"What did you say?" he asked, menacing. He had caught a word that has come to be an epithet in the North.
But by taking it up Harold made a severe strategical error. Bill had never hesitated, by the light of an ancient idiom, to call a spade a spade. Also he always had good reasons before he took back his words. "I said," he repeated clearly, "that I'd found—a squaw man."
Harold's muscles set but immediately relaxed again. He shrugged once. "And is it anybody's business but my own?" he asked.
"It hadn't ought to be, but it is," was the answer. "It's my business, and somebody else's too." he turned to the woman. "Listen, Sindy, and give me a polite answer. You're Joe Robinson's sister, aren't you?"
The Indian looked up, nodded, then went back to her work.
"Then you left Buckshot Dan—to come here and live with this white man?"
Harold turned to her with a snarl. "Don't answer him, Sindy. It's none of his business." Then his smoldering eyes met Bill's. "Now we've talked enough. You can go."
"Wait!" Something in the grave face and set features silenced the squaw man. "But it's true—we have talked just about enough. I've got one question. Lounsbury—do you think, by any chance—you've got any manhood left? Do you think you're rotten clear through?"
Harold leaped then, savage as a wolf, and his rifle swung in his arms. Instantly Bill's form, impassive before, seemed simply to waken with life. There was no rage in his face, only determination; but his arm drove out fast as a serpent's head. Seemingly with one motion he wrenched the gun from the man's hand and sent him spinning against the wall.
Before even his body crashed against the logs, Bill had whirled to face the squaw. He knew these savage women. It would be wholly in character for her whip a gleaming knife from her dress and spring to her man's aid. But she looked up as if with indifference, and once more went back to her work.