"Come with me to the canoes," I demanded. "If you find yourself in the wrong, it may teach you to trust a man's word against your own eyesight."
He assented. We walked swiftly across the moon-lighted open, and I had scant time for fear. Yet I was afraid. I could give the Englishman no helping hand, no word of warning. Would he rise to the moment?
He did. He turned his back upon us, Indian-fashion, and squatted in his blanket. He lost all suggestion of Singing Arrow's slim elasticity, and sat in a shapeless huddle. I laughed with relief.
"Where is Singing Arrow now?" I twitted the priest. "Is this she?"
The old priest peered. "No," he meditated. "No, this is not Singing Arrow." He wheeled on me with one of his flashes of temper. "I cannot recognize this girl. Let her take off her blanket."
I motioned my men to take stations in the canoes. "Father Carheil, I beg you to let me go at once," I implored. "You see you were wrong. As to this Indian, you never saw her; she is a stranger here."
But the father was not pacified. "Let her take off her blanket," he repeated, with all the aimless persistency of age.
Did I say that the man had grown close to my heart? Why, I could have shaken him. But the Englishman cut the knot. He turned with a hunch of the shoulder, and peered at us over the corner of his blanket. Gesture, and roll of the head, he was an Indian. I was so pleased at the mimicry, that I gave way to witless laughter.
"Now!" I cried triumphantly. "Now, are you satisfied?"
But the priest did not reply. He stared, and his eyes grew ferret-sharp. Then he shifted his position, and stared again. It beat into my brain that he had lived thirty years among the Indians, and that his eyes were trained. He could see meanings, where I saw a blank wall.