The faces turned toward Courant—a white man like themselves! So deep was their disapproving astonishment that nobody could say anything. For a space they could only stare at him as though he, too, were suddenly dropping veils that had hidden unsuspected, baleful depths.
Then argument broke out and the clamor of voices was loud on the night. Courant bore the brunt of the attack, Zavier's ideas being scanty, his mode of procedure a persistent, reiteration of his original proposition. Interruptions were furnished in a sudden, cracked laugh from Daddy John, and phrases of dissent or approval from Glen and Bella stretching their ears from the front of the tent. Only Lucy said nothing, her head wrapped in a shawl, her face down-drooped and pale.
Late that night Susan was waked by whispering sounds which wound stealthily through her sleep feeling for her consciousness. At first she lay with her eyes shut, breathing softly, till the sounds percolated through the stupor of her fatigue and she woke, disentangling them from dreams. She threw back her blankets and sat alert thinking of Indians.
The moon was full, silver tides lapping in below the tent's rim. She stole to the flap listening, then drew it softly open. Her tent had been pitched beneath a group of trees which made a splash of shadow broken with mottlings of moonlight. In the depths of this shadow she discerned two figures, the white flecks and slivers sliding along the dark oblong of their shapes as they strayed with loitering steps or stood whispering. The straight edge of their outline, the unbroken solidity of their bulk, told her they were wrapped in the same blanket, a custom in the Indian lover's courtship. Their backs were toward her, the two heads rising from the blanket's folds, showing as a rounded pyramidal finish. As she looked they paced beyond the shadow into the full unobscured light, and she saw that the higher head was dark, the other fair, crowned with a circlet of shining hair.
Her heart gave an astounded leap. Her first instinct was to draw back, her second to stand where she was, seemly traditions overwhelmed in amazement. The whispering ceased, the heads inclined to each other, the light one drooping backward, the dark one leaning toward it, till they rested together for a long, still moment. Then they separated, the woman drawing herself from the blanket and with a whispered word stealing away, a furtive figure flitting through light and shade to the McMurdo tents. The man turned and walked to the fire, and Susan saw it was Zavier. He threw on a brand and in its leaping ray stood motionless, looking at the flame, a slight, fixed smile on his lips.
She crept back to her bed and lay there with her heart throbbing and her eyes on the edges of moonlight that slipped in over the trampled sage leaves. Zavier was on sentry duty that night, and she could hear the padding of his step as he moved back and forth through the sleeping camp. On the dark walls of the tent the vision she had seen kept repeating itself, and as it returned upon her mental sight, new questions surged into her mind. A veil had been raised, and she had caught a glimpse of something in life, a new factor in the world, she had never known of. The first faint comprehension of it, the first stir of sympathy with it, crept toward her understanding and tried to force an entrance. She pushed it out, feeling frightened, feeling as if it were an intruder, that once admitted would grow dominant and masterful, and she would never be her own again.
CHAPTER III
The next morning Susan could not help stealing inquiring looks at Lucy. Surely the participant in such a nocturnal adventure must bear some signs of it upon her face. Lucy had suddenly become a disturbing and incomprehensible problem. In trying to readjust her conception of the practical and energetic girl, Susan found herself confronted with the artifices of a world-old, feminine duplicity that she had never before encountered, and knew no more of than she did of the tumult that had possession of poor Lucy's tormented soul. Here was the heroine of a midnight rendezvous going about her work with her habitual nervous capability, dressing the children, preparing the breakfast, seeing that Bella was comfortably disposed on her mattress in the wagon. She had not a glance for Zavier. Could a girl steal out to meet and kiss a man in the moonlight and the next morning look at him with a limpid, undrooping eye as devoid of consciousness as the eye of a preoccupied cat?
The standards of the doctor's daughter were comparative and their range limited. All she had to measure by was herself. Her imagination in trying to compass such a situation with Susan Gillespie as the heroine, could picture nothing as her portion but complete abasement and, of course, a confession to her father. And how dreadful that would have been! She could feel humiliation stealing on her at the thought of the doctor's frowning displeasure. But Lucy had evidently told no one. Why had she not? Why had she pretended not to like Zavier? Why? Why? Susan found her thoughts trailing off into a perspective of questions that brought up against a wall of incomprehension above which Lucy's clear eyes looked at her with baffling secretiveness.