The one thing that remained incomprehensible to the girl was the idolatrous regard in which MacNair was held by his own Indians. To them he was a superman—the one great man among all white men. His word was accepted without question. Upon leaving for the southward MacNair had told the men to work, therefore they worked unceasingly. Also he had told the women and the children to obey without question the words of the white kloochman, and therefore they absorbed her teaching with painstaking care.
Time and again the girl tried to obtain the admission that MacNair was in the habit of supplying his Indians with whiskey, and always she received the same answer. "MacNair sells no whiskey. He hates whiskey. And many times has he killed men for selling whiskey to his people."
At first these replies exasperated the girl beyond measure. She set them down as stereotyped answers in which they had been carefully coached. But as time went on and the women, whose word she had come to hold in regard, remained unshaken in their statements, an uncomfortable doubt assailed her—a doubt that, despite herself, she fostered. A doubt that caused her to ponder long of nights as she lay in her little room listening to the droning voices of LeFroy and Big Lena as they talked by the stove in the kitchen.
Strange fancies and pictures the girl built up as she lay, half waking, half dreaming between her blankets. Pictures in which MacNair, misjudged, hated, fighting against fearful odds, came clean through the ruck and muck with which his enemies had endeavoured to smother him, and proved himself the man he might have been; fancies and pictures that dulled into a pain that was very like a heartache, as the vivid picture—the real picture—which she herself had seen with her own eyes that night on Snare Lake, arose always to her mind.
The tang of the northern air bit into the girl's blood. She spent much time in the open and became proficient and tireless in the use of snowshoes and skis. Daily her excursions into the surrounding timber grew longer, and she was never so happy as when swinging with strong, wide strides on her fat thong-strung rackets, or sliding with the speed of the wind down some steep slope of the river-bank, on her smoothly polished skis.
It was upon one of these solitary excursions, when her steps had carried her many miles along the winding course of a small tributary of the Yellow Knife, that the girl became so fascinated in her exploration she failed utterly to note the passage of time until a sharp bend of the little river brought her face to face with the low-hung winter sun, which was just on the point of disappearing behind the shrub pines of a long, low ridge.
With a start she brought up short and glanced fearfully about her. Darkness was very near, and she had travelled straight into the wilderness almost since early dawn. Without a moment's delay she turned and retraced her steps. But even as her hurrying feet carried her over the back-trail she realized that night would overtake her before she could hope to reach the larger river.
The thought of a night spent alone in the timber at first terrified her. She sought to increase her pace, but her muscles were tired, her footsteps dragged, and the rackets clung to her feet like inexorable weights which sought to drag her down, down into the soft whiteness of the snow.
Darkness gathered, and the back-trail dimmed. Twice she fell and regained her feet with an effort. Suddenly rounding a sharp bend, she crashed heavily among the dead branches of a fallen tree. When at length she regained her feet, the last vestige of daylight had vanished. Her own snowshoe tracks were indiscernible upon the white snow. She was off the trail!
Something warm and wet trickled along her cheek. She jerked off her mittens and with fingers tingling in the cold, keen air, picked bits of bark from the edges of the ragged wound where the end of a broken branch had snagged the soft flesh of her face. The wound stung, and she held a handful of snow against it until the pain dulled under the numbing chill.