The Sun Queen.
A month had gone by. The mountain air had become thin and steely, and the gorgeous glories of the golden-hued woods were falling fast. Winter was in the atmosphere.
In the villages of the hostiles time was of no account. Dancing and warlike exercises, gossip, story-telling and gambling, and hunting in the adjacent mountains, thus this great gathering of savages on a war-footing solaced their leisure hours—which were many. Bands of warriors, under some favourite chief or partisan, would strike the war-post, and sally forth on some more or less desperate foray, returning in due time with scalps or plunder, or both. Once they brought with them a wretched prisoner, who was promptly done to death under the usual circumstances of revolting barbarity.
Now, of this life Vipan had become heartily sick. Accustomed as he was to come and go at will among the camps and villages of the Sioux, the restraint of knowing himself a prisoner galled him. For although allowed a certain amount of liberty, and rather ostentatiously treated as a guest, he was carefully watched. But it is doubtful whether another cause had not more to do with his weariness and disgust. That was no mere passing passion whose expression had so nearly escaped him when standing in the dug-out with Yseulte Santorex. By an inexplicable rebound from his wild and reckless life, this man’s mature mind and strong nature had sprung to the other extreme. Well he knew—none better—his position, or, rather, the utter lack of it, did he return to civilisation, and there were times when he felt tempted to throw himself in heart and soul with his Indian friends, to lead them on the war-path, and in ferocity and daring excelling even the savages themselves, to devote the remainder of his life to acts of vengeance upon that civilisation whose laws had placed it in the power of a specious hypocrite to drive him forth from its midst a pauper and an outcast—acts of barbarous and bloody vengeance that should render his name a terror to the whole of the Western frontier. What had he to do with softness—with love—at his time of life? Yseulte Santorex would be safe in her English home by this time, probably recalling—when she did recall it—their acquaintanceship only as a passing romance embedded among her other adventurous experiences. With such reflections would he lash and torture himself.
More than once when accompanying some of their hunting parties into the mountains he had been seized by a wild impulse to make a dash for liberty. But the cat-like watchfulness of the Indians never flagged, and upon such occasions a glance was enough to show the impracticability of any such scheme. The first step would be the signal for a volley of bullets through his body—moreover, he was never allowed the use of anything but an inferior steed.
And now, day by day, his situation became more precarious. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and the other chiefs had somehow waxed more than doubtful of late as to whether his services in regard to a possible British intervention would be of any use at all—and this idea was insidiously fostered by his enemies, who were many and powerful—Mountain Cat, the Ogallalla war-chief, and Crow-Scalper, who hated all whites, and the band of young desperadoes who had attached themselves to the fortunes of War Wolf. The latter brave’s bumptiousness had become simply overwhelming. Full of the recently-acquired importance conferred upon him by his captivity among the whites and subsequent escape, he would strut and swagger around, bedecked in all his war-paint and finery—passing Vipan with a contemptuous laugh or a remark of covert insolence. The only consideration that restrained the latter from inflicting summary chastisement was the certainty that the hour he did so would be his last. And his friend and protector, Mahto-sapa, was frequently absent on warlike or diplomatic expeditions. The sullen and hostile feeling growing around him was written on every grim and scowling face. He felt as helpless as a fly in a spider’s web.
Pondering over these things, he was seated one day alone in the lodge of his host—the latter being away upon one of those absences which constituted such a peril to himself—when a shadow darkened the entry and a feminine voice inquired in English:
“May I come in?”
He started, as well he might. The accent was pure and refined, the tone firm and pleasing. For answer he rose and bowed, and the speaker entered.
Strange as it may seem, during all this while Vipan had seen his host’s white wife by no more than a few stray passing glimpses, and then at a distance. It had always struck him that she avoided him with design, and he had respected her motives. She dwelt in two teepes, which she occupied all to herself—an unwonted luxury—and was attended on by a Shoshone slave girl of unrivalled hideosity, captured on one of the chief’s forays into the country of the Snakes.