“I go hunt Yellow Hawk to-night,” he said. “I go fight; I like marry you when I come back. How!” he said, and turned away toward the gate.
Some of his braves held back, the blackness of death in their looks. He saw. “My knife is sharp,” he said. “The woman is brave. She shall live—go and fight Yellow Hawk, or starve and die.”
Divining their misery, their hunger, and the savage thought that had come to them, Sally had whispered to the factor’s wife to bring food, and the woman now came running out with two baskets full, and returned for more. Sally ran forward among the Indians and put the food into their hands. With grunts of satisfaction they seized what she gave, and thrust it into their mouths, squatting on the ground. Arrowhead looked on stern and immobile, but when at last she and the factor’s wife sat down before the braves with confidence and an air of friendliness, he sat down also; yet, famished as he was, he would not touch the food. At last Sally, realizing his proud defiance of hunger, offered him a little lump of pemmican and a biscuit, and with a grunt he took it from her hands and ate it. Then, at his command, a fire was lit, the pipe of peace was brought out, and Sally and the factor’s wife touched their lips to it, and passed it on.
So was a new treaty of peace and loyalty made with Arrowhead and his tribe by a woman without fear, whose life had seemed not worth a minute’s purchase; and, as the sun went down, Arrowhead and his men went forth to make war upon Yellow Hawk beside the Nettigon River. In this wise had her influence spread in the land.
Standing now with the child in his arms and his wife looking at him with a shining moisture of the eyes, Jim laughed outright. There came upon him a sudden sense of power, of aggressive force—the will to do. Sally understood, and came and laughingly grasped his arm.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, playfully, “you are getting muscles like steel. You hadn’t these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!”
“I guess I need them now,” he said, smiling, and with the child still in his arms drew her to a window looking northward. As far as the eye could see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land. Here and there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman riding toward the post—riding hard.
“It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally,” he continued, “and I rooted.... I wonder—that fellow on the horse—I have a feeling about him. See, he’s been riding hard and long—you can tell by the way the horse drops his legs. He sags a bit himself.... But isn’t it beautiful, all that out there—the real quintessence of life.”
The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal, nor stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated in the air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled. Sally had chosen right.