She tottered as if I had struck her. I caught her in my arms and helped her to the couch of robes.
Then I took up my station facing the tent entrance; for I realized the significance of Laplante's warning.
"We have hunted for more than a year for you," I whispered, bending over her, "but the Sioux murdered our messenger and the other you yourself let out of the tent!"
"That—your messenger for me?" she asked in sheer amazement, proving what I had suspected, that she was kept in ignorance of our efforts.
"I have been here for a week, searching the lodges. My horses are in the valley, and we must dare all in one attempt."
"I have given my word I will not try," she hastily interrupted, beginning to pluck at her red shawl in the frenzied way of delirious fever patients. "If we are caught, they will torture us, torture the child before my eyes. They treat him well now and leave me alone as long as I do not try to break away. What can you, one man, do against two thousand Sioux?" and she began to weep, choking back the anguished sobs, that shook her slender frame, and picking feverishly at the red shawl fringe.
To look at that agonized face would have been sacrilege, and in a helpless, nonplussed way, I kept gazing at the painful workings of the thin, frail fingers. That plucking of the wasted, trembling hands haunts me to this day; and never do I see the fingers of a nervous, sensitive woman working in that delirious, aimless fashion but it sets me wondering to what painful treatment from a brutalized nature she has been subjected, that her hands take on the tricks of one in the last stages of disease. It may be only the fancy of an old trader; but I dare avow, if any sympathetic observer takes note of this simple trick of nervous fingers, it will raise the veil on more domestic tragedies and heart-burnings than any father-confessor hears in a year.
"Miriam," said I, in answer to her timid protest, "Eric has risked his life seeking you. Won't you try all for Eric's sake? There'll be little risk! We'll wait for a dark, boisterous, stormy night, and you will roll out of your tent the way you thrust my Indian out. I'll have my horses ready. I'll creep up behind and whisper through the tent."
"Where is Eric?" she asked, beginning to waver.
Two shrill, sharp whistles came from Louis Laplante, commanding me to come out of the tent.