She sprang to her feet. "Ah, now I understand,' she said. "That was why you quarrelled with me; why you deserted me. You were not man enough to say what made you so much the—so wicked and hard, so—"
"Be thankful, Lucy, that I did not kill you then," he interjected.
"But it is a lie," she cried; "a lie!"
She went to the door and called the Indian woman. "Ikni," she said.
"He dares to say evil of Andre and me. Think—of Andre!"
Ikni came to him, put her wrinkled face close to his, and said: "She was yours, only yours; but the spirits gave you a devil. Andre, oh, oh, Andre! The father of Andre was her father—ah, that makes your sulky eyes to open. Ikni knows how to speak. Ikni nursed them both. If you had waited you should have known. But you ran away like a wolf from a coal of fire; you shammed death like a fox; you come back like the snake to crawl into the house and strike with poison tooth, when you should be with the worms in the ground. But Ikni knows—you shall be struck with poison too, the Spirit of the Red Knife waits for you. Andre was her brother."
He pushed her aside savagely: "Be still!" he said. "Get out-quick.
'Sacre'—quick!"
When they were alone again he continued with no anger in his tone: "So,
Andre the avocat and you—that, eh? Well, you see how much trouble has
come; and now this other—a secret too. When were you married to Shon
McGann?"
"Last night," she bitterly replied; "a priest came over from the Indian village."
"Last night," he musingly repeated. "Last night I lost two thousand dollars at the Little Goshen field. I did not play well last night; I was nervous. In ten years I had not lost so much at one game as I did last night. It was a punishment for playing too honest, or something; eh, what do you think, Lucy—or something, 'hein?'"
She said nothing, but rocked her body to and fro.