the girl. No, I take my stand with Wertz and Hawes, and--"

But the dogs snarled and drew in, and he broke off, listening to the
crunch-crunch of many snowshoes. Indian after Indian stalked into the
firelight, tall and grim, fur-clad and silent, their shadows dancing
grotesquely on the snow. One, the witch doctor, spoke gutturally to
Sipsu. His face was daubed with savage paint blotches, and over his
shoulders was drawn a wolfskin, the gleaming teeth and cruel snout
surmounting his head. No other word was spoken. The prospectors held
the peace. Sipsu arose and slipped into her snowshoes.

"Good-by, O my man," she said to Hitchcock. But the man who had sat
beside her on the sled gave no sign, nor lifted his head as they filed
away into the white forest.

Unlike many men, his faculty of adaptation, while large, had never
suggested the expediency of an alliance with the women of the Northland.
His broad cosmopolitanism had never impelled toward covenanting in
marriage with the daughters of the soil. If it had, his philosophy of
life would not have stood between. But it simply had not. Sipsu? He
had pleasured in camp-fire chats with her, not as a man who knew himself
to be man and she woman, but as a man might with a child, and as a man of
his make certainly would if for no other reason than to vary the tedium
of a bleak existence. That was all. But there was a certain chivalric
thrill of warm blood in him, despite his Yankee ancestry and New England
upbringing, and he was so made that the commercial aspect of life often
seemed meaningless and bore contradiction to his deeper impulses.

So he sat silent, with head bowed forward, an organic force, greater than
himself, as great as his race, at work within him. Wertz and Hawes