"Surely," thought Storm, "I've been here before. Aye, in this life I've sat beside that fire."
He peered through a veil of rain into the violet gloom. "If it were only clear enough!" he thought. "There is the Apse of Ice!"
He walked to the eastward edge of the platform and looked down the hillside, precipitous, flecked with dark juniper bushes. A thousand feet below he could see a level mead where there were horses grazing, and there in the pasture close against the hill was a tipi. That was her lodge!
Risking his neck on slippery ground and snowdrift, he rushed that hillside, leaping, sliding, rolling, falling, catching at bushes, then scrambling to his feet and quartering zigzag downwards until, breathless and frantic, he pulled himself up short behind the tipi. It showed no smoke, no firelight.
He groped his way in the dark, round to the eastward side where the closed square flap of the doorway faced the valley. There he tripped over something, and reaching out his hands to save himself, he found the body of a man, of Rain's enemy whom he had come to kill. To all Indians the place was holy, the priestess a sacred woman. The tribes would burn the man who dared molest her. This was no Indian. These sodden clothes, a serge shirt, duck overalls, long boots, were those of a white man. There was but one white man in these mountains, Hiram Kant, the American trapper, known to the Indians as Hunt-the-girls, who had "heard of a crick up north a-ways, plumb spoiled with beaver dams."
Storm's groping fingers found the wound. The touch of it made him retch, for this man was wounded—horribly. Rain's vengeance had struck. And Thunder Feather had given to this trapper Hunt-the-girls a new name—"No-man."
If he had only been dead! But this thing was alive, delirious, muttering, moaning for water. "And it wouldn't be decent to kill—until I gets him well enough to fight me. I suppose I got to——"
Sick, faint, reeling, Storm groped in the dark until he found by the tent door an elk paunch used as a bucket, and half full of water. He poured some into No-man's mouth.
And all the while there were words, dimly remembered words, which would run in Storm's head:
"If thine enemy hunger!"