“My dear ... I’m infernally sorry ... to have brought you into this mess, I ... I——”
“We shall have to get away before,” broke in Joy’s voice. “We can’t remain here and wait for a thing like that to happen.”
“What will it matter?” he asked lightly. “It will be the end—for me. But if it will save you, I do not care.”
Joy did not answer, she knew that he was sincere, but she did not know what to say, and presently he spoke again—
“I do not know what we can do. If we try to get away they will follow, and they will travel faster than we shall. And besides, with the food gone the attempt would be hopeless. One cannot go into the wilderness without grub.”
They sat discussing the situation quietly, and outside, the clamour of the camp grew. Once Joy, finding a small hole in the tent, peeped out. On the edge of the encampment a great fire had been lit, and around it a number of women and men were engaged in trampling the snow hard. She guessed that it was there that the potlatch was to be held, and wondered what would happen when the Indians had feasted. The uncouth figures moving to and fro, and cut out from the deepening darkness by the glow of the fire, seemed inconceivably wild and grotesque, and once, when the strange form of the Shaman shuffled into view, and stood gesticulating and pointing to the tepee, she shuddered.
She knew that these men were as the men of the Stone Age, that pity was a quality to which they were strangers, and that they would do things which, merely to think of, made her shake with terror.
“Oh,” she cried sharply, “is there nothing that we——”
“Hush!” broke in Dick Bracknell’s voice peremptorily. “Listen!”