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Because Sokwenna was the "old man" of the community and therefore the wisest and because with him lived his foster-daughters, Keok and Nawadlook, the loveliest of Alan's tribal colony Sokwenna's cabin was next to Alan's in size. And Alan, looking at it now and then as he ate his breakfast, saw a thin spiral of smoke rising from the chimney, but no other sign of life.
From somewhere he had been given the priceless heritage of dreaming pleasantly, and Keok was very real, with her swift smile and mischievous face, and Nawadlook's big, soft eyes were brighter than when he had gone away. He saw Tautuk, gloomy as usual over the heartlessness of Keok.
The fourth night he said to Tautuk: "If Keok should marry another man, what would you do?" It was a moment before Tautuk looked at him, and in the herdsman's eyes was a wild, mute question, as if suddenly there had leaped into his stolid mind a suspicion which had never come to him before. Alan laid a reassuring hand upon his arm. "I don't mean she's going to, Tautuk," he laughed. "She loves you.
He watched with the eyes of a deadly hunter, wide-open over his rifle-barrel. Sokwenna was still. Probably he was dead. Keok was sobbing in the cellar-pit. Then he saw a shape growing in the illumination, three or four of them, moving, alive. He waited until they were clearer, and he knew what they were thinking that the bullet-riddled cabin had lost its power to fight.
He was worried about her. The pneumonia of the previous winters had left its mark. And Keok, her rival in prettiness! He smiled in the darkness, wondering how Tautuk's sometimes hopeless love affair had progressed. For Keok was a little heart-breaker and had long reveled in Tautuk's sufferings.
"You look twenty years younger," declared Alan, stifling his desire to laugh when he saw the other's seriousness. Stampede was thoughtfully stroking his chin. "Then why the devil did they laugh!" he demanded. "Mary Standish didn't laugh. She cried. Just stood an' cried, an' then sat down an' cried, she thought I was that blamed funny! And Keok laughed until she was sick an' had to go to bed.
He crept stealthily over a knoll, down through a hollow, and then up again to the opposite crest. It was as he had thought. He could see Keok a hundred yards away, standing on the trunk of a fallen tree, and as he looked, she tossed another bunch of sputtering crackers away from her. The others were probably circled about her, out of his sight, watching her performance.
This was the fifth day after the fight in the kloof; and on the sixth he sat up in his bed, bolstered with pillows, and Stampede came to see him, and then Keok and Nawadlook and Tatpan and Topkok and Wegaruk, his old housekeeper, and only for a few minutes at a time was Mary away from him.
"Of course Keok and Nawadlook helped her." "Not very much. She did it. Made the curtains. Put them pictures and flags there. Picked the flowers. Been nice an' thoughtful, hasn't she?" "And somewhat unusual," added Alan. "And she is pretty." "Most decidedly so." There was a puzzling look in Stampede's eyes. He twisted nervously in his chair and waited for words. Alan sat down opposite him.
And then he was shaking hands with Stampede, and Keok had slipped down among the flowers and was crying. That was like Keok.
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