A shadow in the doorway cut the shaft of sunlight and the woman at the writing table turned. On the threshold stood Kenneth Thornton and by the hand he held a savage-visaged child clad in breech clout and moccasins, but otherwise naked. Its eyes held the beady sharpness of the Indian, and though hardly past babyhood, it stood haughtily rigid and expressionless. The face of the man was not flashing its smile now, but deeply grave, and as his wife's gaze questioned him he spoke slowly. "This is Peter Doane's boy," he said, briefly. Dorothy Thornton shrank back with a gesture of repulsion, and the man went on: "A squaw with a travelling party of friendly Indians brought him in. Mad-dog Doane is dead. His life ended in a drunken brawl in an Otari village--but before he died he asked that the child be brought back to us." "Why?" "Because," Thornton spoke seriously, "blood can't be silenced when death comes. The squaw said Chief Mad-dog wanted his boy raised to be a white brave.... He's half white, of course." "And _he_ ventured to ask favours of _us_!" The woman's voice, ordinarily gentle, hardened, and the man led the child over and laid his own hand on her shoulder. "The child is not to blame," he reminded her. "He's the fruit of madness--but he has human life." Dorothy rose, inclining her head in reluctant assent. "I'll fetch him a white child's clothes," she said. This was the story that the faded pages told and a small part of which Dorothy Harper read as she sat in the lamplight of the attic a century and a quarter later. CHAPTER V The old Thornton house on Defeated Creek had for almost two decades stood vacant save for an occasional and temporary tenant. A long time back a formal truce had been declared in the feud that had split in sharp and bitter cleavage the family connections of the Harpers and the Doanes. Back into the limbo of tradition and vagueness went the origin of that "war". The one unclouded certainty was that the hatred had grown until even in this land of vendetta its levy of violent deaths had been appalling beyond those of other enmities.