ELLEN AND DOÑA CLARA.
Since she had fallen again into the power of Red Cedar, Doña Clara, a prey to a gloomy sorrow, had yielded unresistingly to her abductors, despairing ever to escape from them; especially since she had seen the men in whose power she was, definitely take the road to the desert.
For a maiden, accustomed to all the refinements of luxury, and all those little attentions which a father's love continually lavished on her, the new existence commencing was an uninterrupted succession of tortures, among half savage ruffians, whose brutal ways and coarse language constantly made her fear insults she would have been too weak to repulse.
Still, up to this moment, Red Cedar's conduct had been—we will not say respectful, for the squatter was ignorant of such refinements—but, at any rate, proper, that is to say, he had affected to pay no attention to her while ordering his men not to trouble her in any way.
Doña Clara had been entrusted by the scalp hunter to his wife Betsy and his daughter Ellen.
The Megera, after giving the maiden an ugly look, had turned her back on her, and did not once address her—conduct which was most agreeable to the young Mexican. As for Ellen, she had constituted herself, on her private authority, the friend of the prisoner, to whom she rendered all those small services her position allowed her, with a delicacy and tact little to be expected from a girl educated in the desert by a father like hers.
At the outset, Doña Clara, absorbed in her grief, had paid no attention to Ellen's kindness, but gradually, in spite of herself, the young American's unchanging gentleness, and her patience, which nothing rebuffed, affected her; she had felt the services which the other occasionally rendered her, and had gradually learned to feel for the squatter's daughter a degree of gratitude which presently ripened into friendship.
Youth is naturally confiding; when a great grief oppresses it, the need of entrusting that grief to a person who seems to sympathise with it, renders it expansive. Alone among the bandits, to whom chance had handed her over, Doña Clara must inevitably—so soon as the first paroxysm of suffering had passed—seek for someone to console her, and help her in enduring the immense misfortune that crushed her.
And this had occurred much more rapidly than under ordinary circumstances, thanks to the sympathising kindness of the young American, who had in a few hours found the way to her heart.
Red Cedar, whom nothing escaped, smiled cunningly at the friendship of the two maidens, which, however, he feigned not to perceive. It was a strange thing, but this scalp hunter, this man that seemed to have nothing human about him, who perspired crime at every pore, whose ferocity was unbounded, had in his heart one feeling which attached him victoriously to the human family, a profound, illimitable love for Ellen—the love of the tiger for its cubs.