Told in the Hills: A Novel

by Marah Ellis Ryan

"God bless you, girl!" were the heart-felt, earnest words that answered her good-bye; and with a last firm clasp of hands, she turned Betty's head toward the trail Jim had taken, and rode away under the cedar boughs.

Genesee stood bare-headed, with a new light in his eyes as he watched her—the dawn of some growing determination.

Once she looked back, and seeing him still there, touched her cap in military fashion, and with a smile disappeared in the wet woods. As he turned away there crept from the shrubbery at the junction of the trails Talapa, who, with that slow, knowing smile about her full lips, stole after him—in her dusky silence a very shadow of a man's past that grows heavy and wide after the noon is dead, and bars out lives from sunny doors where happiness might be found. His head was bent low, thinking—thinking as he walked back to the cabin that had once held at least a sort of content—a content based on one side of his nature. Had the other died, or was it only asleep? And she had told him not to find fault with his awakening—she! He had never before realized the wealth or loss one woman could make to the world.

"Ashamed to look her in the face!" His own words echoed in his ears as he walked under the wet leaves, with the shadow of the shame skulking unseen after him; and then, little by little, the sense of her farewell came back to him, and running through it, that strong thread of faith in him yet, making his life more worth living.

"Damned little in my present outfit for her to build any foundation for hope on," he muttered grimly, as he saddled and bridled Mowitza, as if in hot haste to be gone somewhere, and then sat down on the door-step as if forgetful of the intention.

Talapa slipped past him with an armful of bark for the fire. Not a word had passed between them since the night before, and the girl watched him covertly from under drooped lids. Was she trying to fathom his meditations, or determine how far they were to affect her own future? For as the birds foretell by the signs in the air the change of the summer, so Talapa, through the atmosphere of the cabin that morning, felt approach the end of a season that had been to her luxurious with comforts new to her; and though the Indian blood in her veins may have disdained the adjuncts of civilization, yet the French tide that crossed it carried to her the Gallic yearning for the dainties and delicacies of life. To be sure, one would not find many of those in a backwoodsman's cabin; but all content is comparative, and Talapa's basis of comparison was the earthen floor of a thronged "tepee," or wigwam, where blows had been more frequent than square meals; and being a thing feminine, her affections turned to this white man of the woods who could give her a floor of boards and a dinner-pot never empty, and moreover, being of the sex feminine, those bonds of affection were no doubt securely fastened—bonds welded in a circle—endless.

At least those attributes, vaguely remembered, are usually conceded to the more gentle half of humanity, and I give Talapa the benefit of the belief, as her portrait has been of necessity set in the shadows, and has need of all the high lights that can be found for it. Whatever she may have lacked from a high-church point of view, she had at least enviable self-possession. Whatever tumult of wounded feeling there may have been in this daughter of the forest, she moved around sedately, with an air that in a white woman would be called martyr-like, and said nothing.

It was as well, perhaps, that she had the rare gift of silence, for the man at the door, with his chin resting grimly on his fists, did not seem at all sympathetic, or in the humor to fit himself to anyone's moods. The tones of that girl's voice were still vibrating over chords in his nature that disturbed him. He did not even notice Talapa's movements until she ceased them by squatting down with native grace by the fire-place, and then—

"Get up off that!" he roared, in a voice that hastened Talapa's rising considerably.

"That" was the buffalo-robe on which the other girl had throned herself the night before; and what a picture she had made in the fire-light!