Jacques, she could understand, for in thought and deed and body he was Indian--a whelp of her own breed. But the girl, she did not understand, and her love for her was the idolatrous love with which she had loved Lacombie. Through many lean years they lived among the tepees of the Indians, but, of late, they had come to the lodge of Jacques, who had become a trapper and guide. His lodge, of necessity, must be pitched not too far from the lumber camps of the white men, whose laws make killing deer in winter a crime--and pay liberally for fresh venison. Swiftly she descended a short slope of the bluff, uttering quick, low whines of anticipation. For Jacques, Blood River Jack he was called by the white men, had told her that Moncrossen was boss of the camp at the head of the rapid. All through the winter she had kept the girl continually within her sight, for she remembered the previous winter when this same Moncrossen had accidentally come upon their lodge on the south fork of Broken Knee, and the look in his eyes as he gazed upon the beauty of Jeanne. She remembered the events that followed when Jacques was paid liberally by the boss to make a midwinter journey to the railroad, and the low sound in the night when she awakened to find the girl struggling in the bear-like grasp of the huge lumberjack, and how she fought him off in the darkness with a hatchet while Jeanne fled shrieking into the timber. Now she stood upon the brink, and beside her stood the girl in whose dark eyes flashed a primitive tiger-hate--for she, too, remembered the terror of that night on the south fork of Broken Knee. And, although she knew nothing of the wild death-curse of the Yaga Tah, she could at least stoop and spit upon the dead face of the one worst white man. Almost touching their feet lapped the brown, bubble-dotted waters of the river, and close in, at a hand's reach from the bank, the logs passed sluggishly in the slow swing of the shore eddy. The eyes of the pair focused in intense eagerness upon the great forked log which poised uncertainly at the outer edge of the whirl. For a breathless moment they watched while it seemed that the great log with its gruesome freight must be swept out into the main current of the stream. Sluggishly it revolved, as upon an axis, and then, in the grip of a random cross-current, swung heavily shoreward. The form of the old woman bent forward and, as the log drifted slowly past, a talon-like hand shot out and fastened upon the bit of striped cloth, and the next moment the two were tugging and hauling in their efforts to drag the limp body clear of the brown waters. Seizing upon the heavy calked boots they worked the body inch by inch up the steep slope, and the dry lips of the old squaw curled in a snaggy grin as she noted the shattered leg and the toe of the boot twisted backward--a grin that deepened into a grimace of sardonic cruelty at the feel of the grating rasp of the shattered bone ends.