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Updated: June 22, 2025
Felt the vital force and strength of him ebb and weaken so that the lean, slender fingers that groped for MacNair's throat closed feebly and dropped limp to dangle impotently from his nerveless arms.
Dully, Chloe noticed that the Indian who had been firing from the floor slipped stealthily through the doorway and, dropping to his knee, raised his rifle. The next instant the girl's eyes widened in horror. The gun was pointed squarely at MacNair's back. She tried to cry out, but no sound came. It seemed minutes that the Indian sighted as he knelt there in the clearing.
The drifted snow had been removed from MacNair's diggings, and the night-fires that thawed out the gravel glared red and illuminated the clearing with a ruddy glow in which the dumps loomed black and ugly, like unclean wens upon the white surface of the trampled snow.
"In the meantime you will have succeeded in educating the Indians to a realization of the fact that they owe allegiance to no man. MacNair's power is broken. He will be discredited by the authorities, and hated by his own Indians a veritable pariah of the wilderness. And now, Miss Elliston, I must hasten at once to the rivers. My interests there have long been neglected.
Deeper and deeper sank the sight. MacNair's fingers tightened their grip until the knuckles whitened and a huge shoulder hunched to throw its weight upon the arm. Slowly, very slowly, the sight moved across the upturned brow, tearing the flesh, rolling up the skin before its dull, broad edge.
Before the echoes of MacNair's voice had died away dark forms were speeding through the moonlight. From all directions they came; from the cabins that yet remained standing, from the tents pitched close against the unburned walls of the stockade, from rude wickiups of skins and of brushwood. Old men and young men they answered the call, and each in his hand bore a rifle.
Chloe was about to retort, when the officer interrupted her with a gesture. "Just a moment, please," he said quietly; "I'm not sure I can make myself plain to you, but you see in the North we know something of MacNair's work. Of what he has done in spite of the odds. We know the North needs men like MacNair. You claim to be a friend of the Indians.
"Better hurry, Miss Elliston," he said, when the last of the bandages was in place. "This is no place for us to be found if some of MacNair's Indians happen along. Your canoe is ready. Mine is farther down the lake." "But, this man surely " "Leave him there. You have done all you can do for him. His Indians will find him." "What!" cried Chloe. "Leave a wounded man to die in the bush!"
Hours later, Big Lena, entering from the kitchen, regarded her mistress with a long vacant-faced stare, and returned again to the kitchen. All through the night Chloe dozed fitfully beside the table, but for the most part she was widely painfully awake. Bitterly she reproached herself. Only she knew the pain the discovery of MacNair's treachery had caused her.
After that she nursed her wrath in silence and brooded upon the wrongs of MacNair's Indians. This continued brooding was not without its effect upon the girl, and slowly but surely destroyed her sense of proportion. No longer was the education and civilization of the Indians the uppermost thought in her mind.
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