As the light came in at the windows, Sewell touched him on the shoulder, and said: “He is sleeping now.”
“I hear my brother breathe,” answered Arrowhead. “He will live.”
All night he had listened, and had heard Jim’s breath as only a man who has lived in waste places can hear. “He will live. What I take with one hand I give with the other.”
He had taken the life of the factor; he had given Jim his life. And when he was tried three months later for murder, some one else said this for him, and the hearts of all, judge and jury, were so moved they knew not what to do.
But Arrowhead was never sentenced, for, at the end of the first day’s trial, he lay down to sleep and never waked again. He was found the next morning still and cold, and there was clasped in his hands a little doll which Nancy had given him on one of her many visits to the prison during her father’s long illness. They found a piece of paper in his belt with these words in the Cree language: “With my hands on his heart at the post I gave him the life that was in me, saving but a little until now. Arrowhead, the chief, goes to find life again by the well at the root of the tree. How!”
V
On the evening of the day that Arrowhead made his journey to “the well at the root of the tree” a stranger knocked at the door of Captain Templeton’s cottage; then, without awaiting admittance, entered.
Jim was sitting with Nancy on his knee, her head against his shoulder, Sally at his side, her face alight with some inner joy. Before the knock came to the door Jim had just said, “Why do your eyes shine so, Sally? What’s in your mind?” She had been about to answer, to say to him what had been swelling her heart with pride, though she had not meant to tell him what he had forgotten—not till midnight. But the figure that entered the room, a big man with deep-set eyes, a man of power who had carried everything before him in the battle of life, answered for her.
“You have won the stake, Jim,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You and she have won the stake, and I’ve brought it—brought it.”
Before they could speak he placed in Sally’s hands bonds for five million dollars.