man should return. She was unwilling to pass out of the world in which together they had shared so deeply of its joys, without another word beyond that last spoken between them. On the third day Paul, with face pale, tense and worn, rode into the Indian camp to interview the Chief. Straight up he stood, pale, quivering under the nerve strain, but unafraid. “Mother is very sick,” he said. “I’m awful afraid she will die. Father is lost in the woods. She wants him awful bad.” The chief listened, apparently unmoved. “Mother kept the little baby from dying.”