After frequent pauses they returned to their task, and at each jerk water gushed from the man's wide-sprung jaws. At last, panting with exertion, they gained the top of the bank. With glittering eyes the old squaw stooped swiftly and turned the body upon its back. The unseeing eyes stared upward, water ceased to gush from the open mouth, and the lolling tongue settled flabbily between the mud-smeared lips. A cry of savage disappointment escaped her, for the face into which she looked was not the face of Moncrossen! The curse of the Yaga Tah died upon her lips, for this curse may be breathed but once in a lifetime, and if, as Father Magnus said, "God is good," she might yet live to gaze into the dead face of the one worst white man, and chant the curse of the Yaga Tah. So she stifled the curse and contented herself with gloating over the battered body of the man of logs which the churning white-water of the Blood River rapid had tossed at her feet, even as the seething white-water of the Saw Tooth had tossed the body of her Pierre at the feet of the white men. At her side the girl gazed curiously at the exanimate form. In her heart was no bitterness against the people of her father--no damning of the breed for the sins of the individual. Lacombie, she knew, was good--the one good white man--old Wa-ha-ta-na-ta called him. And Moncrossen was bad. Between these two extremes were the unnumbered millions of whom Lacombie used to tell her in the long Northern twilight, when, as a little girl, she would creep upon his knees as he sat before the door of the log trading-post, and his arms would steal about her, and a far-away look would creep into his blue eyes. Often he spoke of beautiful women; of mighty tepees of stone; of bridges of iron, and of trains which rushed along the iron trails at the speed of the flight of a bird, and spat fire and smoke, and whose voice shrieked louder than the mate-call of the _loup-cervier_. And she would listen, round-eyed, until the little head would droop slowly against the great chest, and the words would rumble softly and blend bewilderingly with the wheezing of the black pipe and the strong smell of rank tobacco. Sometimes she would wake up with a start to hear more, and it would be morning, and she would be between the blankets in her own little bunk, and Wa-ha-ta-na-ta would come and laugh, and pinch her fat legs, and croon strange Indian songs in low minor keys. There were stories, too; stories of Kas-ka-tan, the chief; of the Crazy Man of the Berry Moon; of Zuk, the lost hunter; of the Maiden of the Snows, whose heart was of ice, and whose voice was the splashing of tiny waters, and of the mighty Fire God, whose breath alone could move the heart of the Maiden of the Snows, so that in the springtime when he spoke to her of love, her laughter was heard in the tiny rills of the woodland.