“Do you regret that you came?”
“No, else I might have lived and died in ignorance of my real name.”
“And now that you have heard it pronounced, is there any thing in it, that sounds familiar—that brings up past memories? Hagar! think of it.”
Little Rifle looked off in the blinding snow with a dim, vacant, wandering look, as if she were seeking to awaken long-forgotten memories. She stood thus, silent and abstracted, for several minutes, and then spoke in a low, hushed voice:
“Yes, there is something in the sound of the word that struck my ear, as though I had heard it before, and it calls up again the picture that I sometimes see in my dreams, of a great ship sailing over the water; but the picture is dim and shadowy, and I do not know whether it is only the outlines of a dream that came to me sometime, away back in childhood, perhaps when I lay asleep in the lodge of the Indian chief, Maquesa.”
“It is reality—I know it,” said the excited Harry; “you have a father living somewhere in the world, and there is a future opening before you.”
“But how is he to be found?” asked Little Rifle. “He may be thousands of miles away; or, it may be that he came back years ago, and finding nothing of me has given me up as dead.”
“That may all be, and it may not. But, do you wish to live the life of a savage in the woods? Don’t you ever want to go among civilized beings and become one of them?”
“I have often dreamed and often wished,” she answered, lowering her eyes, and looking at the snow-flakes, which were drifting against her moccasins.
“And your dream shall become a reality. Go with me to the fort and wait till father comes, and you shall go back with us; you shall be educated, and then what woman shall equal you?”