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Within the circle of the teepee Charley's wife, Loseis, was mixing dough in a pan. Opposite her Bela, the cause of all the trouble, knelt on the ground carefully filing the points of her fish-hooks. Fish-hooks were hard to come by. Charley stopped within the entrance, glaring at her. Bela, looking up, instantly divined from his bloodshot eyes and from the hand he kept behind him what was in store.
Bela, laughing, ran in and seized the stick as he attempted to raise it again. They struggled for possession of it, staggering all over the teepee, falling against the poles, trampling in and out of the embers. Loseis shielded the pan of dough with her body. Bela finally wrenched the stick from Charley and in her turn raised it. Charley's courage went out like a blown lamp. He turned to run.
"His skin white as a dog's tooth," answered Loseis, "his hair bright like the sun." A gleam in the dull eyes as she said this suggested that the stolid squaw was human, too. "Was he good to you?" "He was good to me. Not like Indian husband. He like dress me up fine. All the time laugh and make jokes. He call me 'Tagger-Leelee." "Did he go away?" Loseis shook her head.
He was the last to come off to the boat. Hooliam took possession of the punt as a matter of course, to bring him aboard; but Garth, determined not to allow the slightest act of insolence to pass unchallenged to-day, curtly ordered it back; and the fat trader was obliged to wade out like the breeds, and scramble over the side of the Loseis a very undignified reëntrance upon the scene.
He say 'I not give it to Loseis, because her people get it. They only poor, shiftless people, just blow it in on foolishness. He say, 'I goin' keep it for the child. I say, 'All right. "Well, bam-by Beaton leave the company, go back home outside. He give me an order on the new trader. He say keep it till Bela grow up. I have it now.
Briefly satisfying himself that the man still lived, Garth dragged him out of reach of the waves, and letting him lie in the driving rain, turned his attention to the boat. The Loseis was in a bad way. The waves under her stern had lifted the driven stakes as easily as pins are drawn from a cushion.
Pigs they are! I hate them! They not my people!" Loseis, with a jerk like an automaton, recommenced kneading the dough. Bela raised a streaming, accusing face to her mother. "What for you take a man like that?" she cried passionately. "A weasel, a mouse, a flea of a man! A dog is more of a man than he! He run from me squeaking like a puppy!"
Before him, the lightning luridly showed up the trees on the shore, writhing horridly; and the wet mast and the guy ropes were often wreathed in faint, bluish flames. The Loseis forward, with her irregularly piled cargo, and the crouching forms under the sail-cloths, presented a thousand shifting, fantastic shapes in the playing flashes; and Garth had a score of false alarms.
The breeds fell asleep one by one; and for the first, the jabbering, the ki-yi-ing and the maddening stick-kettle were all stilled. The Loseis hovered over the lake with her gigantic wing spread, like some great bird of the night. The only evidences that she moved at all were the flecks of foam that drifted slowly astern under the counter.
Arriving opposite the cabin, they all leaped aboard; and poling across, landed in front of where Garth and Charley stood. Natalie, not caring to run the gauntlet of another battery of stupid stares, had retired to the cabin. On the prow of the boat, which had a dingy, weather-beaten look, very different from the smart green and white craft of the "Company," was crookedly painted the name Loseis.
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