Across in the darkness among the Bois-Brules one ear had lain close to the tell-tale earth, one evil face peered unsleeping among the dusky shapes of the camp, a swarthy face with a white lock on its temple.
Keener than all the rest, Bois DesCaut, driven by personal hate, listened to all the sounds of night.
And he had heard a changing in the steps that passed and repassed, that separated and came together, before that lodge across the sleeping mob,—a change, a little silence, and then the steps again that presently thinned to ONE,—one step that paced evenly, with a measured tread, a moccasined step like that of an Indian, yet somehow alien in its firmness and swing.
One step where there should have been two,—and the half-breed trapper raised himself and gave the first “Hi! Hi!”
Like startled wolves they were up all around him in a moment and down on that empty tepee with its one sentry!
A torch flared redly with the sudden revealing of a slim youth in buckskins and two Nakonkirhirinon warriors deep in the Great Sleep.
What was there for Marc Dupre in that moment of roused fury,—that tense moment of awaking rage, of baffled rights of payment?
What but death too swift and unrestrained for torture?
A dozen weapons reached him from as many crowding hands and he went down on the last earth her feet had trod, the spot where she had last touched his hand.
Her golden voice, sweet with its sliding minors, was in his ears, the sweetness of her lips on his.