How Chip, still sobbing from the awful agony of mind, and dripping water as well, greeted Old Tomah; how Hersey, chagrined at the escape of the half-breed, gave vent to muttered curses; how Martin joined them in thought; and how they all gathered around Chip and listened to her tale of horror, are but minor features of the episode, and not worth the telling. When all was said and done, Old Tomah, grim and silent as ever, although he had done what no white man could do or would try to do, washed his bloody face in the stream, drank his fill of the cool water, and lifting Pete's half-filled canoe as easily as if it were a shingle, tipped it, turned the water out, and set it on the sloping bank. "Me take you back and watch you now," he said to Chip. "You no get caught again." And thus convoyed, poor Chip, willing to clasp and caress the feet or legs of any or all of those men, and more grateful than any dog ever was for a caress, was escorted back to the lake. All those waiting at the cabin were at the landing when the rescuers arrived. Angie, her eyes brimming, first embraced and then kissed the girl. Ray would have felt it a proud privilege to have carried her to the cabin, and Old Cy's wrinkled face showed more joy than ever gladdened it in all his life before. Somehow this hapless waif had grown dearer to them all than she or they understood. There was also feasting and rejoicing that night at Martin's wildwood home, and mingled with it all an oft-repeated tale. Old Cy told one end of it in his droll way, Martin related the other, and Chip filled up the interim. Levi had his say, and Hersey supplied more or less--mostly more--of this half-breed's history. Old Tomah, however, said nothing. To him, who lived in the past of a bygone race which looked upon lumbermen as devastating vandals ever eating into its kingdom, and whose thoughts were upon the happy hunting-grounds soon to be entered, this half-breed's lust and cunning were as the fall of the leaf. Were it needful he would, as he had, plunge through bramble and brier and leap over rock and chasm to rescue his big pappoose, but now that she was safe again, he lapsed into his stoical reserve once more. Shadowy forms and the mysticism of the wilderness were more to his taste than all the pathos of human life; and while his eyes kindled at Chip's smile, his thoughts were following some storm or tempest sweeping over a vast wilderness, or the rush and roar of the great white spectre. "Chip is good girl," he said to Angie the next morning, "and white lady love her. Tomah's heart is like squaw heart, too; but he go away and forget. White lady must not forget," and with that mixture of tenderness and stoicism he strode away, and the last seen of him was when he entered the outlet without once looking back at the cabin where his "big pappoose" was kept.