There came before her a picture of the ancient withered hags, the burden-bearers, the human vampires of the Indian camps, the vile in word and deed, the first to cry for the blood of captives, the most eager to give taunts and blows to the helpless; were they to be her associates, her teachers? Involuntarily she lifted her hand, as if to push from her a future so dreadful.
“Wallulah will bring the wood and the water. Wallulah will work. The old women need not teach her.”
“That is well. But one thing more you must 251 learn; and that is to hold up your head and not look like a drooping captive. Smile, laugh, be gay. Snoqualmie will have no clouded face, no bent head in his lodge.”
She looked at him imploringly. The huge form, the swarthy face, seemed to dominate her, to crush her down with their barbarian strength and ferocity. She dropped her eyes again, and lay there on the furs like some frightened bird shrinking from the glance of a hawk.
“I will work; I will bear burdens,” she repeated, in a trembling tone. “But I cannot smile and laugh when my heart is heavy.”
He watched her with a half angry, half malicious regard, a regard that seemed ruthlessly probing into every secret of her nature.
She knew somehow that he was aware of her love for Cecil, and she dreaded lest he should taunt her with it. Anything but that. He knew it, and held it back as his last and most cruel blow. Over his bronzed face flitted no expression of pity. She was to him like some delicate wounded creature of the forest, that it was a pleasure to torture. So he had often treated a maimed bird or fawn,—tantalizing it, delighted by its fluttering and its pain, till the lust of torture was gratified and the death-blow was given.
He sat regarding her with a sneering, malicious look for a little while; then he said,—
“It is hard to smile on Snoqualmie; but the white man whom you met in the wood, it was not so with him. It was easy to smile and look glad at him, but it is hard to do so for Snoqualmie.”