Ruby smiled very provokingly.
“There may be no impropriety, sir, but you will please to note that I belong to the delegation with which I came, and as a chief of the Wabash I have a duty to my friends. I can not leave them. So I wish you good morning.”
“Stay, madam,” cried Clark, excitedly. “In heaven’s name, how am I to take you? Are you chief or lady? Keep to one character, I beseech you. Which is it to be?”
Ruby drew her little figure up, and threw her velvet mantle over one shoulder, Indian fashion, with an air of the most ineffable pride.
“It is to be any thing, monsieur, which will keep me from speaking to you, who have avenged yourself on a poor boy for the cruelties you dare not resent from me.”
And she was at the door ere Clark had recovered from his astonishment. Then he rushed forward, crying:
“Mademoiselle, only one single word. If I forgive the adjutant, will you grant me one single interview?”
“Try it, and see,” was the unsatisfactory reply, as the girl stepped haughtily from the room.
“Helas, mon ami, it is no use,” said father Gibault, elevating his shoulders to his ears in a truly French shrug. “You can not drive that child from her own way. I remember when she was little, before her father died—rest his soul, poor Captain Roland—she would roam away alone among the Indians, and they were more dangerous then than now. She would go up to the grimmest warrior in his war-paint, and pull his scalp-lock as he sat by the fire; and ’twas her wonderful boldness that first gained her the love of the old chief, Tabac. She was made a chief before she was ten years old, and formally adopted as head Medicine chief. They looked on her with superstition, and reverenced her knowledge. In faith, monsieur, she knows all that I do in the way of science and art, and moreover, she is the head of all Indian woodcraft and magic. But you can not turn her out of the way, any more than the sun in heaven. She is immutable.”
Clark stood ruminating awhile over the priest’s words. At last he answered: