It was either a trick of the dying light, or else I detected an almost imperceptible twitching of the grim lips. After a short pause he said:
“The Shawnees are not driven. They will pick up the end of the peace-belt. They will not drop it on the ground again. Tah-gah-jute (Logan) does not wish for war. He has taken ten scalps for every one taken from his people at Baker’s house. He has covered the dead. The Pack-Horse-Man spoke wise words.”
“This white woman? You know she must go back to her people.”
Again the faint twitching of the lips. When he spoke it was to say:
“She can go where she will or where she is made to go. If she is taken to the white settlements she will run away and go back to the Scioto. Her people are red. After the French War, after Pontiac’s War, it was the same. White prisoners were returned to the white people. Many of them escaped and came back to us.”
His voice was calm and positive and my confidence in the girl’s willingness to return to civilization was shaken. She had been as stolid as her red mate in my presence, but I had believed that nature would conquer her ten years’ of savagery once she was alone with her brother.
The light had left the top of the elm and the fleecy clouds overhead were no longer dazzling because of their borrowed splendor. I cocked my rifle. The savage folded his arms as he caught the sound, but his gaze toward the west never wavered. To nerve myself into shooting the fellow in cold blood I made myself think of the girl’s terrible fate, and was succeeding rapidly when a light step sounded behind me and her low voice was saying:
“My brother is at the spring. You will find him there.”
I rose and dropped the rifle into the hollow of my left arm and stared at her incredulously. It had happened before, the rebellion of white prisoners at quitting their captors. Yet the girl’s refusal was astounding.
“You would not go with him?”