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Her voice broke in a gasp that was like a sob. He struggled to rise; stood swaying before her, his legs unsteady as stilts under him. "My gun, Marge my pistol!" he demanded, trying to reach out his arms. "If I had them now...." "They must have taken them," she interrupted. "But I have Nisikoos' rifle, Sakewawin! Oh I must hurry! They won't come to my room, and Marcee is perhaps dead.
"If it were just Brokaw I wouldn't be afraid. I would let him catch me, and scream. Tara would kill him for me. But it's Hauck, too. And the others. They are worse since Nisikoos died. That is what I called her Nisikoos my aunt. They are all terrible, and they all frighten me, especially since they began to build a great cage for Tara. Why should they build a cage for Tara, out of small trees?
The girl's eyes darkened, and then slowly there came back the softer glow into them. "I loved Nisikoos," she said. It was sunset when they began making their first camp in a cedar thicket, where David shot a porcupine for Tara and Baree. After their supper they sat for a while in the glow of the stars, and after that Marge snuggled down in her cedar bed and went to sleep.
"And if Hauck swears at me I'll scratch his out!" she declared, trembling in the glorious anticipation of her vengeance. "I'll ... I'll scratch his out, anyway, for what he did to Nisikoos!" David stared at her. She was looking away from him, her eyes on the break between the mountains, and he noticed how tense her slender body had become and how tightly her hands were clenched.
From the far end of it, through a partly open door, came a reek of tobacco smoke, and loud voices a burst of coarse laughter, a sudden volley of curses that died away in a still louder roar of merriment. Some one closed the door from within. The girl was staring toward the end of the hall, and shuddering. "That is the way it has been growing worse and worse since Nisikoos died," she said.
We can't put up a running fight for they'd keep out of range of this little pea-shooter and fill me as full of holes as a sieve!" She was tugging at his arm. "The cabin, Sakewawin!" she exclaimed with sudden inspiration. "It has a strong bar at the door, and the clay has fallen in places from between the logs leaving openings through which you can shoot!" He was examining Nisikoos' rifle.
He drove his mind back to the photograph of the girl and the woman. How had she come into possession of the picture which Brokaw had taken? What had Nisikoos tried to say to Marge O'Doone in those last moments when she was dying whispered words which the girl had not heard because she was crying, and her heart was breaking? Did Nisikoos know that the mother was alive?
A man stood up within seventy yards of the cabin a moment later, firing as fast as he could pump the lever of his gun, and David drove one of Nisikoos' partridge-killers straight into his chest. He fired a second time at Hauck another miss! Then he flung the useless rifle to the floor as he sprang back to Marge. "Got one. Five left. Now damn 'em let then come!" He drew Hauck's revolver.
She ran from him quickly and from under the cot where the Indian lay dragged forth a pack. He could not see plainly what she was doing now. In a moment she had put a rifle in his hands. "It belonged to Nisikoos," she said. "There are six shots in it, and here are all the cartridges I have." He took them in his hand and counted them as he dropped them into his pocket.
Just now there was quite a number of the "miners" down from the north, ten or twelve of them. She had not been afraid when Nisikoos, her aunt, was alive. But now there was no other woman at the Nest, except an old Indian woman who did Hauck's cooking. Hauck wanted no one there. And she was afraid of those men. They all feared Hauck, and she knew that Hauck was afraid of Brokaw.
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