Granger watched her while she was speaking, wondering whether he was hearing the very truth this time. "And, if I do as you ask me, what will happen to Spurling?" he said.
She drew him nearer to herself. "I hate that man," she whispered; "let him die as he deserves."
"And why didn't you tell me everything at first?"
"Because you are not strong enough to make the journey yet; and I wanted to keep you resting here, till you had no other choice of saving yourself but by following me into the forest. While my father was present, I did not dare to tell you—for his soul is dead."
Granger took his eyes from off her face; she tempted him—he had been so long unused to kindness. He gazed out of the window, far away across the frozen forest, and heard the dream of his boyhood calling to him to seek the city out of sight. His choice lay between this woman and El Dorado, in whose search he had wasted all his life. He did not deceive himself, whatever he might say aloud; his hesitancy did not arise out of unwillingness to desert Spurling, but from unwillingness to abandon the quest while a fragment of hope remained. With that stolen gold, if he could slip by the winter patrol and carry it out to Winnipeg, he would be able to strike for the south and sail up the Great Amana, past the rocks with the forgotten handwriting, till he came to the lake of Parima, on whose shores the city is said to stand.
She saw that his will was wavering and that his choice was going against her. Seizing his hands in her own and pressing them to her breast, "I am only a poor half-breed girl," she cried, "but I am soon to be the mother of your child; and our child will be nearly all white like yourself. You can't think what my life was before you came to me; for, though my body is half Indian, my mind has become a white woman's since I went to school in Winnipeg. I am so white that I would die for you to-morrow, if I could give you life by doing that. I could not tell you this before, while my father and brother were present; somehow, with their silence they stifled my words, and made me silent. But don't judge me by the past months, believe me now."
"Peggy," he said, "what should we do in the forest, if we went there and joined your mother's tribe? We should starve, and grow sullen; and you would be treated as a squaw, and our child would grow up an Indian."
"But I should not mind that if only we were together."
"But we shall be together if my plan works out and I manage to escape. Then there's Spurling; however much I hate him, I cannot break my promise to him and leave him to die."
She dropped his hands and drew away from him. "You are going to meet the white woman," she said; "you had planned to desert me whatever happened."