“Come back with me,” suggested Nelly.
“All right,” said Beverly, “but I won’t bother Anne.”
Beverly found Sal Seguin squatting on the floor of Cap’n Sackett’s barn. The Captain himself sat in the doorway, whittling gravely, apparently acting as guard of the prisoner, while the door remained open. “I thought the poor thing would be more comfortable here than in the lockup at the Harbor,” he explained. “Seems hard to shut up an Injun that’s had the run of the woods; even if she may be a fire-bug,” he looked at her doubtfully. “I can’t see what she done it for,” he said. “She hadn’t any spite against Poole, like the rest of ’em. She hadn’t any money to get away. If she had, maybe he’d a tried to get that too!” He whittled angrily. “She might have been after the liquor, of course. But she hadn’t been drinkin’.”
Sal Seguin greeted Beverly with a grunt that might mean pleasure or the opposite, and immediately began to gesticulate and to jabber, as Nelly had said. “She is trying to tell me that she didn’t do it,” said Beverly. But Cap’n Sackett could make as good a guess as that. “I can’t understand half her words,” said Beverly, listening patiently to the queer mixture of syllables, part English and part of at least one other tongue. “But I do seem to gather what she means, in a way. Isn’t it queer? I suppose it’s because I had an Indian ancestor once.” But it was more likely that she understood because she was so eager to help. There is nothing that quickens understanding so much as sympathy; as anyone knows who has had a pet animal that other persons call “dumb.”
“Not set fire! No! No! No!” cried the old woman.
“Anybody can understand that, whether it’s true or not,” said Cap’n Sackett. “But what else, eh? What was she doin’ up at Idlewild? That’s what I want to know.”
The squaw made strange motions with her hands, up and down, mumbling as she did so, words of which Beverly finally made out the meaning. “Oh, I see!” she cried. “She is trying to say that she was cutting something—with a knife—oh yes, in the garden.”
“Ugh!” grunted the squaw, satisfied at last and nodding her head violently. “Garden, ugh!”
“But there’s nothin’ in the garden,” said the Captain incredulously. “It’s all dried up, except Anne’s flower-bed. She can’t pretend she came to get vegetables. And I guess she didn’t want Anne’s flowers, did she?” He grinned at the joke.
The old squaw listened, with sharp little eyes first on Beverly’s then on the old man’s face. “Ugh, no!” she grunted with a frown. “Not flowers; good-smell-things; make sick folks well; medicine-plants.” She fumbled in her pocket and finally drew out a few stalks of withered herbs, which she held to Beverly’s nose.