No, she gazed with unshaken bosom and clear eye upon the valleys of her home. The last peep! And there, miles and miles away, and, oh, so far beneath, was a something strung out across a snow-field, a something which would have escaped the best eye in a regiment of modern Alpini—a something which moved slowly, and was withal so faint and so far, that a strand of cobweb seen across a pane at the breadth of a wide room would be cable-broad compared with it. "Wah, we started none too soon," was Pŭl-Yūn's comment, and, leg-weary as he found himself, he kept at it, butting away upward into cloud and falling snow so long as he was sure of his line, then, confident that the advance-party of the Little Moons, supposing that they had got upon the spoor, and meant sticking to it, would not have daylight to make it good, he bored into the leeside of a big drift, throwing out the loose snow behind him like a dog, and invited Dêh-Yān to accept it as a camp.
Dêh-Yān disliked the idea of camping in the presence of pursuit, but she saw that her man had marched as far as he was able. Moreover, he was now in his element; a brave who had been a member of four war-parties had a right to his opinion as to what other braves would or would not do. "They will follow on to the edge of the cloud," said he. "Above that the new fall will cover our sign, not wholly, but enough to make them call off the dogs when the sun sets. And we—we will be up and off before She rises to-morrow. And I say, Dêh-Yān, I do not like those Good Wolves of thy people."
"Nor I—And if they follow on?"
"They won't. They are wholly out of their country, and I am nearing mine, and have travelled this road before, which none of them have, as I think—at least none that returned."
"That is so," assented Dêh-Yān. "When I was quite little, two of our young men tried this pass. They never came back. Tell me," she went on, snuggling down into the bear-skin, and feeling the blood begin to move again in her toes. "What brought thee over this awful road?"
"I was out for a wife."
"But were there no girls in the tribes south of you that thou took this high white path?"
"Oh, yes, there are girls everywhere, but the tribes to the south of the Sun-Men, the Hawks and the White Wolf people, are so much stronger than we that we have had to give up going to them for wives. It was our braves who never came back from those journeys."
"Oho! those tribes would not be braver, I think? then, how?"
"They have an all-year-round camp close to the best quarry of weapon-stone. They have many slaves at work doing nothing else but axe-making, and so are better armed than we. Also they stockade their camps. There is no getting in or getting out of their villages. I think our bows will surprise them." He added, "And now, if thou hast eaten all thou canst, go to sleep. I shall watch, or rather lie awake and listen."