He sprang up. She was quicker than he. He saw her headed straight and determined for the edge. He stopped dead.
"Nahnya!" he cried hoarsely.
She stopped on the very edge, looking down into the gulf with a kind of wistful desirousness. One would almost have said that she was sorry he had cried out.
"I will swear it!" he cried quickly. He dropped to his knees beside the cross of stones.
She came back from the edge with a sigh. "I will do all that I said," she murmured, as if to herself.
The way down into the shallow valley on the other side was easy. As they proceeded Nahnya laid out their plans for the future with a kind of ecstasy in her sad eyes.
"All day I am thinking what we will do. We will gather those like ourselves who are not red and not white, and make a new people of them. First we will go to Caribou Lake and talk with the people. They have steamboats now on Caribou Lake and the little river and the big river; the York boats are rotting on the beach and the half-breeds have no work to do. They are poor and sick and full of hate for the white men. I know a fine country where the Tamarack River rises in the hills. There are no white men near, and the Kakisa Indians who hunted there are all dead or gone away with other tribes. It is the best fur country there is left. We will tell the people about this country, and make a village there. There is good hunting for all. The company will make a post there, and you shall be the trader!"
XXIV
EPILOGUE
At evening of a day early in August a raft landed on the beach below Fort Cheever. It bore a middle-aged man, a girl, and a young man. The last named ceaselessly tossed and muttered in a fever; he was strapped to the raft to keep him from rolling off.