"
"A friend?"
"No. A stranger. Someone who had injured you, for instance; someone Keok
hated, and who had cheated her into marrying him."
"I would kill him," said Tautuk quietly.
It was this night the temptation was strongest upon Alan. Why should
Mary Standish go back, he asked himself. She had surrendered everything
to escape from the horror down there. She had given up fortune and
friends. She had scattered convention to the four winds, had gambled her
life in the hazard, and in the end had come to him! Why should he not
keep her? John Graham and the world believed she was dead. And he was
master here. If--some day--Graham should happen to cross his path, he
would settle the matter in Tautuk's way. Later, while Tautuk slept, and
the world lay about him in a soft glow, and the valley below was filled
with misty billows of twilight out of which came to him faintly the
curious, crackling sound of reindeer hoofs and the grunting contentment
of the feeding herd, the reaction came, as he had known it would come
in the end.
The morning of the fifth day he set out alone for the eastward herd, and
on the sixth overtook Tatpan and his herdsmen. Tatpan, like Sokwenna's
foster-children, Keok and Nawadlook, had a quarter-strain of white in
him, and when Alan came up to him in the edge of the valley where the
deer were grazing, he was lying on a rock, playing Yankee Doodle on a
mouth-organ.
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