"Schoharie," he repeated.
Conrad tried to wave his hand, but could make only a feeble motion. He began to talk in a queer, uncertain way, and Quagnant, looking at him uneasily, took him by the arm, and presently lifted him to his back. On he went until at dusk he stepped into a path worn into a deep rut. Ahead were lights and the sound of voices.
When Conrad was allowed to slip from the broad back to a soft pile of deerskins, he felt that all the comforts he had ever known were combined in one delicious sensation. That Schoharie lay far behind him he did not know: that the faces about him were dark, the voices strange,—all were matters of indifference. He felt the rim of a warm cup against his lips, then he fell asleep.
The sun had been long in the sky when he woke. He was in an oblong house of bark. Through a hole in the roof the sun streamed upon the ashes of a fire. On the walls hung guns and bows and arrows and strange long spears and about were piles of furs, on one of which lay a little case of bark from which there issued the scream of a hungry baby.
At once a young woman lifted the curtain at the door. Before taking her baby, she looked at Conrad, and finding him awake, nodded and smiled. In a moment she brought a wooden bowl filled with broth. Conrad drained the bowl and lay back once more.
When, late in the afternoon, he lifted the curtain, he found himself in a village of bark houses. At the far end of the single street children were playing, and from the ashes of a fire a woman was taking a loaf of Indian bread. She gave a little call and at once other women appeared and the children came closer.
"Where is Quagnant?" asked Conrad.
The women imitated the sighting of a gun and pointed to their mouths. The children, dressed in little coats and leggings of leather, pointed with amazement to Conrad's fair skin and then at their own dark cheeks. Finally one came close to him.
"Eyes-like-the-Sky," said he, and his companions repeated the strange name.
It was repeated again when the hunters returned with deer meat, and there seemed to be general satisfaction with the discernment of the little boy whose own name was Young Deer.