'Long time between drinks, ain't it, Alf?'
'You're right, Davey. Wonderful fine place New York, ain't it? We'll have a drink, then I'll take you around on a car, while we take in the show.'
'I'm right on,' hiccoughed Dave. 'Come on, Alf.' They linked together, and staggered up the byway in the darkness. The road and themselves soon ended in a ditch.
[1] Geographically known as Selkirk Island, though wrongly placed on all maps.
CHAPTER V
THE DEAD HEART
While the lonely, heart-broken girl sat in that tainted room, her whole being bowed with grief, the drunken revellers shouting before her, many thoughts passed and flashed across the highly-strung mind.
Position, before that brutal assault, was as nothing. It mattered not at all that she looked on others enjoying themselves in the manner to them most congenial, that she was outside all this, barred by the law of race from having any part in their festivities, even had she wished it.
But why should men be cruel to her, she who had harmed no one? Why, because she was Indian, should she be treated as animal? She knew she was beautiful—once that knowledge had been the chief joy of the heart; she had, to the ruin of that joy, succeeded in attracting the desire of a handsome white; he had told her she was perfect in face and form, that she was in fact the divine woman of Nature. Yet he had taken her, under the seal of a false love, but to while away a few careless hours of leisure.