"I tell you in the morning," said Nahnya coolly. "You don' have to go unless you want."
Philippe shrugged. He turned to make ready. "I have a blanket at Joe Mixer's camp," he said.
"Take mine," said Nahnya. "Leave your blanket lie there when you get up, so they not know right away that you gone away."
The preparations were quickly made. Nahnya sent one of the boys back to the stream for a handful of gold dust, that Philippe might have something to show for his journey. All this while Ralph stood still and silent, looking straight before him. There was something proud in his abasement. His face was composed except for the eyes which glowed with a kind of exaltation of pain. He was thinking with a sombre satisfaction of the bottomless black hole that sucked in the stream entire. "A step off the bridge ends it!" he said to himself, and was impatient to get there.
As they turned to start down beside the stream, Nahnya, alarmed by Ralph's silence, stole a look into his face. To her foreseeing eyes his intention was written there as clearly as if he had proclaimed it. She became deathly pale.
"Wait!" she said faintly. "I—I will go with you through the cave. Wait for me inside." To Ralph, she said, without looking at him: "I want speak with you."
A spasm of reawakened hope, doubt, pain convulsed his face. It was the pain that a man peacefully dead of asphyxiation feels when the reviving oxygen is forced into his lungs, dragging him back over the border. Nevertheless, Nahnya saw that he had given up his grim intention.
Philippe, Ralph, and Kitty disappeared inside the cave. Nahnya drew St. Jean Bateese a little way up the slope apart from the boys, and made him sit beside her at the edge of the rocks. "St. Jean," she said quietly, "I go away now. I not come back."
The old man turned horrified eyes on her. He began to protest breathlessly. As he looked in her quiet, resolute face the uselessness of it was borne on him, and his quavering voice died away.
"It is the best to do," Nahnya went on. "I think it all out. I am half white. I not belong here. In this place we want begin a new red race, strong and free. I am half white. Look what trouble and danger I bring on you. I will go away. All shall go on as we plan."