"Well, 'ere we are," said Jean Paul with an odd start of laughter. "W'at you goin' to do?"
"I've told you," said Jack. "I'll take you to the fort or bury you on the way. I keep my word."
There was a silence between them. They were motionless on their little platform of rock, remote in the great spaces of the upper air. Jean Paul looked straight ahead of him with his hard, flat black eyes, in which there lurked something inhuman and inexplicable, and he idly plucked bits of moss from between the stones. What thoughts were passing through his head only God who made the redskins knows. When he turned his eyes again to Jack, it was with the old vain, childish, sidelong look.
"You t'ink you one brave man, huh, to climb up the rock las' night?"
"Never mind that," said Jack coolly. "You don't know yet what white men can do."
Jean Paul sprang up with an extraordinary display of passion. "White men!" he cried, flinging up his arms. "You are not the only men! I am a man as much as you! I am half white and I hate the whites! My fathers were white as well as yours. They beget us and they spit on us. Is it my fault that my blood is mixed? Am I your brother? No, your dog that you kick! Very well. I will do something no pure white man ever did. You go back and tell them!"
On the side of the river, the rock they were on ran up and ended in a row of jagged points like the jaw of a steel trap, overhanging a well nigh bottomless void. With his last words Jean Paul ran out on one of these points of rock, and stood there, with arms flung up, like a diver before he makes his cast.
Jack's heart contracted in his breast. "Come back!" he gasped.
"Come and get me, white man!" cried Jean Paul over his shoulder. Exaltation was in his face.