tak to das back channel, where de water not queek, and I t’ink we mak good tam.”
A scuffling and pattering of feet in the last year’s dry grass caught his quick ear, and he turned his head. The Indian girl, circled by a bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them. Mrs. Sayther noted that the girl’s face, which had been apathetic throughout the scene in the cabin, had now quickened into blazing and wrathful life.
“What you do my man?” she demanded abruptly of Mrs. Sayther. “Him lay on bunk, and him look bad all the time. I say, ‘What the matter, Dave? You sick?’ But him no say nothing. After that him say, ‘Good girl Winapie, go way. I be all right bimeby.’ What you do my man, eh? I think you bad woman.”
Mrs. Sayther looked curiously at the barbarian woman who shared the life of this man, while she departed alone in the darkness of night.
“I think you bad woman,” Winapie repeated in the slow, methodical way of one who gropes for strange words in an alien tongue. “I think better you go way, no come no more. Eh? What you think? I have one man. I Indian girl. You ‘Merican woman. You good to see. You find plenty men. Your eyes blue like the sky. Your skin so white, so soft.”
Coolly she thrust out a brown forefinger and pressed the soft cheek of the other woman. And to the eternal credit of Karen Sayther, she never flinched. Pierre hesitated and half stepped forward; but she motioned him away, though her heart welled to him with secret gratitude. “It’s all right, Pierre,” she said. “Please go away.”
He stepped back respectfully out of earshot, where he stood grumbling to himself and measuring the distance in springs.
“Um white, um soft, like baby.” Winapie touched the other cheek and withdrew her hand. “Bimeby mosquito come. Skin get sore in spot; um swell, oh, so big; um hurt, oh, so much. Plenty mosquito; plenty spot. I think better you go now before mosquito come. This way,” pointing down the stream, “you go St. Michael’s; that way,” pointing up, “you go Dyea. Better you go Dyea. Good-by.”
And that which Mrs. Sayther then did, caused Pierre to marvel greatly. For she threw her arms around the Indian girl, kissed her, and burst into tears.
“Be good to him,” she cried. “Be good to him.”
Then she slipped half down the face of the bank, called back “Good-by,” and dropped into the boat amidships. Pierre followed her and cast off. He shoved the steering oar into place and gave the signal. Le Goire lifted an old French chanson; the men, like a row of ghosts in the dim starlight, bent their backs to the tow line; the steering oar cut the black current sharply, and the boat swept out into the night.
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