Ralph pricked up his ears.
"If you're coming back," Cranston went on, "if you're going to settle here, be on your guard against the pretty native girls. Take the word of an old-timer: it is always fatal!"
A hot colour crept into Ralph's cheeks, but the flickering firelight did not betray him. He was on fire to refute Cranston, to crush him with arguments, but he fought it down, fearful of betraying his secret.
Cranston went on all unconscious: "You can't blame either party. The young fellow is lonely of course, and he thinks he is cut off from the women of his own race. As for the girl, she thinks she is made if she gets a white husband. He forgets the long procession of the generations ending in him, and she doesn't know anything about it. You cannot reconcile the two strains. Generally the man gives in. He forgets his past and sinks to her level; becomes 'smoked,' as we say.
"Once in a way the man turns out to be of harder fibre and then it is worse. For she cannot rise to him, she is made conscious of her own deficiencies, and all the hateful, stubborn qualities of the red race come to the fore. When you look to a woman for more than she can give, and she knows it, it turns her into a devil. Suppose this couple has children, and the man tries to teach them of their white heritage. The children become strangers to their mother, and who can blame her for going mad with rage? What is this father going to do with his children who are neither red nor white when they begin to grow up? what with the girls? what with the boys? That question is unanswerable."
Ralph remembered the two engaging little dark-skinned boys with the Scotch names, and his heart warmed toward their father. "Poor devil!" he thought. "He's been unlucky!" The story came no nearer to Ralph himself, for to him Nahnya was an exception, and of different clay from every other woman in the world.
While the two men were talking a woman suddenly appeared within the firelight. They had not heard her come. She was a half-breed, still handsome in a savage way, though verging upon middle age. Her features were distorted with rage, and she opened a torrent of withering invective in her own tongue upon Cranston, with malignant side shafts in Ralph's direction.
Cranston coolly knocked the ashes out of his pipe and arose. "Go back to the house, my girl!" he said, with a curious compound of firmness and patience.
The woman clutched at her hair in hysterical fury. Her voice rose to a scream.
"Go to the house!" repeated Cranston, with a commanding gesture.