She turned sharply and her dark eyes flashed. But only for an instant.
"You had better not ask Sergeant Silk," she said in a slow, level voice, which had in it something of warning. "He knows. Yes, he knows. But he would not tell you."
She watched him go out into the back garden towards the shed which he used as a kennel. When he was out of sight, she put forth her hand to the plate rack and drew a small square of looking-glass from behind a cracked dish.
Propping the mirror against the shelf, she drew aside the strands of black hair from above her ear in such a way that the scar was revealed more clearly, running upward and backward from her temple.
"Yes," she nodded with a smile of satisfaction at her own reflection, "it is still there. It will always be there. Maple Leaf is not sorry. She is glad. It helps her to remember."
She put the mirror back in its hiding-place and went to the door and looked out across the ripening cornfields and the more distant prairie to the blue foothills behind which the sun was sinking.
It was just such an evening as this, she reflected. And she recalled one by one the incidents of the adventure in which she had taken so prominent a part.
It had happened that her father, The Moose That Walks, and her brother, Rippling Water, had been absent many days from Mrs. Medlicott's ranch, where they lived and worked. The crops were not yet ready for harvesting, and there was not much for them to do on the farm lands, whereas the beaver were plentiful on the creeks and in their best condition; so the father and son had gone trapping on the head waters of the Bow River.
They had left word at the ranch that if they did not return within a stated time it would mean that they were having good luck, and that Maple Leaf was to go to them with some further supplies of the white man's food—tea, sugar, flour, with rifle cartridges, not forgetting tobacco.
So Maple Leaf had filled her saddle-bags, mounted her pony, and gone off on the trail alone to the trappers' dug-out on far-away Butterfly Creek.