“Tell me,” she insisted.
“I have never married,” he evaded.
“And there is no one else? No other Iseult out there beyond the mountains?”
Then it was that Smoke knew himself a coward. He lied. Reluctantly he did it, but he lied. He shook his head with a slow indulgent smile, and in his face was more of fondness than he dreamed as he noted Labiskwee's swift joy-transfiguration.
He excused himself to himself. His reasoning was jesuitical beyond dispute, and yet he was not Spartan enough to strike this child-woman a quivering heart-stroke.
Snass, too, was a perturbing factor in the problem. Little escaped his black eyes, and he spoke significantly.
“No man cares to see his daughter married,” he said to Smoke. “At least, no man of imagination. It hurts. The thought of it hurts, I tell you. Just the same, in the natural order of life, Margaret must marry some time.”
A pause fell; Smoke caught himself wondering for the thousandth time what Snass's history must be.
“I am a harsh, cruel man,” Snass went on. “Yet the law is the law, and I am just. Nay, here with this primitive people, I am the law and the justice. Beyond my will no man goes. Also, I am a father, and all my days I have been cursed with imagination.”
Whither his monologue tended, Smoke did not learn, for it was interrupted by a burst of chiding and silvery laughter from Labiskwee's tent, where she played with a new-caught wolf-cub. A spasm of pain twitched Snass's face.