come near him, and his terrible, helpless suffering from his frozen hands and feet made her feel that she must call for aid.
“When white man give up—wave white flag,” she said and pointed upward toward where she had raised the signal on the roof. That was the end of her story.
To all of it Jake had listened, with never a change of expression, never moving his eyes from Hugh, powerless to interrupt or to deny. Only when the Indian woman once mentioned Linda Ingmarsson’s name there was a change, a momentary wincing and a quivering of those steady eyes. Perhaps Hugh’s sensibilities had been sharpened by his recent experiences, for certainly he guessed quickly and as surely as though some one had told him that Jake must have loved Linda long ago, but that his bullying ways had failed before her courageous scorn of him.
“Old—live hard—die,” said Laughing Mary again when she came to the end. Such was her only comment on the fall of that once-feared master of Jasper Peak.
