"A broken head!" laughed a third. "It was nigh a broken back in my case. I mind me he laded me down with every single thing he owned and strutted before me like a black-cock in lekking-time! Oh, but wasn't I proud of him!—Fine and mannish he looked when I could get a peep at him, for my head was bent to my knees with my load and the sweat was running into my eyes, I tell you! Ha!" The speaker laughed at the remembrance, just as a prefect chuckles over the lammings he took when a fag.
"Eh, but, what in the world will this mean?" cried all together. "He has divided the loads, and she was carrying—what? It can never be a bear-skin, the thing is plainly impossible. And—look at those silly bags of little feather-ended sticks! and the long ash-sticks!—What foolishness is this?"
"The young chief is no fool."
"They walked well, anyhow."
"Pride, mere pride—they were ready to drop. Could not ye see as much? Think, they are in full winter dress: heavy deer-skin leggings and karosses and all, 'tis plain they have come from high up, somewhere, not over the pass, that is impossible for another three moons yet: they will have felt the heat cruelly all day."
"A likely-looking girl—a Little Moon girl by her gait and colour;—but where can he have picked her up—and where has he been all this while? A brave can't live upon snow, and he has lived well, and upon an enemy's ground. Wah, Pŭl-Yūn is a wise man in some ways,—but a fool in others. He must be mad to set so much by an unproved squaw."
"He has had six months of her in my view," said an old woman, "and, right or wrong, Pŭl-Yūn ever knew his own mind."
"She has bewitched him—he is mad—mad!" muttered Honk-Ah morosely, who saw his deputy-chieftainship slipping through his fingers after seeming safely in hand. The man was not a politic man (from the modern standpoint he was but a youth), he was a jealous fellow and wont to strike first. It seemed to him that this was his opportunity; he loafed around talking to those whom he believed to be in his interest, in undertones at first, then more loudly. "Who is she?—a Little Moon?—But, that story will not do, for there are none of that tribe on this side of the ranges, and he cannot have passed the ranges this spring. Where has Pŭl-Yūn been?"
This was Mystery the First, an offence in itself in a community which has the right to know the most intimate facts of the life of each of its members. Mystery breeds suspicion and suspicion leads up to distrust and to hate. But in the heart of Honk-Ah hate was already full grown.
"There is something here that the tribe should know," he spoke aloud and his voice carried far. "It seems to us that the Sun-Folk should be told, and told this night, where a brave has been harbouring who has been away, and on an enemy's grounds, for six moons."