“And the man made jokes at me that stung like elkhorn whips, for he was thin and looked as one whose blood is half water. I could have choked him with two fingers like a worm. So!”
Yellow Fox snapped his fingers viciously.
“And it pleased the young man to shove his finger into my ribs and laugh. So I grasped his arm very hard. I put his finger to my mouth; I bit it and the blood came. He cried ow ow; then I said to the woman, using what speech of hers I knew: ‘Take this baby man of yours away or I will eat him, for I am hungry. But you are good to see; I like you; touch me.’
“And she, wondering that I spoke her speech, touched me!
“Ah—everything was changed!”
Yellow Fox suddenly passed into a subconscious mood. The moon, grown pale with its ascent, illumined his masterful male features, over which I could see the dream of old days flitting like a ghost. The song of the women dancing about the feast fires within arose into a high and tenuous minor of yearning, filling up the momentary gap in the story like a chorus. In the wake of the passing gust of song, the voice of Yellow Fox arose, soft, low, musical—the voice of memory.
“Her hands she laid upon me—soft and white and thin, they were. She passed them over the muscles of my breast; she stroked my arms. Soft as a mother’s touch was hers; like a mother’s touch—but I felt a fire burning at her finger tips, that made me wish to fight big men for her, and make them bleed and make them groan and make them die, slobbering blood in the dust! Then afterward to take her far away, thrown across my back like a dead fawn; to build a lodge for her in a lonesome place where man’s face never was!
“Much hair she had—much hair that hung above her face like a dark cloud upon a white sky at evening. And it brushed across my breast! I shivered as in a wind that drives the snow before it—and yet I was not cold.
“And then she was gone—swallowed up in the river of people. But not all of her was gone. A smell sweeter than the earth-smell when the spring rains fall was in my nostrils! A smell that gnawed within me like a hunger—yet I did not wish to eat! A smell of soft, white flesh—oh, very soft and white! And now in my old age I call that smell Mignon.
“And the people, like a noisy, muddy stream, flowed round me, past me. But I growled no more; for I did not wish for fun. I hated them—they stank! An ache like the ache for home was upon me; an ache like the ache of a man who smells the home-smoke in a dream and wakes far off from home.