Armour sat for a moment longer, his face turned to the open window. He was perfectly still, but he had become grave. He was about to reply to the chief, when the trader entered the room hurriedly with a newspaper in his hand. He paused abruptly when he saw Eye-of-the-Moon. Armour felt that the trader had something important to communicate. He guessed it was in the paper. He mutely held out his hand for it. The trader handed it to him hesitatingly, at the same time pointing to a paragraph, and saying: “It is nearly two years old, as you see. I chanced upon it by accident to-day.” It was a copy of a London evening paper, containing a somewhat sensational account of Lali’s accident. It said that she was in a critical condition. This time Armour did not ask for brandy, but the trader put it out beside him. He shook his head. “Gordon,” he said presently, “I shall leave here in the morning. Please send my men to me.” The trader whispered to him: “She was all right, of course, long ago, Mr. Armour, or you would have heard.” Armour looked at the date of the paper. He had several letters from England of a later date, and these said nothing of her illness. It bewildered him, made him uneasy. Perhaps the first real sense of his duty as a husband came home to him there. For the first time he was anxious about the woman for her own sake. The trader had left the room. “What a scoundrel I’ve been!” said Armour between his teeth, oblivious, for the moment, of Eye-of-the-Moon’s presence. Presently, bethinking himself, he turned to the Indian. “I’ve been debating,” he said. “Eye-of-the-Moon, my wife is in England, at my father’s home. I am going to her. Men have lied in thinking I would do her any injury, but--but--never mind, the harm was of another kind. It isn’t wise for a white man and an Indian to marry, but when they are married--well, they must live as man and wife should live, and, as I said, I am going to my wife.” To say all this to a common Indian, whose only property was a dozen ponies and a couple of tepees, required something very like moral courage; but then Armour had not been exercising moral courage during the last year or so, and its exercise was profitable to him. The next morning he was on his way to Montreal, and Eye-of-the-Moon was the richest chief in British North America, at that moment, by five thousand dollars or so. CHAPTER VIII. TO EVERY MAN HIS HOUR