"You, who were with the bandits when they attacked this village, should know me," Ellen replied, drily.
"Yes, I know you," the Spaniard said presently, in a hoarse voice. "You are the woman whom the genius of evil brought across my path to rob me of all my happiness! I did not expect to find you here, but I am delighted at doing so, for I can at length tell you how I hate you," she added, stamping her foot passionately. "Yes, I hate you!"
Ellen, in her heart, was alarmed at the stranger's violence; she tried in vain to explain her incomprehensible words.
"You hate me!" she replied, softly. "For what reason? I do not know you. This is the first time that accident has brought us together. Up to this day, we never had any relations together, near or remote."
"Do you think so?" the Spaniard continued, with a cutting smile. "In truth," she added, "we never had any relations together. You are right, and yet I know you thoroughly. Miss Ellen, daughter of the squatter, the scalp hunter, the bandit, in a word, Red Cedar, and who dares to love Don Pablo de Zarate, as if you did not belong to an accursed race. Have I forgotten aught—are those all your titles? Answer, will you?" she said, thrusting her face, inflamed with passion, close to Ellen's, and shaking her violently by the arm.
"I am, indeed, Red Cedar's daughter," Ellen answered, coldly; "but I do not understand what you mean by your allusion to Don Pablo de Zarate."
"Do you not, innocent lamb!" the Spaniard retorted with irony.
"And supposing it were so," the American answered with some haughtiness, "what does it concern you? By what right do you cross-question me?"
"By what right?" the Spaniard said, violently, but suddenly checked herself, and, biting her lips till the blood came, she folded her hands on her breast, and, surveying Ellen with a glance full of the utmost contempt, she continued:—
"In truth, you are an angel of purity and gentleness; your life has passed calmly and softly at the hearth of honest and respectable parents, who inculcated in you at an early age all the virtues they practice so well—ah, ah! Is not that what you meant to say to me?— while I, who am an associate of brigands, who have spent my whole life on the prairie, who understand nothing of the narrow exigencies of your paltry civilisation, who have always breathed the sharp and savage air of liberty—by what right should I come to interfere in your family arrangements, and interfere in your chaste loves, whose sentimental and insipid incidents are so well regulated by feet and inches? You are right, I cannot, with my savage manner, and burning heart, cross your love, and destroy for a caprice all your combinations—I am, indeed, mad," she added, as she rudely repulsed the maiden.