She did not ask if it were so, but she leaned forward with all of eager question in her eyes. It was the first time she had shown strong interest in anything. But, having aroused from her listlessness to speak of the ghosts of fancy haunting her, she seemed quickened to anxiety by the picture her own words conjured up.
“Ah! those tracks in the black mud and that face above the ledge!”
“It is true,” said the squaw, “and not a dream. The track of the white man was there, and the moon was in the sky, as you say.”
“Ah!” and the evidently unwelcome truth made her clench her fingers together despairingly; she had hoped so that it was a dream. The truth of it banished her lethargy, made her think as nothing else had. “Ah! it was so, then; and the face—the face was real, was—”
“I saw no face,” said the squaw.
“But I did—yes, I did,” she muttered. “I saw it like the face of a white devil!”
Then she checked herself and glanced at the Indian woman, whose dark, heavy face appeared so stupid. Still, one never could tell by the looks of an Indian how much or how little he knows of the thing you want to know; and after a moment’s scrutiny, the girl asked:
“Did you learn more of the tracks?—learn who the white man was that made them?”
“You sick—much sick,” she explained. “All time Dan he say: ‘Stay here by white girl’s bed. Never leave.’ So I not get out again, and the rain come wash all track away.”