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I'd like to run away again if there was any place to run to, but I've followed frontiers till I've seen them disappear one by one; I've retreated till my back is against the Circle, and there isn't any further land to go to. All the time I've prayed and planned for this meeting, and yet I'm undecided." "Kill him!" said Alluna. "God knows I've always hated trouble, whereas it's what he lives on.
It is the law," repeated Alluna, stubbornly, but he put her aside with a slow shake of the head and arose as if very tired. "No! I don't think I can do it not in cold blood, anyhow. Good-night! I'm going to sleep on it." He crossed to the door of his room, but as he went she noted that he slipped the knife and scabbard inside the bosom of his shirt.
This is but a little trading-post." "It was yesterday, but it isn't to-day. Lee has made a strike like the one George Carmack made on the Klondike. He came to tell me and Poleon, and we are going back with him to-night, but you must say nothing or it will start a stampede." "Other men will come a great many of them?" interrogated Alluna, fearfully, ignoring utterly the momentous news. "Yes.
"Wal," hesitated the other, "mebbe dat would depen' on de crime." "Suppose it was murder?" "Ha! We ain' got no men lak' dat in Flambeau." They said good-night, and the old man entered his house to find Alluna waiting for him, a look of worry on her stolid face. "What's wrong?" he inquired. "All night Necia has been weeping." "Is she sick?" He started for the girl's door, but Alluna stopped him.
John Gale had never kissed his daughter, and, as it was not a custom of her mother's race, she never missed the caresses. On rare occasions the old man romped with the little ones and took them in his arms and acted as other fathers act, but he had never done these things with her. When she had gone he spoke without moving. "She'll never marry Poleon Doret." "Why?" inquired Alluna.
"Poor little girl!" Necia was in a restless mood, and, remembering that Alluna and the children had gone berrying on the slopes behind the Indian village, she turned her way thither. All at once a fear of seeing Meade Burrell came upon her. She wanted to think this out, to find where she stood, before he had word with her.
They slipped away quietly to prevent suspicion, but I knew there was something up from the way Poleon acted, so I made Alluna tell me all about it. They haven't more than two hours start of us, and we can overtake them easily." "We! Why, we are not going?"
He found nothing humorous or grotesque in her measure of a gentleman, for he realized that she was strung to a pitch of unreason and unnatural excitement, and that she was in terrible earnest. "Daughter," he said, "I'm mighty sorry this knowledge has come to you, and I see it's my fault, but things are different now to what they were when I met Alluna.
You may be right." "If it's true I'll shuffle up a hand for that soldier." "If I were you I wouldn't deal it to him," said the gambler, dryly. "He may not cut to your break." Meanwhile, Necia had passed on out of the town and through the Indian village at the mouth of the creek, until high up on the slopes she saw Alluna and the little ones.
Gale found Alluna in charge of the store, but no opportunity of talking alone with her occurred until late in the evening, after Necia had put the two little ones to bed and had followed them wearily. Then he told his squaw. She took the news better than he expected, and showed no emotion such as other women would have displayed, even when he told her of the gunshot.
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