Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/79

Rh faint, uneradicable stamp of the high cheek-bones. He was watching the red curve of the lips, and the perfect chin where the cap-tie went.

The moose backed, scrabbling its splay feet in the snow, and Tempest spoke like a man suddenly waked.

"I—I beg your pardon. You were in a hurry"

"No," said the girl. "I was just pretending to be the wind." Her voice was grave. For though she was used to have men look at her, Life had not taken her among those who looked as Tempest looked now.

"For God's sake," he said and moved forward. "Who are you?"

"I am Grange's Andree," she said.

The name meant nothing to Tempest, for Dick had not thought fit to speak of O'Hara's private feelings. The girl whipped off her mitten; swept up a handful of snow, and rubbed vigorously at Tempest's cheek with the colour breaking on her face and her warm breath over him.

"Frost-bite," she exclaimed. And then Tempest took her stiffened hand between his and brought life back to it with an energy that set her to laughing such a rollicking care-free laugh that Tempest laughed too, unknowing why any more than he knew of the Indian taint in her or of the wild drop that called to sky and wind and was never content with the earth.

"Bo' soir, M'sieu," she cried suddenly; pulled free, whistled the moose in the high bell-note that would call him later from his kind in the forest, and fled down the track like the wind she had pretended to be. And Tempest went home with that awakened look yet in his eyes.

Andree corralled the moose in the hotel-lot; fed it with green branches sliced down from spruce and cedar, and flung herself on the hard-wood sofa in the corner of the little back eating-room at Grange's. She thrust her cap back, idly watching Grange's half-breed wife roll her fat bulk to the kitchen and back with plates of smoking meat, with hot biscuits and with babies of various ages and sexes which she set about as indifferently as she set the plates of meat. They lay or sat, according to their size, staring on their small world of smoked log ceiling and