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Updated: June 17, 2025
The shooting had stopped, and the silence that followed it held a significance for Alan. They were giving him an allotted time in which to care for those under his protection. A trap-door was in the floor of Sokwenna's cabin. It opened into a small storeroom and cellar, which in turn possessed an air vent leading to the outside, overlooking the ravine.
The strangeness of the laugh told him more than anything else the tension he had been under. Another half-hour, and he came up out of the dip behind Sokwenna's cabin and tried the door. It was locked. A voice answered his knock, and he called out his name. The bolt shot back, the door opened, and he stepped in. Nawadlook stood at her bedroom door, a gun in her hands.
Lights flared up through the gray mist. It was then, from the barricaded attic window over their heads, that Sokwenna's rifle answered. A single shot, a shriek, and then a pale stream of flame leaped out from the window as the old warrior emptied his gun. Before the last of the five swift shots were fired, Alan was in the cabin, barring the door behind him.
It remained with him when they drew back out of gloom and chill into sunshine and warmth, leaving Wegaruk to snuff her tomato-can lantern and follow with the steak, and it did not leave him when they walked over the tundra together toward Sokwenna's cabin.
They had reached Sokwenna's door, and in that moment they hesitated and turned their faces back to the gloom out of which they had fled. Voices came suddenly from beyond the corrals. There was no effort at concealment. The buildings were discovered, and men called out loudly and were answered from half a dozen points out on the tundra.
Nawadlook came creeping after her, dragging another rifle and bearing an apron heavy with the weight of cartridges. And above, through the darkened loophole of the attic window, Sokwenna's ferret eyes had caught the movement of a shadow in the gray mist, and his rifle sent its death-challenge once more to John Graham and his men.
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.
It made him forget the cottonwoods and the plains beyond, and his caution, and Sokwenna's advice to guard carefully against the hiding-places of Ghost Kloof and the country beyond. "I have been thinking a great deal today," she was saying, "because you have left me so much alone. I have been thinking of you. And my thoughts have given me a wonderful happiness."
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