"I can't let you go," Susan moaned.
But Lucy's kiss had not the fervor of hers. The strength of her being had gone to her lover. Friendship, home, family, all other claims hung loose about her, the broken trappings of her maidenhood. The great primal tie had claimed her.
A black figure against the pallor of the night, she turned for a last word.
"If you tell them and they come after us, Zavier'll fight them. He'll fight if he kills them. They'll know to-morrow. Good-by," and she was gone, a noiseless shadow, flitting toward the denser group of shadow where her heart was.
Susan, crouched at the tent flap, saw her melt into the waiting blackness, and then heard the muffled hoof beats growing thinner and fainter as the silence absorbed them.
She sat thus till the dawn came. Once or twice she started up to give the alarm, but fell back. Under the tumult of her thoughts a conviction lay that Lucy must follow her own wild way. In the welter of confused emotion it was all that was clear. It may have come from that sense of Lucy's detachment, that consciousness of cords and feelers stretching out to a new life which commanded and held closer than the old had ever done. All she knew was that Lucy was obeying some instinct that was law to her, that was true for her to obey. If they caught her and brought her back it would twist her life into a broken form. Was it love? Was that what had drawn her over all obstacles, away from the established joys and comforts, drawn her like a magnet to such a desperate course? With wide eyes the girl saw the whiteness of the dawn, and sat gripped in her resolution of silence, fearful at the thought of what that mighty force must be.
CHAPTER V
The cross, drowsy bustle of the camp's uprising was suddenly broken by a piercing cry. It came from Bella, who, standing by the mess chest, was revealed to her astonished companions with a buffalo skull in her hands, uttering as dolorous sounds as ever were emitted by that animal in the agony of its death throes. Her words were unintelligible, but on taking the skull from her the cause of her disturbance was made known. Upon the frontal bone were a few words scrawled in pencil—Lucy's farewell.
It came upon them like a thunderbolt, and they took it in different ways—amazed silence, curses, angry questionings. The skull passed from hand to hand till Courant dropped it and kicked it to one side where Leff went after it, lifted it by the horns and stood spelling out the words with a grin. The children, at first rejoicing in the new excitement, soon recognized the note of dole, lifted up their voices and filled the air with cries for Lucy upon whom, in times at tribulation, they had come to look. Glen broke into savage anger, called down curses on his sister-in-law, applying to her certain terms of a scriptural simplicity till the doctor asked him to go afield and vent his passion in the seclusion of the sage. Bella, sunk in heavy, uncorseted despair upon the mess chest, gripped her children to her knees as though an army of ravishers menaced the house of McMurdo. Her words flowed with her tears, both together in a choked and bitter flood of wrath, sorrow, and self-pity. She bewailed Lucy, not only as a vanished relative but as a necessary member of the McMurdo escort. And doubts of Zavier's lawful intentions shook her from the abandon of her grief, to furious invective against the red man of all places and tribes whereso'er he be.