"Tell him yourself," jerked the contractor. "And I'd like to be around when you're at it. I fancy he can look after himself."
"Indian need to," said Koppy from the darkness.
CHAPTER XVI
THE HEART OF A HALFBREED
Blue Pete glided in and tossed aside the blanket of his Indian disguise with a gesture of irritability. With a petulant kick his beaded moccasins struck the ceiling of the cave, and, sighing, he sank his feet into the more familiar high-heeled cowboy boots.
Mira, moving busily about the camp stove in a recess, noted it all without turning her head—noted, too, that there the usual routine of his return was interrupted. The great two-inch spurs, his individual twist to cowboy attire—great spiked wheels which he never used, but whose glitter and rattle seemed to satisfy him—were forgotten. Instead, he sank to the rocky floor and meditatively drew from his belt the beloved corncob pipe.
Troubled, Mira went about the preparation of their evening meal with a plaintive quietness. Juno, too, seemed oppressed, for after a tentative wriggle of her stump of a tail she settled back on her haunches, eyes fixed on her mistress.
Mira struggled to hold back the tears, struggled harder to hide them when they persisted. To celebrate their return to the old cave under the river bank she had spent hours that afternoon scouring woods and river bottom for wild flowers; and a dozen old tin cans rescued from the camp garbage heap gleamed confused colour in the candle light. For more hours she had been rasping her little hands with scrubbing the rude table and the blocks that served as seats; and over the table she had draped after much experiment a gaudy Indian blanket, thereby approaching more nearly the atmosphere of home they both craved so eagerly. About the wall depended picture papers, meaningless in story but heavy with pathetic longing.
Hitherto he had always noticed so quickly and eagerly her efforts toward their comfort. From the first it had been one of the rites of their association—he beaming wordlessly at the touches of decoration with which she busied herself about their wild homes, she glowing with vocal pleasure at the things he carved with his own hands—the chair back in the Cypress Hills cave, the shelves for her stores, the drawer in the table, the box for Juno to sleep in.
And now he did not seem to notice—and she had worked so hard.