There was no reply. He had driven his will home.
“Oh, Snow-Burner,” said Nawa, at last, “as Little Bear has said, we do your will.”
“Good;” Reivers rose and towered over them. “My will at present is that you go to your tepees. Sleep soundly. I have work for you in the morning.”
He stood and watched while they filed, stooped over, through the low opening in the tepee wall. They went without question, without will of their own. A stronger will than theirs had caught them and held them. From hence on they were wholly subservient to the superior mentality which was to direct their actions. Reivers smiled. Old MacGregor had felt safe in telling about the mine; a strange man had no chance to find it. But MacGregor did not know of Tillie’s people.
Reivers suddenly turned toward the fire. Tillie was standing there, arrayed in buckskin so white that she must have kept it protected from the tepee smoke in hope of his coming. At the sight of her there came before Reivers’ eyes the picture of Hattie MacGregor’s face as she had looked up at him when he was leaving the MacGregor cabin. The look that came over his face then was new even to Tillie.
“You, too, get out!” he roared, and Tillie fled from the tepee in terror.
CHAPTER XXX—ANY MEANS TO AN END
In the big tepee Reivers rolled on his blankets and cursed himself for his weakness. What had happened to him? Was he getting to be like other men, that he would let the memory of an impudent, red-haired girl interfere with his plans or pleasures? Had he not sworn to forget? And yet here came the memory of her—the wide grey eyes, the suffering mouth, the purity of the look of her—rising before his eyes like a vision to shame him.
To shame him! To shame the Snow-Burner! He understood the significance of the look she had given him, and which had stood between him and Tillie. Womanhood, pure, noble womanhood, was appealing to his better self.
His better self! Reivers laughed a laugh so ghastly that it might have come from a bare skull. His better self! If a man believed in things like that he had to believe in the human race—had to believe in goodness and badness, virtue and sin, right and wrong, and all that silly, effeminate rot. Reivers didn’t believe in that stuff. He knew only one life-law, that of strength over weakness, and that was the law he would live and die with, and Miss Hattie MacGregor could not interfere.