“No! No!” I begged. “Don’t speak of that. It will be bad enough at the best. How can I? I don’t know how I can do it!”
“You will, though,” she soothed. “I’d rather have it from you. You must be brave, for yourself and for me; and kind, and quick. I think it should be through the temple. That’s sure. But you won’t wait to look, will you? You’ll spare yourself that?”
This made me groan, craven, and wipe my hand across my forehead to brush away the frenzy. The fingers came free, damp with cold sticky sweat—a prodigy of a parchment skin which puzzled me.
We had not exchanged a caress, save by voice; had not again touched each other. Sometimes I glanced at the Sioux, but not for long; I dreaded to lose sight of her by so much as a moment. The Sioux remained virtually as from the beginning of their vigil. They sat secure, drank, probably ate, with time their ally: sat judicial and persistent, as though depending upon the progress of a slow fuse, or upon the workings of poison, which indeed was the case.
Thirst and heat tortured unceasingly. The sun had passed the zenith—this sun of a culminating summer throughout which he had thrived regal and lustful. It seemed ignoble of him that he now should stoop to torment only us, and one of us a small woman. There was all his boundless domain for him. 308
But stoop he did, burning nearer and nearer. She broke with sudden passion of hoarse appeal.
“Why do we wait? Why not now?”
“We ought to wait,” I stammered, miserable and pitying.
“Yes,” she whispered, submissive, “I suppose we ought. One always does. But I am so tired. I think,” she said, “that I will let my hair down. I shall go with my hair down. I have a right to, at the last.”
Whereupon she fell to loosening her hair and braiding it with hurried fingers.