"Waiting to speak to Mr. Bowkett," replied Wilfred stoutly.
"Then you may wait for him on the snow-bank," retorted the hunter, seizing Wilfred by the collar and flinging him out of the door.
"What is that for?" asked several of the dancers.
"I'll vow it is the same young imp who passed us with a party of miners coming from a summer's work in the Rocky Mountains, who stole my dinner from the spit," he went on, working himself into the semblance of a passion. "I marked him with a rare black eye before we parted then, and I'll give him another if he shows his face again where I am."
"It is false!" cried Wilfred, rising up in the heat of his indignation.
His tormentor came a step or two from the door, and gathering up a great lump of snow, hurled it at him.
Wilfred escaped from the avalanche, and the mocking laughter which accompanied it, to the sheltering darkness. He paused among the sombre shadows thrown by the wall of the opposite hut. Maxica was waiting for him under its pine-bark eaves, surveying the cloudless heavens.
"He speaks with a forked tongue," said the Cree, pointing to the man in the doorway, and dividing his fingers, to show that thoughts went one way and words another.
The scorn of the savage beside him was balm to Wilfred. The touch of sympathy which makes the whole world kin drew them together. But between him and the hunter swaggering on the snow-bank there was a moral gulf nothing could bridge over. There was a sense—a strange sense—of deliverance. What would it have been to live on with such men, touching their pitch, and feeling himself becoming blackened? That was the uttermost depth from which this fellow's mistake had saved him.
It was no mistake, as Maxica was quick to show him, but deliberate purpose. Then Wilfred gave up every hope of getting back to his home. All was lost to him—even his dogs were gone.