Again she raised her head, this time giving him a steady look, and was it fancy that for a single instant there was something like a gleam of recognition in her eye.
If so it was gone again before he could be sure it had been there; while she answered indifferently in the Shawnee tongue, that she did not understand what he had just said, and that she was not a pale face but an Indian woman, the wife of a Shawnee brave.
Kenneth sat for a moment in perplexed silence; her assertion that she did not belong to the white race was evidently false, yet what could be her motive for making it? If she preferred to remain with the tribe no one could force her away, or would be likely to care to do so.
As he watched her again busied with her work, apparently wholly careless of his presence, and studied her face, recalling the description that had been given him, calculating what her age might be, and the changes produced by the hardships and exposure of her wild life, the conviction grew upon him that it was possible, even probable, she was the very woman for whom he had so long and vainly searched.
He determined upon a bold course.
Leaning toward her and gazing full into her face, "Reumah Clark," he said, "have you quite forgotten the old life in the little valley among the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, the husband and children you then loved so dearly, the kind neighbors at whose house you were when the Indians swooped down so suddenly upon you all?"
She had not been able to repress a slight start at the unexpected sound of that name, or to entirely preserve the stolidity of countenance with which she had begun the interview.
She rose hastily and disappeared from view within the wigwam.
The action left in Kenneth's mind little room for doubt of her identity, but alas, of what avail that he had found her, if she could not be induced to speak of those long past occurrences and to reveal the secret which, if known to any mortal, was possessed by her alone?
His heart beat almost to suffocation while he forced himself to sit waiting quietly there at the door of her wigwam in the forlorn hope that she might return in a truthful and communicative mood.