This bewilderment was the means of Tim being saved. Before the animal had entirely recovered, he had darted out of sight, and when the Indians came up the bear was just in "fighting trim," and immediately made at them. Consequently they were compelled to give over all thoughts of the flying hunter and attend to their own personal safety. What the final result was Tim never learned, and we cannot speak with certainty.
CHAPTER XXVI.
SHASTA'S HUNT.
If the Pah Utah in the extremity of his suffering had been betrayed into the extraordinary weakness of manifesting it, he now seemed anxious to make amends for the humiliating fact. It may have been that among his own people he would have restrained those utterances which declared his agony, and borne the utmost with the stoicism of his race; but knowing that civilization does not teach such outward indifference to pain, he had adopted the surest means to reach the sympathy of the white strangers; or, if we may conjecture still further, the consciousness of the instinctive feud between the American and Caucasian race told him that the plan he took was the only one that offered safety to himself. What reason had he to believe that the hunters were kind of heart? If he hid his distress, would he not be treated as a well Indian? And was there any but the one common ground upon which the two races met?
But the fever had passed and he was himself again. True, he was still feeble, and his limbs trembled at times like those of an old man; but the disease had gone, and the stern, unbending will had resumed its sway. He was not a child, but he was Shasta, the Pah Utah Indian.
The inexperience of Elwood Brandon and Howard Lawrence with these strange people made this savage an enigma to them. As he stood with his arms folded, his blanket wrapped around him, his long black hair streaming over his shoulders, and the mingling of the paint on his crown and over his face, and his midnight eyes fixed upon them, it was hard indeed to conjecture the thoughts filtrating through his brain.
But there is a language in which the human heart can speak—that of emotion. The boys felt no fear—ingratitude is not an element of the savage character, though sad to say it is sometimes manifested among us of greater moral pretensions.
He looked at them as they came up and paused a few feet from him.
"You seem to be better?" asked Elwood, feeling it incumbent that he should make some remark, even though it was incomprehensible to their dusky friend. He muttered something and then stretched out his arms as if to show that he had recovered from his illness.