On the third day after the squaw-man’s arrival, Fifty Mile had a second sensation. That morning, as Reivers, staggering artistically, came out of Raftery’s house of poison, he all but stumbled over a sledge before the door. With his assumed grin of idiocy growing wider, he examined the sledge carefully, next the team which was hitched to it, then lifted his eyes to the man and woman that stood beside the outfit. At the first glance he had recognised the sledge, and he needed the time thus gained to recover from the shock. “Hello, Mac, ol’ timer!” he bellowed drunkenly at Duncan MacGregor. “Come have a drink with me.” MacGregor looked at him dourly, disgust and anger on his big red face. Hattie, at his side, looked away, her lips pressed tightly together to control the anger rising within her. She had gone deadly pale at the first sight of Reivers; now the red of shame was burning in her cheeks. “I shook hands with you, stranger, when you left our roof,” said MacGregor gruffly. “I do not do so now. I thought you were a man.” “I never did!” snapped Hattie, still looking away. “I knew it was not a man.” Something like a sob seemed to wrench itself from her chest in spite of her firm lips. “I knew it was—just what it is.” Suddenly she flared around on Reivers, her face wan with mingled pain, shame and anger. “Now you are doing just what you are fit for. I’ve heard. Living on your squaws! And you dared to talk big to me—to a decent woman. Blood of my father! You dared to talk to me at all! Drive on, Uncle. We’ll go on to Dumont’s. We’ll get away from this thing; it pollutes the air. Hi-yah, Bones! Mush, mush, mush!” Reivers leered and grinned foolishly—for the benefit of the onlookers—as the sledge went on out of sight. “See?” he said boastfully. “I used to know white folks once. Yes sir; used to know lot of ’em. Don’t now. Only know Indians. S’long, boys; got to go home.” All that day he sat alone in his tepee. Tillie came to him at noon with food and he cursed her and drove her away. In the evening she came to him again, and again Reivers ordered her not to lift the flap on his tepee. Tillie by this time was fully convinced that the Snow-Burner had gone mad. Else why had he repulsed all her advances? Why had he refused to look at the young and attractive Neopa? And now he even spurned food. Yes, the Snow-Burner had gone mad, as white men sometimes go mad in the North; but she was still his slave. That was her fate. Reivers sat alone in his tepee, once more fighting to put away the face of Hattie MacGregor as it rode before his eyes, a burning, searing memory. He was not faltering. The shame for him, because he was a white man, because she had once had him under her roof, that Hattie MacGregor had suffered as she saw him now, did not swerve him in the least from the way he was going.