An hour before day in the Kootenais! Not the musical dawn of that early autumn, when all the woods were a-quiver with the fullness of color and sound; when the birds called to each other of the coming sun, and the little rills of the shady places moistened the sweet fern and spread its fragrance around and about, until one could find no couch so seductive as one on the amber grasses with the rare, all-pervading scents of the virgin soil.

Not any of those seductions solaced or made more bitter the watch of the men who stood hopeless in the snow of that treacherous ravine. Not even a fire dared be lit all the night long, because of those suddenly murderous natives, who, through knowing the secrets of the cleft earth, held their fates at the mercy of eager bronze hands.

"And one man who knew the country could have prevented this!" groaned Hardy, with a thought of the little wife and Miss Margaret. How would they listen to this story?

"If we had Genesee with us, we should not have been penned up in any such fashion as this," decided Murray, stamping back and forward, as many others were doing, to keep their blood in circulation—for what?

"Hard to tell," chimed in the scout from Idaho. "Don't know as it's any better to be tricked by one's own gang than the hostiles. Genesee, more'n likely, was gettin' ready for this when he run off the stock."

Just then something struck him. The snow made a soft bed, but the assailant had not stopped to consider that, and quick as light his knee was on the fallen man's chest.

"Take it back!" he commanded, with the icy muzzle of a revolver persuading his meaning into the brain of the surprised scout. "That man is no horse-thief. Take it back, or I'll save the Indians the trouble of wasting lead on you."

"Well," reasoned the philosopher in the snow, "this ain't the damnedest best place I've ever been in for arguin' a point, an' as you have fightin' ideas on the question, an' I haven't any ideas, an' don't care a hell of a sight, I'll eat my words for the time bein', and we'll settle the question o' that knock on the head, if the chance is ever given us to settle anything, out o' this gully."

"What's this?" and though only outlines of figures could be distinguished, the voice was the authoritative one of Captain Holt. "Mr. Stuart, I am surprised to find you in this sort of thing, and about that squaw man back in camp. Find something better to waste your strength for. There is no doubt in my mind now of the man's complicity—"

"Stop it!" broke in Stuart curtly; "you can hold what opinion you please of him, but you can't tell me he's a horse-thief. A squaw man and adopted Indian he may be and altogether an outlaw in your eyes; but I doubt much your fitness to judge him, and advise you not to call him a thief until you are able to prove your words, or willing to back them with all we've got left here."

All they had left was their lives, and Stuart's unexpected recklessness and sharp words told them his was ready as a pledge to his speech. None cared, at that stage of the game, to question why. It was no time for quarrels among themselves when each felt that with the daylight might come death.

Afterward, when the tale was told, no man could remember which of them first discovered a form in their midst that had not been with them on their entrance—a breathless, panting figure, that leaned against one of their horses.

"Who is it?" someone asked.

"What is it?"

No one answered—only pressed closer, with fingers on triggers, fearing treachery. And then the panting figure raised itself from its rest on the horse's neck, rose to a stature not easily mistaken, even in that light, and a familiar, surly voice spoke:

"I don't reckon any of you need be puzzled much to find out; hasn't been such a long time since you saw me."

"By God, it's Genesee!"

And despite the wholesale condemnation of the man, there was not a heart that did not grow lighter with the knowledge. They knew, or believed, that here was the one man who had the power to save them, if he cared to use it; but would he?

"Jack!"

Someone, at sound of his voice, pushed through the crowd with outstretched hand. It was not refused this time.

"I've come for you," was all Genesee said; then he turned to the others.

"Are you willing to follow me?" he asked, raising his voice a little. "The horses can't go through where I've got to take you; you'll have to leave them."

A voice close to his elbow put in a word of expostulation against the desertion of the horses. Genesee turned on the speaker with an oath.

"You may command in a quiet camp, but we're outside of it now, and I put just a little less value on your opinion than on any man's in the gulch. This is a question for every man to answer for himself. You've lost their lives for them if they're kept here till daylight. I'll take them out if they're ready to come."

There was no dissenting voice. Compared with the inglorious death awaiting them in the gulch, the deliverance was a God-send. They did not just see how it was to be effected; but the strange certainty of hope with which they turned to the man they had left behind as a horse-thief was a thing surprising to them all, when they had time to think of it—in the dusk of the morning, they had not.

He appeared among them as if a deliverer had materialized from the snow-laden branches of cedar, or from the close-creeping clouds of the mountain. They had felt themselves touched by a superstitious thrill when he was found in their midst; but they knew that, come as he might, be what he would, they had in him one to whom the mountains were as an open book, as the Indians knew when they tendered him the significant name of Lamonti.

Captain Holt was the only rebel on the horse question; to add those to the spoils of the Indians was a bitter thing for him to do.

"It looks as if we were not content with them taking half our stock, but rode up here to leave them the rest," he said, aggressively, to nobody in particular. "I've a notion to leave only the carcasses."

"Not this morning," broke in the scout. "We've no time to wait for work of that sort. Serves you right to lose them, too, for your damned blunders. Come along if you want to get out of this—single file, and keep quiet."

It was no time for argument or military measures for insubordination; and bitter as the statement of inefficiency was, Captain Holt knew there were some grounds for it, and knew that, in the eyes of the men, he was judged from the same standpoint. The blind raid with green scouts did seem, looking back at it, like a headlong piece of folly. How much of folly the whole attack was, they did not as yet realize.

It was not far that Genesee led them through the stunted, gnarled growth up the steep sides of the gulch. Half-way to the top there were, in the summer-time, green grass and low brush in which the small game could hide; but above that rose a sheer wall of rock clear up to where the soil had gathered and the pines taken root.

In the dusk they could see no way of surmounting it; yet there was no word of demur, not even a question. He was simply their hope, and they followed him.

And their guide felt it. He knew few of them liked him personally, and it made his victory the greater; but even above that was the thought that his freedom was due to the girl who never guessed how he should use it.

He felt, some way, as if he must account to her for every act she had given him the power to perform, as if his life itself belonged to her, and the sweetness of the thought was with him in every step of the night ride, in every plan for the delivery of the men.

At the very foot of the rock wall he stopped and turned to the man next him. It was Hardy.

"It's a case of 'crawl' here for a few lengths; pass the word along, and look out for your heads."

The next instant he had vanished under the rock wall—Hardy following him; then a flicker of light shone like a star as a guide for the others, and in five minutes every man of them had wriggled through what seemed but a slit in the solid front.

"A regular cave, by hooky!" said the moral guide from Idaho, as he stood upright at last. His voice echoed strangely. "Hooky! hooky! hooky!" sounded from different points where the shadows deepened, suggesting endless additions to the room where they stood.

Genesee had halted and was splitting up some pine for a torch, using the knife Rachel had cut his bonds with, and showing that the handle was stained with blood, as were the sticks of pine he was handling.

"Look for some more sticks around here, and lend a hand," he said. "We need more than one torch. I burnt up what I had in working through that hole. I've been at it for three hours, I reckon, without knowing, till I got the last stone away, whether I'd be in time or find daylight on the other side."

"And is that what cut your hands?" asked Lieutenant Murray. "Why, they're a sight! For heaven's sake, what have you been doing?"

"I found a 'cave-in' of rock and gravel right at the end of that tunnel," answered Genesee, nodding the way they had just come, and drawing their notice to fresh earth and broken stone thrown to the side. "I had no tools here, nothing but that," and he motioned toward a mallet-like thing of stone. "My tools were moved from the mine over to Scot's Mountain awhile back, and as that truck had to be hoisted away, and I hadn't time to invite help, it had to be done with these;" and he held out his hands that were bleeding—a telling witness of his endeavors to reach there in time. And every man of them felt it.

There was an impulsive move forward, and Hardy was the first to hold out his hand. But Genesee stepped back, and leaned against the wall.

"That's all right, Hardy," he said, with something of his old careless smile. "I'm glad you're the first, for the sake of old times; but I reckon it would be playing it pretty low down on a friend to let him take me in on false pretenses. You see I haven't been acquitted of horse-stealing yet—about the most low-lived trade a man can turn to, unless it is sheep-stealing."

"Oh, hell!" broke in one of the men, "this clears the horse business so far as I'm concerned, and I can bet on the other boys, too!"

"Can you?" asked Genesee, with a sort of elated, yet conservative, air; "but this isn't your game or the boys' game. I'm playing a lone hand, and not begging either. That torch ready?"

The rebuff kept the others from any advance, if they had thought of making it. Lieutenant Murray had picked up the stone mallet and was examining it by the flickering light; one side was flattened a little, like a tomahawk.

"That's a queer affair," he remarked. "What did you have it made for?"

"Have it made! The chances are that thing was made before Columbus ever managed a sail-boat," returned Genesee. "I found a lot of them in here; wedges, too, and such."

"In here?" and the men looked with a new interest at the rocky walls. "What is it?"

"An extension I tumbled into, over a year back, when I was tunneling at a drift the other side of the hill. One day I found that hole there, and minded it this morning, so it came in handy. I reckon this is the original Tamahnous mine of the old tribe. It's been lost over a hundred years. The Kootenais only have a tradition of it."

"A mine—gold?"

"Well, I was digging for a silver show when I struck it," answered Genesee; "and, so far as I see, that's what was here, but it's worked out. Didn't do much prospecting in it, as I left the Kootenai hills less than a week after. I just filled up the entry, and allowed it would keep till I got back."

"Does it belong to you?" asked one man, with speculation in his voice.

Genesee laughed. "I reckon so. Tamahnous Peak is mine, and a few feet of grazing land on the east. Nobody grudges it to me up this way. Indians think it's haunted, 'cause all the rocks around it give echoes; and I—"

He ceased speaking abruptly, his eyes on the pile of debris in the corner. Then he lit a fresh torch from the dying one, and gave the word to strike for the outside, following single file, as the hill was pretty well honey-combed, and it was wise to be cautious.

"Because," said their leader, "if any should stray off, we might not have time this day of our Lord to come back and hunt him up."

Before leaving what seemed like the back entrance, he walked over to the corner and picked up the thing that had arrested his attention a minute before, and slipping it in his pocket, walked to the head of the long line of men, several of whom were wounded, but only one less than the number who had left camp. And the one lacking was the man who had fired the first shot and killed the messenger from Grey Eagle—he himself dying from a wound, after the ride into the gulch.

As the scout passed the men, a hand and a pair of gloves were thrust out to him from a group; and turning his torch so that the light would show the giver, he saw it was Stuart.

"Thank you, sir," he said, with more graciousness than most of the men had ever seen in him; "I'll take them from you, as my own are damaged some." They were torn to shreds, and the fingers under them worn to the quick.

The echoing steps of the forty men were as if forty hundred were making their way through the mine of the Tamahnous; for no living tribe ever claimed it, even by descent. The hill that contained it had for generations been given by tradition to the witches of evil, who spoke through the rock—a clever scheme of those vanished workers to guard their wealth, or the wealth they hoped to find; but for what use? Neither silver in coin nor vessel can be traced as ever belonging to tribes of the Northern Indians. Yet that honey-combed peak, with its wide galleries, its many entries, and well-planned rooms, bespoke trained skill in underground quarrying. From some unseen source fresh air sifted through the darkness to them, and the tinkle of dripping water in pools came to their ears, though the pools were shrouded in the darkness that, just beyond the range of the few torches, was intense; and after the long tramp through echoing winds and turns, the misty dawn that was still early seemed dazzling to the eyes, red and haggard from the vigil of the night.

"You will have to get away from here on a double-quick," said Genesee sharply, after a glance at the sky and up the sides of the hill from which they had come. "Once down there in the valley, the fog may hide you till sun-up, and then, again, it mightn't. Just mind that they have horses."

"We are not likely to forget it," was Captain Holt's answer; and then hesitated a moment, looking at Genesee.

"Are you not coming with us?" asked Lieutenant Murray, giving voice to the question in his commander's mind as well as the others.

"Yes, part of the way," said the scout quietly, but with a challenge to detention in the slight pause with which he glanced at the group; "but I have a beast to carry me back, and I'm just tired enough to use it." And disappearing for a minute in the brush, he led out Mowitza, and, mounting her, turned her head toward the terraces of the lower valley.

They passed the isolated cabin that brought back to Stuart a remembrance of where they were; then down the steps of the Tamahnous and along the little lake, all swathed alike in the snow and the mist leaving null all character in the landscape.

The cabin was commented on by the men, to whom it was a surprise, looming up so close to them through the cloud curtain.

"That's mine," their guide remarked, and one of them, puzzled, stated it as his belief that Genesee claimed the whole Kootenai territory.

The scout gave up his saddle to a man with a leg-wound, but he did not let go the bridle of Mowitza; and so they went on with their guide stalking grimly ahead, ready, they all knew, to turn as fiercely against them at a sign of restraint as he had worked for them, if a movement was made to interfere with his further liberty.

The sun rolled up over the purple horizon—a great body of blushes suffusing the mountains; but its chaste entrance had brazened into a very steady stare before it could pierce the veil of the valleys, and pick out the dots of moving blue against the snow on the home trail.

It had been a wonderfully quiet tramp. Most of the thoughts of the party were of the man walking ahead of them, and his nearness made the discussion of his actions awkward. They did not know what to expect of him, and a general curiosity prevailed as to what he would do next.

They learned, when at last the ridge above camp was reached, about the middle of the forenoon. He had been talking some to the man on Mowitza, and when they reached that point he stopped.

"Whereabouts?" he asked; and the man pointed to a place where the snow was colored by soil.

"Over there! I guess the boys buried him."

"Well, you can get down from that saddle now. I reckon you can walk down to camp; if not, they can carry you." Then he turned to the rest.

"There's a body under that snow that I want," he said sententiously. "I'm not in condition for any more digging," and he glanced at his hands. "Are there any men among you that will get it out for me?"

"You bet!" was the unhesitating reply; and without question, hands and knives were turned to the task, the man on horseback watching them attentively.

"May I ask what that is for?" asked Captain Holt; at last, as amiably as he could, in the face of being ignored and affronted at every chance that was given Genesee. He had saved the commander's life; that was an easy thing to do compared with the possibility of hiding his contempt.

He was openly and even unreasonably aggressive—one of the spots in his nature that to a careless eye would appear the natural color of his whole character. He did not answer at once, and Captain Holt spoke again:

"What is the object of digging up that Indian?"

Then Genesee turned in the saddle.

"Just to give you all a little proof of how big a fool a man can be without being a 'permanent' in a lunatic asylum."

And then he turned his attention again to the men digging up the loose earth. They had not far to go; small care had been taken to make the grave deep.

"Take care there with your knives," said Genesee as one shoulder was bared to sight. "Lift him out. Here—give him to me."

"What in——"

"Give him to me!" he repeated. "I've given your damned fool lives back to forty of you, and all I'm asking for it is that Kootenai's dead body."

Stuart stooped and lifted the chill, dark thing, and other hands were quick to help. The frozen soil was brushed like dust from the frozen face, and then, heavy—heavy, it was laid in the arms of the man waiting for it.

He scanned from the young face to the moccasined feet swiftly, and then turned his eyes to the others.

"Where's his blanket?" he demanded; and a man who wore it pushed forward and threw it over the figure.

"Denny took it," he said in extenuation, "and when Denny went under, I took it."

"Yes!" and again his eyes swept the crowd. "Now I want his rifle, his knife, a snake-skin belt, and a necklace of bear's teeth—who's got them?"

"Well, I'll be damned!" "How's that for second sight?" "Beats the devil out of hell!" were some of the sotto-voce remarks exchanged at the enumeration of the things wanted.

"I've no time to waste in waiting," he added. "If they're in this crowd and ain't given up, I'll straighten the account some day, if I have to hunt five years for the trail to them. I'm a-waiting."

His hand was laid on the breast of the dead Indian as he spoke, and something in the touch brought a change to his face. The hand was slipped quickly inside the fringed shirt, and withdrawn, clasping a roll of parchment cured in Indian fashion. A bitter oath broke from him as he untied the white sinews of the deer, and glanced at the contents.

"What is it? What is it?" was the question from all sides.

Genesee, in a sort of fury, seemed to hear most clearly that of the, for the hour, displaced commander.

"I'll tell you what it is!" he burst out wrathfully. "It's a message of peace from the Kootenai tribe—an offer of their help against the Blackfeet any time the troops of the United States need them. It is sent by Grey Eagle, the oldest of their war chiefs, and the messenger sent was Grey Eagle's grandson, Snowcap—the future chief of their people. And you have had him shot down like a dog while carrying that message. By God! I wouldn't have blamed them if they had scalped every mother's son of you."

To say that the revelation was impressive, would express the emotions of the men but mildly. Captain Holt was not the only one of them who turned white at the realization of what a provoked uprising of those joint tribes would mean, in the crippled condition of the camp. It would mean a sweeping annihilation of all white blood in their path; the troops would have enough to do to defend themselves, without being able to help the settlers.

"In God's name, Genesee, is this true?" and forgetting all animosity in the overwhelming news, Holt pressed forward, laying his hand on the shoulder of the dead messenger.

"Take it off!" yelled Genesee, looking at the unconscious hand that involuntarily had moved toward him. "Take it off, or, by Heaven, I'll cut it off!"

And his fingers closing nervously on the hunting-knife emphasized his meaning, and showed how stubborn and sleepless were the man's prejudices.

The hand dropped, and Genesee reached out the document to one of the crestfallen scouts.

"Just read that out loud for the benefit of anyone that can't understand my way of talking," he suggested with ironical bitterness; "and while you are about it, the fellows that stripped this boy will be good enough to ante up with everything they've got of his—and no time to waste about it either."

And Captain Holt, with a new idea of the seriousness of the demand, seconded it, receiving with his own hands the arms and decorations that had been seized by the victorious Denny, and afterward divided among his comrades. Genesee noted that rendering up of trifling spoils with sullen eyes, in which the fury had not abated a particle.

"A healthy crew you are!" he remarked contemptuously; "a nice, clean-handed lot, without grit enough to steal a horse, but plenty of it for robbing a dead boy. I reckon no one of you ever had a boy that age of your own."

Several of them—looking in the dark, dead face—felt uneasy, and forgot for the moment that they were lectured by a horse-thief; forgot even how light a thing the life of an Indian was anyway.

"Don't blame the whole squad," said the man who took the articles from the Captain and handed them up to Genesee. "Denny captured them when he made the shot, just as anyone would do, and it's no use cussin' about Denny; he's buried up in that gulch—the Kootenais finished him."

"And saved me the trouble," added the scout significantly.

He was wrapping as well as he could the gay blanket over the rigid form. The necklace was clasped about the throat, but the belt was more awkward to manage, and was thrust into the bosom of Genesee's buckskin shirt, the knife in his belt, the rifle swung at his back.

There was something impressively ghastly in those two figures—the live one with the stubborness of fate, and the stolidity, sitting there, with across his thighs the blanketed, shapeless thing that had held a life; and even the husk seemed a little more horrible with its face hidden than when revealed more frankly; there was something so weirdly suggestive in the motionless outlines.

"No, I don't want that," he said, as the man who read the message was about to hand it back to him; "it belongs to the command, and I may get a dose of cold lead before I could deliver it."

Then he glanced about, signaling Stuart by a motion of his head.

"There's a lady across in the valley there that I treated pretty badly last night," he said, in a tone so natural that all near could hear him, and more than one head was raised in angry question. "She was just good enough to ride over from the ranch to bring a letter to me—hearing I was locked up for a horse-thief, and couldn't go after it. Well, as I tell you, I was just mean enough to treat her pretty bad—flung her on the floor when she tried to stop me, and then nabbed the beast she rode to camp on—happened to be my own; but may be she won't feel so bad if you just tell her what the nag was used for; and may be that will show her I didn't take the trail for fun."

"That" was one of the gloves he had worn from his hands with his night's work, and there were stains on it darker than those made with earth.

"I'll tell her;" and then an impulsive honesty of feeling made him add: "You need never fear her judgment of you, Jack."

The two looked a moment in each other's eyes, and the older man spoke.

"I've been hard on you," he said deliberately, "damned hard; all at once I've seen it, and all the time you've been thinking a heap better of me than I deserved. I know it now, but it's about over. I won't stand in your way much longer; wait till I come back—"

"You are coming back? and where are you going?" The questions, a tone louder than they had used, were heard by the others around. Genesee noted the listening look on the faces, and his words were answers to them as much as to the questioner.

"I'm going to take the trail for the Kootenai village; if any white man is let reach it, or patch up the infernal blunder that's been made, I can do it with him," and his hand lay on the breast of the shrouded thing before him.

"If I get out of it alive, I'll be back to meet the Major; if I don't"—and this time his significant glance was turned unmistakably to the blue coats and their leader—"and if I don't, you'd better pack your carcasses out of this Kootenai valley, and hell go with you."

So, with a curse for them on his lips, and the dogged determination to save them in his heart, he nodded to Hardy, clasped the hand of Stuart, and turning Mowitza's head, started with that horrible burden back over the trail that would take a day and a night to cover.

The men were grateful for the bravery that had saved their lives, but burned under the brutal taunts that had spared nothing of their feelings. His execrable temper had belittled his own generosity.

He was a squaw man, but they had listened in silence and ashamed, when he had presumed to censure them. He was a horse-thief, yet the men who believed it watched, with few words, the figure disappear slowly along the trail, with no thought of checking him.