The days passed; the moons came and went; yet Shadow Flower did not return. There was a common thought concerning her disappearance which was never spoken aloud; but when the fires burned low and the night grew late, it was often whispered with awe:
“She has gone in search of her soul; it fled last year with the summer.”
VI
THE ART OF HATE
MANY tales have been told of noble sacrifice for love, and I have seen such in my time; but I have in mind an instance in which a man reached a sublime height through the least exalted of human passions—hate.
There are some who argue that love is born at first sight. However that be, I am certain that it is often thus with hate. I have seen men in my time the first sight of whom was an insult to me—sudden, stinging like a slap on the cheek. It is a strange thing, and I have never heard it explained satisfactorily. Sometimes in my own case I have attributed it to even so slight a thing as a certain turn of the nose, a curve of the lip, a droop of the eye. And again I have felt that it was due to nothing visible about the man, but rather to some subtle emanation from the very soul of him, that maddened me as though I had inhaled the fumes of some devilish drug. Have you ever felt this?
Well, I am telling you about Zephyr Recontre.
He was a little, wiry half-breed, with a French father and a woman of the Blackfeet tribe for a mother. Quite a promising combination, if you think it over! I came across him ’way up at Fort Union in the early ’30’s, when I was in charge of a keel boat of the American Fur Company. He was employed at the Fort as interpreter, being a fluent speaker of several Indian tongues as well as English and French.