“But Sun-Hair no fool the chief! If she does he will kill her! She can’t get away. Take care!”
The Indian let her free now; and he sat down on a low stool near the door, as if half fearing some treachery on Vinnie’s part, but he was pretty well assured, after all, that she would go with him without much resistance. Vinnie stood for some time, striving to think of some plan by which she might escape the Indian, who watched her every motion from under his heavy, overhanging brows, as closely as a cat watches a mouse.
There was such a look of half-suspicious triumph on his dark face and in his cruel eyes as is sometimes seen in the eyes of the panther, as it sits quietly by, watching its prey, and suffering it to live and exult in a few moments more of life that the moment of its annihilation, when it comes suddenly and unlooked for, may be the harder to bear.
But the poor girl rejected plan after plan as impracticable. At one time she thought of making some excuse to enter an adjoining apartment and secure a pistol which she knew her father kept there; but she feared that the savage would discover her intention and tomahawk her at once. Then she contemplated making a rush for the door at the cabin and escaping into the forest; but her reason told her that the chief would overtake her before she was fairly outside the door.
At last, when she had nearly given up in despair, a thought suggested itself to her brain—how, she never knew, it was so wild and strange—that made her heart leap with a newborn hope—a hope that she might yet outwit her captor and gain time until something—she know not what—should intervene to save her from the fate he had marked out for her.
She sat down by the table and opened the small box of polished wood, of which mention was made in our first chapter, the Indian watching her the while from his place near the door.
This casket, on being opened, prove to be a small galvanic battery; and Vinnie was but a moment preparing it for action.
When all was in readiness, she took a pair of electric slippers from a drawer in the table and placed them beside the battery.
Then, knowing the superstition of the Indian race, she arose, and waving her hands several times very slowly around her head, seemed to be invoking a charm. Her eyes were fixed apparently on vacancy, and she stood motionless for several minutes; then smiling sweetly, she turned to Ku-nan-gu-no-nah, who had advanced to the center of the room, and stood regarding her mystic performance with a sort of awed wonder, she said in a low, soft voice, that sounded to him like the murmuring of a distant brooklet:
“Does the chief know that the Great Manitou has given the white maiden a mysterious power, greater than is possessed by any of the Indian medicine-men? Would Ku-nan-gu-no-nah like to see evidence of the white maiden’s power?”