“Never,” she muttered; “he is all mine. No one shall share his love—the savage who claims him shall have no part in my treasure.”
Saying these words she pressed her lips upon the forehead of the sleeping babe as if registering a vow, so wickedly did she mingle evil thought with the tenderest and holiest feelings that our human nature can possess.
While she sat thus nursing her child with womanly seeming, the door was flung open, and, with a quick, joyous tread, Gi-en-gwa-tah entered the apartment.
Mahaska started so violently that the babe was disturbed in his slumber, and uttered a faint cry that smote her heart like a sudden blow; and she grew inwardly furious to see the man she so bitterly hated looking down upon her and her child with an expression of such absorbing love, claiming participation in her joy.
He bent over her, his dark, noble features aglow with emotion, his eyes misty with the new tenderness which overflowed his heart.
“Mahaska—Mahaska!”
He could speak no other words. He bent over her, encircling his wife and child in his arms. She drove back the bitter tide that surged up from her heart, and forced herself to greet him with an appearance of pleasure.
“Mahaska and her boy have been waiting for days,” she said; “the chief has been long in returning.”
“The days have seemed like years to Gi-en-gwa-tah,” he answered; “he had left his heart here and was like one in the dark till he could come back and find it.”
“Gi-en-gwa-tah speaks pleasantly like the south wind,” she returned, with a smile; “he has been studying the flowery language of the pale-faces.”