An impish smile quite obliterated the Christmas-angel look for an instant, then vanished, and left her a pretty, abused maiden who is grieved at harsh treatment.
“Well, I wanted to scare Gene,” she confessed. “I did, too. I just know he's a cowardy-cat, because he's always trying to scare ME. It's Gene's fault—he told me the grove is haunted. He said a long time ago, before Uncle Hart settled here, a lot of Indians waylaid a wagon-train here and killed a girl, and he says that when the moon is just past the full, something white walks through the grove and wails like a lost soul in torment. He says sometimes it comes and moans at the corner of the house where my room is. I just know he was going to do it himself; but I guess he forgot. So I thought I'd see if he believed his own yarns. I was going to do it every night till I scared him into sleeping in the house. I had a perfectly lovely place to disappear into, where he couldn't trace me if he took to hunting around—only he wouldn't dare.” She pulled down her sleeve very carefully, and then, just as carefully, she pushed it up again, and took another look.
“My best friend TOLD me I'd get shot if I came to Idaho,” she reminded herself, with a melancholy satisfaction.
“You didn't get shot,” Grant contradicted for the sake of drawing more sparks of temper where temper seemed quaintly out of place, and stared hard at her drooping profile. “You just got nicely missed; a bullet that only scrapes off a little skin can't be said to hit. I'd hate to hit a bear like that.”
“I believe you're wishing you HAD killed me! You might at least have some conscience in the matter, and be sorry you shot a lady. But you're not. You just wish you had murdered me. You hate girls—you said so. And I don't know what business it is of yours, if I want to play a joke on my cousin, or why you had to be sleeping outside, anyway. I've a perfect right to be a ghost if I choose—and I don't call it nice, or polite, or gentlemanly for you to chase me all over the place with a gun, trying to kill me! I'll never speak to you again as long as I live. When I say that I mean it. I never liked you from the very start, when I first saw you this afternoon. Now I hate and despise you. I suppose I oughtn't to expect you to apologize or be sorry because you almost killed me. I suppose that's just your real nature coming to the surface. Indians love to hurt and torture people! I shouldn't have expected anything else of you, I suppose. I made the mistake of treating you like a white man.”
“Don't you think you're making another mistake right now?” Grant's whole attitude changed, as well as his tone. “Aren't you afraid to push the white man down into the dirt, and raise up—the INDIAN?”
She cast a swift, half-frightened glance up into his face and the eyes that glowed ominously in the moonlight.
“When people make the blunder of calling up the Indian,” he went on steadily, “they usually find that they have to deal with—the Indian.”
Evadna looked at him again, and turned slowly white before her temper surged to the surface again.
“I didn't call up the Indian,” she defended hotly; “but if the Indian wants to deal with me according to his nature—why, let him! But you don't ACT like other people! I don't know another man who wouldn't have been horrified at shooting me, even such a tiny little bit; but you don't care at all. You never even said you were sorry.”