Little time did she give herself for thought, but with a quick, startled glance around she turned to go; but with the first step confronted an Indian girl standing in her very path. To pass her and rush to the camp before the red warriors could cut her off from the way, appeared to be her only hope; but even as she hurried past, the skirt of her dress was caught and retained, while a not unmusical voice whispered, in strangely broken accents:
“Look. Me no enemy to you. Look! Has the pale-face no thought of the Laramie? The memory of the white squaw is not true like the heart of the red one.”
In a moment the swiftly-retreating blood flowed back to Esther’s heart. She recognized the Indian girl as one whom she had slightly befriended weeks before.
“The white squaw good to me. She has no forgotten?” asked the Indian girl, or rather wife, for she was in fact the bride of a dusky chief of the Sioux.
In the bright sunlight, as she stood there waiting to be recognized, this Indian woman was the very incarnation of that rare, almost spiritual beauty sometimes to be found among the daughters of the red-men. Slight, yet tall, with movements so perfectly graceful that they approached those of a leopard; with a small foot, whose richly-ornamented moccasins fell light, almost, as the dew upon the prairie-blossoms; with long, black hair, knotted with scraps of gorgeous ribbon, she stood before Esther. Her eyes, large, lustrous and pensive as those of the antelope, were fixed upon the young girl. You would not have thought, from the expression at the moment, that they could be piercing as the sun-gazing eagle, when insult or danger aroused the slumbering passions of uneducated nature. With that look, and a voice flute-like and musical, it would have been strange indeed if she could so soon have been forgotten.
“Yes,” replied Esther, “I remember you well; but what could have brought you so far from your tribe? You Indian women are not used, I think, to stray away from your wigwams or leave your husbands.”
“Waupee has no husband,” was the response of the young wife.
“No husband! What do you mean? It is not a month since I saw you the bride of a great warrior—high in power and famous on the hunting-path.”
“One day there came to the wigwam of the Black Eagle a woman fair as a white rose. The warrior forgot Waupee, his wife, and his heart turned to the white rose. Waupee has no husband.”
“Waupee—White Hawk—what story is this? What do you mean?”