“You are not hating Conacher,” murmured Mary-Lou sadly. “Why say that to me?”
Loseis stamped her foot. “I tell you I hate him!” she cried. “That is enough for you! . . . What right had he to treat me like a child? I am Blackburn’s daughter. My father is the master of this country. And who is this white man? A poor man in a canoe with only two servants! Nobody ever heard of him before. My father was angry at his coming, and I was angry. We do not want white men coming here to spoil the fur trade!”
Mary-Lou’s silence suggested that she was far from being convinced.
“A poor man with no outfit at all!” Loseis repeated louder. “Yet he held his head as if he was as good as my father! He must be a fool. He talked to me as if I was anybody at all, and his eyes laughed when I became angry . . . !” In the midst of her tirade Loseis suddenly broke down. “Oh, I wish I could forget him!” she cried, with the angry tears springing to her eyes.
This sign of weakness gave Mary-Lou the courage to glide to her mistress, and wreathe her arms about her. “I think Conacher was a good man,” she whispered. “His eyes were true.”
These words were very sweet to Loseis; but she would not openly confess it. However, she gave Mary-Lou a little squeeze, before withdrawing herself from her arms. “No,” she said; “I shall stand by my father. My father is the finest man living. Conacher is gone. I shall never see him again. I shall quickly forget him.
“It was only because he took me by surprise,” she went on with an eagerness in which there was something pathetically childlike. “When he came paddling down our river with the two Beaver Indians I was like one struck on the head. It was like a white man falling from the skies. No white man ever came down our river before; and he so young and strong and full of laughter! He wore no hat; and the sunlight was snared in his yellow hair. I never saw hair like that. . . .”
“He like you, too, ver’ moch,” ventured Mary-Lou. “I was there when he landed. I saw it burn up like fire in his blue eyes.”
“Yes, I saw that, too,” murmured Loseis, averting her face. “But why did he change right away?”
“Because you treat him like poor, dirty Slavi,” said Mary-Lou. “No white man take that.”