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of Angus McRae?" he asked, astonished.
"Yes."
"His woman's a Cree?"
"His wife is," the girl corrected.
"What you doin' here?"
"Father's camp is near. He's hunting hides."
"Did he send you to smash our whiskey-barrels?"
"Angus McRae never hides behind a woman," she said, her chin up.
That was true. Morse knew it, though he had never met McRae. His
reputation had gone all over the Northland as a fearless fighting man
honest as daylight and stern as the Day of Judgment. If this girl was a
daughter of the old Scot, not even a whiskey-trader could safely lay
hands on her. For back of Angus was a group of buffalo-hunters related
to him by blood over whom he held half-patriarchal sway.
"Why did you do it?" Morse demanded.
The question struck a spark of spirit from her. "Because you're ruining
my people--destroying them with your fire-water."
He was taken wholly by surprise. "Do you mean you destroyed our
property for that reason?"
She nodded, sullenly.
"But we don't trade with the Crees," he persisted.

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that she was of the Blackfoot
tribe and not of the Crees, but again for reasons of policy she was less
than candid. Till she was safely out of the woods, it was better this man
should not know she was only an adopted daughter of Angus McRae.
She offered another reason, and with a flare of passion which he was to
learn as a characteristic of her.
"You make trouble for my brother Fergus. He shot Akokotos (Many
Horses) in the leg when the fire-water burned in him. He was stabbed
by a Piegan brave who did not know what he was doing. Fergus is good.
He minds his own business. But you steal away his brains. Then he
runs wild. It was you, not Fergus, that shot Akokotos. The Great Spirit
knows you whiskey-traders, and not my poor people who destroy each
other, are the real murderers."
Her logic was feminine and personal, from his viewpoint wholly unfair.
Moreover, one of her charges did not happen to be literally true.
"We never sold whiskey to your brother--not our outfit. It was
Jackson's, maybe. Anyhow, nobody made him buy it. He was free to
take it or leave it."
"A wolf doesn't have to eat the poisoned meat in a trap, but it eats and
dies," she retorted swiftly and bitterly.
Adroitly she had put him on the defensive. Her words had the sting of
barbed darts.
"We're not talking of wolves."
"No, but of Blackfeet and Bloods and Sarcees," she burst out, again
with that flare of feminine ferocity so out of character in an Indian
woman or the daughter of one. "D'you think I don't know how you
Americans talk? A good Indian is a dead Indian. No wonder we hate
you all. No wonder the tribes fight you to the death."
He had no answer for this. It was true. He had been brought up in a
land of Indian wars and he had accepted without question the common

view that the Sioux, the Crows, and the Cheyennes, with all their blood
brothers, were menaces to civilization. The case for the natives he had
never studied. How great a part broken pledges and callous injustice
had done to drive the tribes to the war-path he did not know. Few of the
actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs of the red men.
The young man's hands fell from her arms. Hard-eyed and grim, he
looked her over from head to foot. The short skirt and smock of
buckskin, the moccasins of buffalo hide, all dusty and travel-stained,
told of life in a primitive country under the simplest and hardest
conditions.
Yet the voice was clear and vibrant, the words well enunciated. She
bloomed like a desert rose, had some quality of vital life that struck a
spark from his imagination.
What manner of girl was she? Not by any possibility would she fit into
the specifications of the cubby-hole his mind had built for Indian
women. The daughters even of the boisbrulés had much of the
heaviness and stolidity of their native mothers. Jessie McRae was
graceful as a fawn. Every turn of the dark head, every lift of the hand,
expressed spirit and verve. She must, he thought, have inherited almost
wholly from her father, though in her lissom youth he could find little
of McRae's heavy solidity of mind and body.
"Your brother is of the métis[2]. He's not a tribesman. And he's no child.
He can look out for himself," Morse said at last.
[Footnote 2: The half-breeds were known as "métis." The word means,
of course, mongrel. (W.M.R.)]
His choice of a word was unfortunate. It applied