His hands in his pockets, Armour sat silent for a minute, eyeing his boot, as he swung his leg to and fro. Presently he said: “Eye-of-the-Moon, I don’t think I can talk as poetically as you, even in my own language, and I shall not try. But I should like to ask you this: Do you believe any harm has come to your daughter—to my wife?”
The old Indian forgot to blow the tobacco-smoke from his mouth, and, as he sat debating, lips slightly apart, it came leaking out in little trailing clouds and gave a strange appearance to his iron-featured face. He looked steadily at Armour, and said: “You are of those who rule in your land,”—here Armour protested,—“you have much gold to buy and sell. I am a chief,” he drew himself up,—“I am poor: we speak with the straight tongue; it is cowards who lie. Speak deep as from the heart, my brother, and tell me where my daughter is.”
Armour could not but respect the chief for the way this request was put, but still it galled him to think that he was under suspicion of having done any bodily injury to his wife, so he quietly persisted: “Do you think I have done Lali any harm?”
“The thing is strange,” replied the other. “You are of those who are great among your people. You married a daughter of a red man. Then she was yours for less than one moon, and you sent her far away, and you stayed. Her father was as a dog in your sight. Do men whose hearts are clear act so? They have said strange things of you. I have not believed; but it is good I know all, that I may say to the tale-bearers, ‘You have crooked tongues.’”
Armour sat for a moment longer, his face turned to the open window. He was perfectly still, but he had become grave. He was about to reply to the chief, when the trader entered the room hurriedly with a newspaper in his hand. He paused abruptly when he saw Eye-of-the-Moon. Armour felt that the trader had something important to communicate. He guessed it was in the paper. He mutely held out his hand for it. The trader handed it to him hesitatingly, at the same time pointing to a paragraph, and saying: “It is nearly two years old, as you see. I chanced upon it by accident to-day.”
It was a copy of a London evening paper, containing a somewhat sensational account of Lali’s accident. It said that she was in a critical condition. This time Armour did not ask for brandy, but the trader put it out beside him. He shook his head. “Gordon,” he said presently, “I shall leave here in the morning. Please send my men to me.”
The trader whispered to him: “She was all right, of course, long ago, Mr. Armour, or you would have heard.”
Armour looked at the date of the paper. He had several letters from England of a later date, and these said nothing of her illness. It bewildered him, made him uneasy. Perhaps the first real sense of his duty as a husband came home to him there. For the first time he was anxious about the woman for her own sake. The trader had left the room.
“What a scoundrel I’ve been!” said Armour between his teeth, oblivious, for the moment, of Eye-of-the-Moon’s presence. Presently, bethinking himself, he turned to the Indian. “I’ve been debating,” he said. “Eye-of-the-Moon, my wife is in England, at my father’s home. I am going to her. Men have lied in thinking I would do her any injury, but—but—never mind, the harm was of another kind. It isn’t wise for a white man and an Indian to marry, but when they are married—well, they must live as man and wife should live, and, as I said, I am going to my wife.”
To say all this to a common Indian, whose only property was a dozen ponies and a couple of tepees, required something very like moral courage; but then Armour had not been exercising moral courage during the last year or so, and its exercise was profitable to him. The next morning he was on his way to Montreal, and Eye-of-the-Moon was the richest chief in British North America, at that moment, by five thousand dollars or so.