"You can marry and stay here, when I go. You are twenty. I had my man,
your father, when I was seventeen. You can marry. There are men. You
have money. They will marry you--and forget the rest."

With a cry of rage and misery the girl sprang to her feet and started
forwards, but stopped suddenly at sound of a hasty knocking and a voice
asking admittance. An instant later, a huge, bearded, broad-shouldered
man stepped inside, shaking himself free of the snow, laughing half-
sheepishly as he did so, and laying his fur-cap and gloves with
exaggerated care on the wide window-sill.

"John Alloway," said the Indian woman in a voice of welcome, and with a
brightening eye, for it would seem as though he came in answer to her
words of a few moments before. With a mother's instinct she had divined
at once the reason for the visit, though no warning thought crossed the
mind of the girl, who placed a chair for their visitor with a heartiness
which was real--was not this the white man she had saved from death in
the snow a year ago? Her heart was soft towards the life she had kept in
the world. She smiled at him, all the anger gone from her eyes, and
there was almost a touch of tender anxiety in her voice as she said "What
brought you out in this blizzard? It wasn't safe. It doesn't seem
possible you got here from the Portage."

The huge ranchman and auctioneer laughed cheerily. "Once lost, twice get
there," he exclaimed, with a quizzical toss of the head, thinking he had
said a good thing. "It's a year ago to the very day that I was lost out
back"--he jerked a thumb over his shoulder--"and you picked me up and
brought me in; and what was I to do but come out on the anniversary and
say thank you? I'd fixed up all year to come to you, and I wasn't to be