It was just at the moment when despair appeared about to take possession of them that Patsy, chancing to glance away at the hills that loomed above the opposite banks, suddenly cried:
“Look! A man!”
All looked in the direction she had pointed. The man was standing perfectly still, but his right hand was pointing. Like a wooden signboard, it pointed downstream. Three times the arm dropped. Three times it was raised to point again.
“He is an Indian,” said Terogloona, stoically. “It is his country. He knows. We must go back. The crossing lies in that direction.”
As the man on the hill saw them turn their herd about and start back, he began to travel slowly downstream. All that day, and even into the night, he went before them, showing the way.
“Like the pillar of fire,” said Marian, with a little choke in her voice.
There was no doubt in her mind that this benefactor was the Indian they had befriended when he was starving. To her lips there came a line she had long known, “I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat.”
Not wishing to camp again at the edge of the forest, they traveled without rest or food for eight hours. At last, when they were so hungry and weary that they felt they must drop in their tracks and fall asleep, they came suddenly to a place where the troubled rush of waters ceased; where the river spread out into a broad, quiet, icebound lake.
“Thank God!” Marian murmured reverently as she dropped exhausted upon her sled.
After resting and eating a cold lunch of hardtack, frozen boiled beans, and reindeer steak, they headed the herd across the lake. Having passed through the narrow forest that skirted the lake, they came upon a series of low-lying, barren hills. Here, in a little gully lined with willows whose clinging dead leaves rustled incessantly in the breeze, the girls made camp.