“Even so, with much meat,” she continued, more harshly than before. “But of what worth to you and me? A few bones to gnaw in our toothless old age. But the back-fat, the kidneys, and the tongues—these shall go into other mouths than thine and mine, old man.”
Ebbits nodded his head and wept silently.
“There be no one to hunt meat for us,” she cried, turning fiercely upon me.
There was accusation in her manner, and I shrugged my shoulders in token that I was not guilty of the unknown crime imputed to me.
“Know, O White Man, that it is because of thy kind, because of all white men, that my man and I have no meat in our old age and sit without tobacco in the cold.”
“Nay,” Ebbits said gravely, with a stricter sense of justice. “Wrong has been done us, it be true; but the white men did not mean the wrong.”
“Where be Moklan?” she demanded. “Where be thy strong son, Moklan, and the fish he was ever willing to bring that you might eat?”
The old man shook his head.
“And where be Bidarshik, thy strong son? Ever was he a mighty hunter, and ever did he bring thee the good back-fat and the sweet dried tongues of the moose and the caribou. I see no back-fat and no sweet dried tongues. Your stomach is full with emptiness through the days, and it is for a man of a very miserable and lying people to give you to eat.”
“Nay,” old Ebbits interposed in kindliness, “the white man’s is not a lying people. The white man speaks true. Always does the white man speak true.” He paused, casting about him for words wherewith to temper the severity of what he was about to say. “But the white man speaks true in different ways. To-day he speaks true one way, to-morrow he speaks true another way, and there is no understanding him nor his way.”