And one by one they who sat to judge arose and left the big lodge.
XVII
MIGNON
“BUT, Yellow Fox,” I protested, “no one understands them; they do not understand themselves!”
Yellow Fox grunted and smiled, showing a very white set of wolfish teeth. We two were sitting together outside the lodge, and, male-like, we had hit upon the topic of woman. The locust-like cadences of the songs and the shuffle of dancing feet came muffled to us. The scent of boiling beef and the good smoke-tang of wood fires permeated the sultry night air, lifting my not overcivilised fancy back into the spacious star-hung feast rooms of the dead years, where big-boned, brawny, fighting men indulged their lusts for steaming haunches. The full moon lifted a Rabelaisian face of lusty red above the hills, and I saw by its light the eager spirit of the story-teller bright in the eyes of Yellow Fox.
“What they understand I do not know,” he began; “I only know I do not understand. And I have travelled far. When I was a young man, many strange valleys knew my feet, and from many hilltops my eyes looked forth. For from my first moccasins my feet caught the itch for going. And in many villages of strange peoples I have lived for little spaces, until the feasts were tasteless and the maidens ugly. Then did my moccasins itch my feet again, so that I went forth and sought new feasts, other maidens.
“And I have known many maidens. None of them did I understand; and least of all—Mignon.
“Even to-night something of the soft summer smell of her is in my nose; and if I were not old I would walk far, walk far; for that smell is like a voice calling over big waters and many valleys—a voice so far away that the ear does not catch it—so thin that it is no sound, but a feeling.