The interruption this time was effective enough: "It's cowardly of you, Joe Swan, to speak of her like that." Harry's eyes were gleaming with anger. "You are presuming on the kindnesses you have done me," he went on, halting in front of him, "and if her father and a few of his friends had been here, you would not have dared to speak in that manner. You know I love Nellie Shuter, and nothing you can say will make me break with her."
With this he almost ran out of the tent, leaving Joe dragging at his heavy blonde moustache and gazing at the patches in the canvas tent.
The minutes sped on, and still he continued to think. Finally he took the pipe out of his mouth, put it absently into his pocket and said to himself, as though he had solved a difficult problem, "The lad was right; I had no business to speak to him in that way, but what I said about them both I believe to be the truth, gospel truth, and sooner or later there's going to be trouble for him in Shuter's dive; and I'm going to be with him when it comes, although he did give me that hard rub about bein' afraid of Shuter and his friends."
He slowly picked up his hat, and was about to step out into the darkness when the Indian girl, whom he had seen accost Harry, noiselessly entered the tent, and drawing the wet blanket from her head, said passionately, in quaint broken English, as she pointed in the direction of Shuter's store, "He go dare again—Harry—for see de white girl, Nellie; I see him go, and she no love him."
As Joe looked at her he saw she was far more prepossessing than the other squaws; while against her character he had not heard a word. He had seen her for the first time about three months ago, when she came to camp with some old squaws, to sell prairie chickens and ducks, which the braves had shot, and Indian-like had sent them to sell.
Her acquaintance with Harry had not been of long duration. The first time she met him he was lying in the deep rich grass, for it was the time the fever was upon him. Joe was away in the distance taking care of both the mules and the scraper. So unexpectedly had she come across him, that her moccasined foot touched his hand before he was aware of her presence.
In his gentlemanly way he had risen and told her he was sorry he had been in her way, and then had sunk weakly back again. The suffering on his pinched boyish face went straight to her heart, which awoke to longings never known before.
Every day after this little adventure, on one pretext or another, she managed to encounter him. At first, he nodded and smiled and had a kindly word for her, but suddenly he ignored her altogether, for word of her infatuation had reached Nellie Shuter's ears, and she had acted as though she were displeased.
For a time the girl stayed away, and Harry thought she would not return; but one night, when he was walking alone on the prairie, she ran suddenly up to him, and pointing to the swiftly-flowing Red River, told him in the figurative language of her people, that because of him her heart was as troubled as the river was in the spring-time—when the melting snow vexed it so that it burst its barriers and flowed over the prairie. She went on in her childish, earnest way to tell him that she could not help loving him, and that if he would take her to be his wife she should work for him as long as she lived.
As he did not reply, a gleam of hope crept into her heart, and baring her dark arm, she showed him how strong it was, how it never grew weary, and how, if he would throw in his lot with her people, he should never have to work, as the squaws always worked for the braves. It was no uncommon thing for French-Canadians to marry squaws, neither was it uncommon for squaws to offer themselves in marriage, and thus she did not know how strangely unnatural her proposition sounded to him. It never, in his inexperience, occurred to him to make any allowance for her on account of her life and environments, and he judged her as he would have judged a white girl.