But the voice that he
heard did not come from his own lips. It was another voice--and then two,
three, many of them. His dazed eyes caught glimpses of dark objects
floundering in the deep snow about him, and just beyond these objects were
four or five tall mounds of snow, like tents, arranged in a circle. A
number of times that winter Roscoe had seen mounds of snow like these, and
he knew what they meant. He had fallen into an Indian village. He tried to
call out the words of greeting that Rameses had taught him, but he had no
tongue. Then the floundering figures caught him up, and he was carried to
the circle of snow-mounds. The last that he knew was that warmth was
entering his lungs, and that once again there came to him the low, sweet
music of a Cree girl's voice.
It was a face that he first saw after that, a face that seemed to come to
him slowly from out of night, approaching nearer and nearer until he knew
that it was a girl's face, with great, dark, shining eyes whose lustre
suffused him with warmth and a strange happiness. It was a face of
wonderful beauty, he thought--of a wild sort of beauty, yet with something
so gentle in the shining eyes that he sighed restfully. In these first
moments of his returning consciousness the whimsical thought came to him
that he was dying, and the face was a part of a pleasant dream.
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