"If they do not come back, or if we do not find meat in seven days," he said, "we will die."

Roscoe made an effort to rise, and the effort sent a rush of fire into his head. He turned dizzy, and fell back with a groan. In an instant the girl was at his side—ahead of the man. Her hands were at his face, her eyes glowing again. He felt that he was falling into a deep sleep. But the eyes did not leave him. They were wonderful eyes, glorious eyes! He dreamed of them in the strange sleep that came to him, and they grew more and more beautiful, shining with a light which thrilled him even in his unconsciousness. After a time there came a black, more natural sort of night to him. He awoke from it refreshed. It was day. The tepee was filled with light, and for the first time he looked about him. He was alone. A fire burned low among the stones; over it simmered a pot. The earth floor of the tepee was covered with deer and caribou skins, and opposite him there was another bunk. He drew himself painfully to a sitting posture and found that it was his shoulder and hip that hurt him. He rose to his feet, and stood balancing himself feebly when the door to the tepee was drawn back and Oachi entered. At sight of him, standing up from his bed, she made a quick movement to draw back, but Roscoe reached out his hands with a low cry of pleasure.

"Oachi," he cried softly. "Come in!" He spoke in French, and Oachi's face lighted up like sunlight. "I am better," he said. "I am well. I want to thank you—and the others." He made a step toward her, and the strength of his left leg gave way. He would have fallen if she had not darted to him so quickly that she made a prop for him, and her eyes looked up into his whitened face, big and frightened and filled with pain.

"Oo-ee-ee," she said in Cree, her red lips rounded as she saw him flinch, and that one word, a song in a word; came to him like a flute note.

"It hurts—a little," he said. He dropped back on his bunk, and Oachi sank upon the skins at his feet, looking up at him steadily with her wonderful, pure eyes, her mouth still rounded, little wrinkles of tense anxiety drawn in her forehead. Roscoe laughed.

For a few moments his soul was filled with a strange gladness. He reached out his hand and stroked it over her shining hair, and a radiance such as he had never seen leapt into her eyes. "You—talk—French?" he asked slowly.

She nodded.

"Then tell me this—you are hungry—starving?"

She nodded again, and made a cup of her two small hands. "No meat. This little—so much—flour—" Her throat trembled and her voice fluttered. But even as she measured out their starvation her face was looking at him joyously. And then she added, with the gladness of a child, "Feesh, for you," and pointed to the simmering pot.

"For ME!" Roscoe looked at the pot, and then back at her.

"Oachi," he said gently, "go tell your father that I am ready to talk with him. Ask him to come—now."

She looked at him for a moment as though she did not quite understand what he had said, and he repeated the words. Even as he was speaking he marvelled at the fairness of her skin, which shone with a pink flush, and at the softness and beauty of her hair. What he saw impelled him to ask, as she made to rise:

"Your father—your mother—is French. Is that so, Oachi?" The girl nodded again, with the soft little Cree throat note that meant yes. Then she slipped to her feet and ran out, and a little later there came into the tepee the man who had first loomed up in the dusky light like a god of the First People to Roscoe Cummins. His splendid face was a little more gaunt than the night before, and Roscoe knew that famine came hand in hand with him. He had seen starvation before, and he knew that it reddened the eyes and gave the lips a grayish pallor. These things, and more, he saw in Oachi's father. But Mukoki came in straight and erect, hiding his weakness under the pride of his race. Fighting down his pain Roscoe rose at sight of him and held out his hands.

"I want to thank you," he said, repeating the words he had spoken to Oachi. "You have saved my life. But I have eyes, and I can see. You gave me of your last fish. You have no meat. You have no flour. You are starving. What? I have asked you to come and tell me, so that I may know how it fares with your women and children. You will give me a council, and we will smoke." Roscoe dropped back on his bunk. He drew forth his pipe and filled it with tobacco. The Cree sat down mutely in the centre of the tepee. They smoked, passing the pipe back and forth without speaking. Once Roscoe loaded the pipe, and once the chief; and when the last puff of the last pipeful was taken the Indian reached over his hand, and Roscoe gripped it hard.

And then, while the storm still moaned far up over their heads, Roscoe Cummins listened to the old, old story of the First People—the story of starvation and of death. To him it was epic. It was terrible. But to the other it was the mere coming and going of a natural thing, of a thing that had existed for him and for his kind since life began, and he spoke of it quietly and without a gesture. There had been a camp of twenty-two, and there were now fifteen. Seven had died, four men, two women, and one child. Each day during the great storm the men had gone out on their futile search for game, and every few days one of them had failed to return. Thus four had died. The dogs were eaten. Corn and fish were gone; there remained but a little flour, and this was for the women and the children. The men had eaten nothing but bark and roots for five days. And there seemed to be no hope. It was death to stray far from the camp. That morning the two men had set out for the post, but Mukoki said calmly that they would never return. And then Roscoe spoke of Oachi, his daughter, and for the first time the iron lines of the chief's bronze face seemed to soften, and his head bent over a little, and his shoulders drooped. Not until then did Roscoe learn the depths of sorrow hidden behind the splendid strength of the starving man. Oachi's mother had been a French woman. Six months before she had died in this tepee, and Mukoki had buried his wife up on the face of the mountain, where the storm was moaning. After this Roscoe could not speak. He was choking. He loaded his pipe again, and sat down close to the chief, so that their knees and their shoulders touched, and thus, as taught him by old Rameses, he smoked with Oachi's father the pledge of eternal friendship, of brotherhood in life, of spirit communion in the Valley of Silent Men. After that Mukoki left him and he crawled back upon his bunk, weak and filled with pain, knowing that he was facing death with the others. He was not afraid, but was filled with a great thankfulness that, even at the price of starvation, fate had allowed him to touch at last the edge of the fabric of his dreams. All of that day he wrote, in the hours when he felt best. He filled page after page of the tablets which he carried in his pack, writing feverishly and with great haste, oppressed only by the fear that he would not be able to finish the message which he had for the people of that other world a thousand miles away. Three times during the morning Oachi came in and brought him the cooked fish and a biscuit which she had made for him out of flour and meal. And each time he said, "I am a man with the other men, Oachi. I would be a woman if I ate."

The third time Oachi knelt close down at his side, and when he refused the food again there came a strange light into her eyes, and she said, "If you starve—I starve!"

It was the first revelation to him. He put up his hands. They touched her face. Some potent spirit in him carried him across all gulfs. In that moment, thrilling, strange, he was heart and soul of the First People. In an instant he had drifted back a thousand years, beyond the memory of cities, of clubs, of all that went with civilization. A wild, half savage longing filled him. One of his hands slipped to her shining hair, and suddenly their faces lay close to each other, and he knew that in that moment love had come to him from the fount of glory itself.

* * * * *

Days followed—black days filled with the endless terrors of the storm. And yet they were days of a strange contentment which Roscoe had never felt before. Oachi and her father were with him a great deal in the tepee which they had given up to him. On the third day Roscoe noticed that Oachi's little hands were bruised and red and he found that the chief's daughter had gone out to dig down through ice and snow with the other women after roots. The camp lived entirely on roots now—wild flag and moose roots ground up and cooked in a batter. On this same day, late in the afternoon, there came a low wailing grief from one of the tepees, a moaning sound that pitched itself to the key of the storm until it seemed to be a part of it. A child had died, and the mother was mourning. That night another of the camp huntsmen failed to return at dusk.

The next day Roscoe was able to move about in his tepee without pain. Oachi and her father were with him when, for the first time, he got out his comb and military brushes and began grooming his touselled hair. Oachi watched him, and suddenly, seeing the wondering pleasure in her eyes, he held out the brushes to her. "You may have them, Oachi," he said, and the girl accepted them with a soft little cry of delight. To his amazement she began unbraiding her hair immediately, and then she stood up before him, hidden to her knees in her wonderful wealth of shining tresses, and Roscoe Cummins thought in this moment that he had never seen a woman more beautiful than the half Cree girl. When they had gone he still saw her, and the vision troubled him. They came in again at night, when the fire was sending red and yellow lights up and down the tepee walls, and the more he watched Oachi the stronger there grew within him something that seemed to gnaw and gripe with a dull sort of pain. Oachi was beautiful. He had never seen hair like her hair. He had never before seen eyes more beautiful. He had never heard a voice so low and sweet and filled with bird-like ripples of music. She was beautiful, and yet with her beauty there was a primitiveness, a gentle savagery, and an age-old story written in the fine lines of her face which made him uneasy with the thought of a thing that was almost tragedy. Oachi loved him. He could see that love in her eyes, in her movement; he could feel it in her presence, and the sweet song of it trembled in her voice when she spoke to him. Ordinarily a white man would have accepted this love; he would have rejoiced in it, and would have played with it for a time, as they have done with the loves of the women of Oachi's people since the beginning of white man's time. But Roscoe Cummins was of a different type. He was a man of ideals, and in Oachi's love he saw his ideal of love set apart from him by illimitable voids. This night, in the firelit tepee, there came to him like a painful stab the truth of Ransom's words. He had been born some thousands of years too late. He saw in Oachi love and life as they might have been for him; but beyond them he also saw, like a grim and threatening hand, a vision of cities, of toiling millions, of a great work just begun—a vision of life as it was intended that he should live it; and to shut it out from him he bowed his head in his two hands, overwhelmed by a new grief.

The chief sat with his face to the fire, smoking silently, and Oachi came to Roscoe's side, and touched hands timidly, like a little child. She seemed to him wondrously like a child when he lifted his head and looked down into her face. She smiled at him, questioning him, and he smiled his answer back, yet neither broke the silence with words. He heard only the soft little note in Oachi's throat that filled him with such an exquisite sensation, and he wondered what music would be if it could find expression through a voice like hers.

"Oachi," he asked softly, "why did you never sing?"

The girl looked at him in silence for a moment.

"We starve," she said. She swept her hand toward the door of the tepee. "We starve—die—there is no song."

He put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to him, as he might have done with a little child.

"I wish you would sing, Oachi," he said.

For a moment the girl's dark eyes glowed up at him. Then she drew back softly, and seated herself before the fire, with her back turned toward him, close beside her father. A strange quiet filled the tepee. Over their heads the wailing storm seemed to die for a moment; and then something rose in its place, so low and gentle at first that it seemed like a whisper, but growing in sweetness and volume until Roscoe Cummins sat erect, his eyes flashing, his hands clenched, looking at Oachi. The storm rose, and with it the song—a song that reached down into his soul, stirring him now with its gladness, now with a half savage pain; but always with a sweetness that engulfed for him all other things, until he was listening only to the voice. And then silence came again within the tepee. Over the mountain the wind burst more fiercely. The chief sat motionless. In Oachi's hair the firelight glistened with a dull radiance. There was quiet, and yet Roscoe still heard the voice. He knew that he would always hear it, that it would never die.

Not until long afterward did he know that Oachi had sung to him the great love song of the Crees.

That night and the next day, and the terrible night and day that followed, Roscoe fought with himself. He won—when alone—and lost when Oachi was with him. In some ways she knew intuitively that he loved to see her with her splendid hair down, and she would sit at his feet and brush it, while he tried to hide his admiration and smother the passion which sprang up in his breast when she was near. He knew, in these moments, that it was too late to kill the thing that was born in him—the craving of his heart and his soul for this girl of the First People who had laid her life at his feet and who was removed from him by barriers which he could never pass. On the afternoon of his seventh day in camp an Indian hunter ran in from the forest nearly crazed with joy. He had ventured farther away than the others, and had found a moose-yard. He had killed two of the animals. The days of famine were over. Oachi brought the first news to Roscoe. Her face was radiant with joy, her eyes burned like stars, and in her excitement she stretched out her arms to him as she cried out the wonderful news. Roscoe took her two hands.

"Is it true, Oachi?" he asked. "They have surely killed meat?"

"Yes—yes—yes," she cried. "They have killed meat—much meat—"

She stopped at the strange, hard look in Roscoe's eyes. He was looking overhead. If he had looked down, into the glory and love of her eyes, he would have swept her close in his arms, and the last fight would have been over then and there. Oachi went out, wondering at the coldness with which he had received the word of their deliverance, and little guessing that in that moment he had fought the greatest battle of his life. Each day after this called him back to the fight. His two broken ribs healed slowly. The storm passed. The sun followed it, and the March winds began bringing up warmth from the south. Days grew into weeks, and the snow was growing soft underfoot before he dared venture forth short distances from the camp alone. He tried often to make Oachi understand, but he always stopped short of what he meant to say; his hand would steal to her beautiful hair, and in Oachi's throat would sound the inimitable little note of happiness. Each day he was more and more handicapped. For in the joy of her great love Oachi became more beautiful and her voice still sweeter. By the time the snows began running down from the mountains and the poplar buds began to swell she was telling him the most sacred of all sacred things, and one day she told him of the wonderful world far to the west, painted by the glow of the setting sun, wherein lay the Valley of Silent Men.

"And that is Heaven—your Heaven," breathed Roscoe. He was almost well now, but he was sitting on the edge of his bunk, and Oachi knelt in the old place upon the deer skin at his feet. As he spoke he stroked her hair.

"Tell me," he said, "what sort of a place it is, Oachi."

"It is beautiful," spoke Oachi softly.

"Long, long ago the Great God came down among us and lived for a time; and He came at a time like that which has just passed, and He saw suffering, and hunger, and death. And when He saw what life was He made for us another world, and told us that it should be called the Valley of Silent Men; and that when we died we would go to this place, and that at last—when all of our race were gone—He would cause the earth to roll three times, and in the Valley of Silent Men all would awaken into life which would never know death, or sorrow, or pain again. And He says that those who love will awaken there—hand in hand."

"It is beautiful," said Roscoe. He felt himself trembling. Oachi's breath was against his hand. It was his last fight. He half reached out, as if to clasp her to him; but beyond her he still saw the other thing—the other world. He rose to his feet, not daring to look at her now. He loved her too much to sacrifice her. And it would be a sacrifice. He tried to speak firmly.

"Oachi," he said, "I am nearly well enough to travel now. I have spent pleasant weeks with you, weeks which I shall never forget. But it is time for me to go back to my people. They are expecting me. They are waiting for me, and wondering at my absence. I am as you would be if you were down there in a great city. So I must go. I must go to-morrow, or the next day, or soon after. Oachi—"

He still looked where he could not see her face. But he heard her move. He knew that slowly she was drawing away.

"Oachi—"

She was near the door now, and his eyes turned toward her. She was looking back, her slender shoulders bent over, her glorious hair rippling to her knees, as she had left it undone for him. In her eyes was love such as falls from the heavens. But her face was as white as a mask.

"Oachi!"

With a cry Roscoe reached out his arms. But Oachi was gone. At last the Cree girl understood.

* * * * *

Three days later there came in the passing of a single day and night the splendour of northern spring. The sun rose warm and golden. From the sides of the mountains and in the valleys water poured forth in rippling, singing floods. There bakneesh glowed on bared rocks. Moose-birds, and jays, and wood-thrushes flitted about the camp, and the air was filled with the fragrant smells of new life bursting from earth, and tree, and shrub. On this morning of the third day Roscoe strode forth from his tepee, with his pack upon his back. An Indian guide waited for him outside. He had smoked his last pipe with the chief, and now he went from tepee to tepee, in the fashion of the Crees, and drew a single puff from the pipe of each master, until there was but one tepee left, and in that was Oachi. With a white face he rubbed his hand over the deer-flap, and waited. Slowly it was drawn back, and Oachi came out. He had not seen her since the night he had driven her from him, and he had planned to say things in this last moment which he might have said then. But words stumbled on his lips. Oachi was changed. She seemed taller. Her beautiful eyes looked at him clearly and proudly. For the first time she was to him Oachi, the "Sun Child," a princess of the First People—the daughter of a Cree chief. He held out his hand, and the hand which Oachi gave to him was cold and lifeless. She smiled when he told her that he had come to say good-bye, and when she spoke to him her voice was as clear as the stream singing through the canon. His own voice trembled. In spite of his mightiest effort a tightening fist seemed choking him.

"I am coming back—some day," he managed.

Oachi smiled, with the glory of the morning sun in her eyes and hair. She turned, still smiling, and pointed far to the west.

"And some day—the Valley of Silent Men will awaken," she said, and reentered her father's tepee.

Out of the camp staggered Roscoe Cummins behind his Indian guide, a blinding heat in his eyes. Once or twice a gulping sob rose in his throat, and he clutched hard at his heart to beat himself into submission to the great law of life as it had been made for him.

An hour later the two came to a stream where there was a canoe. Because of rapids and the fierceness of the spring floods, portages were many, and progress slow during the whole of that day. They had made twenty miles when the sun began sinking in the west, and they struck camp. After their supper of meat the Cree rolled himself in his blanket and slept. But for long hours Roscoe sat beside their fire. Night dropped about him, a splendid night filled with sweet breaths and stars and a new moon, and with strange sounds which came to him now in a language which he was beginning to understand. From far away there floated faintly to his ears the lonely cry of a wolf, and it no longer made him shudder, but filled him with the mysterious longing of the cry itself. It was the mate-song of the beast of prey, sending up its message to the stars—crying out to all the wilderness for a response to its loneliness. Night birds twittered about him. A loon laughed in its mocking joy. An owl hooted down at him from the black top of a tall spruce. From out of starvation and death the wilderness had awakened. Its sounds spoke to him still of grief, of the suffering that would never know end; and yet there trembled in them a note of happiness and of content. Beside the campfire it came to him that in this world he had discovered two things—a suffering that he had never known, and a peace he had never known. And Oachi stood for them both. He thought of her until drowsiness drew a pale film over his eyes. The birch crackled more and more faintly in the fire and sounds died away. The stillness of sleep fell about him. Scarce had he fallen into slumber than his eyes seemed to open wide and wakeful, and out of the gloom beyond the smouldering fire he saw a human form slowly revealing itself, until there stood clearly within his vision a figure which he at first took to be that of Mukoki, the chief. But in another moment he saw that it was even taller than the tall chief, and that its eyes had searched him out. When he heard a voice, speaking in Cree the words which mean, "Whither goest thou?" he was startled to hear his own voice reply: "I am going back to my people."

He stared into vacancy, for at the sound of his voice the vision faded away; but there came a voice to him back through the night, which said: "And it is here that you have found that of which you have dreamed—Life, and the Valley of Silent Men!"

Roscoe was wide awake now. The voice and the vision had seemed so real to him that he looked about him tremblingly into the starlit gloom of the forest, as if not quite sure that he had been dreaming. Then he crawled into his balsam shelter, drew his blankets about him, and fell asleep.

The next day he had little to say to his Indian companion as they made their way downstream. At each dip of their paddles a deeper sickness seemed to enter into his heart. Life, after all, he tried to reason, was like a tailored garment. One might have an ideal, and if that ideal became a realization it would be found a misfit for one reason or another. So he told himself, in spite of fill the dreams which had urged him on in the fight for better things. There flooded upon him now the forceful truth of what Ransom had said. His work, as he had begun it, was at an end, his fabric of idealism had fallen into ruins. For he had found all that was ideal—love, faith, purity, and beauty—and he, Roscoe Cummins, the idealist, had repulsed them because they were not dressed in the tailored fashion of his kind. He told himself the truth with brutal directness. Before him he saw another work in his books, but of a different kind; and each hour that passed added to the conviction within him that at last that work would prove a failure. He went off alone into the forest when they camped, early in the afternoon, and thought of Oachi, who would mourn him until the end of time. And he—could he forget? What if he had yielded to temptation, and had taken Oachi with him? She would have come. He knew that. She would have sacrificed herself to him forever, would have gone with him into a life which she could not understand, and would never understand, satisfied to live in his love alone. The old, choking hand gripped at his heart, and yet with the pain of it there was still a rejoicing that he had not surrendered to the temptation, that he had been strong enough to save her.

The last light of the setting sun cast film-like webs of yellow and gold through the forest as he turned in the direction of camp. It was that hour in which a wonderful quiet falls upon the wilderness, the last minutes between night and day, when all wild life seems to shrink in suspensive waiting for the change. Seven months had taught Roscoe a quiet of his own. His moccasined feet made no sound. His head was bent, his shoulders had a tired droop, and his eyes searched for nothing in the mystery about him. His heart seemed weighted under a pressure that had taken all life from him, and close above him, in a balsam bough, a night bird twittered. In response to it a low cry burst from his lips, a cry of loneliness and of grief. In that moment he saw Oachi again at his feet; he heard the low, sweet note of love in her throat, so much like that of the bird over his head; he saw the soft lustre of her hair, the glory of her eyes, looking up at him from the half gloom of the tepee, telling him that they had found their god. It was all so near, so real for a moment, that he sprang erect, his fingers clutching handfuls of moss. He looked toward the camp, and he saw something move between the rock and the fire.

It was a wolf, he thought, or perhaps a lynx, and drawing his revolver he moved quickly and silently in its direction. The object had disappeared behind a little clump of balsam shrub within fifty paces of the camp, and as he drew nearer, until he was no more than ten paces away, he wondered why it did not break cover.

There were no trees, and it was quite light where the balsam grew. He approached, step by step. And then, suddenly, from almost under his hands, something darted away with a strange, human cry, turning upon him for a single instant a face that was as white as the white stars of early night—a face with great, glowing, half-mad eyes. It was Oachi. His pistol dropped to the ground. His heart stopped beating. No cry, no breath of sound, came from his paralyzed lips. And like a wild thing Oachi was fleeing from him into the darkening depths of the forest. Life leaped into his limbs, and he raced like mad after her, overtaking her with a panting, joyous cry. When she saw that she was caught the girl turned. Her hair had fallen, and swept about her shoulders and her body. She tried to speak, but only bursting sobs came from her breast. As she shrank from him, Roscoe saw that her clothing was in shreds, and that her thin moccasins were almost torn from her little feet. The truth held him for another moment stunned and speechless. Like a lightning flash there recurred to him her last words: "And some day—the Valley of Silent Men will awaken." He understood—now. She had followed him, fighting her way through swamp and forest along the river, hiding from him, and yet keeping him company so long as her little broken heart could urge her on. And then alone, with a last prayer for him—she had planned to kill herself. He trembled. Something wonderful happened with him, flooding his soul with day—with a joy that descended upon him as the Hand of the Messiah must have fallen upon the heads of the children of Samaria. With a great, glad cry he sprang toward Oachi and caught her in his arms, crushing her face to him, kissing her hair and her eyes and her mouth until at last with a strange, soft cry she put her arms up about his neck and sobbed like a little child upon his breast.

Back in the camp the Indian waited. The white stars grew red. In the forest the shadows deepened to the chaos of night. Once more there was sound, the pulse and beat of a life that moves in darkness. In the camp the Indian grew restless with the thought that Roscoe had wandered away until he was lost. So at last he fired his rifle.

Oachi started in Roscoe's arms.

"You should go back—alone," she whispered. The old, fluttering love-note was in her voice, sweeter than the sweetest music to Roscoe Cummins. He turned her face up, and held it between his two hands.

"If I go there," he said, pointing for a moment into the south, "I go alone. But if I go there—" and he pointed into the north—"I go with you. Oachi, my beloved, I am going with you." He drew her close again, and asked, almost in a whisper: "And when we awaken in the Valley of Silent Men, how shall it be, my Oachi?"

And with the sweet love-note, Oachi said in Cree:

"Hand in hand, my master."

Hand in hand they returned to the waiting Indian and the fire.

THE END