Phelim, standing near, muttered a curse under his breath, but the woman bore the rebuke in silence. A vision of her reprover lying there stiff and stark, with fast glazing eyes and gray hairs all dabbled in blood, seemed to come before her, and she had no heart to resent his unkindness—could scarce refrain even now from shrieking out to him to beware of these men, for they were seeking his life.
She sat pale and trembling while they loosed from the shore and dropped slowly down the stream, McManus laughing and exchanging coarse jests with his intended victim, while his two accomplices waved their hats, cheered the departing voyagers, and shouting good-bye, turned and walked rapidly away in the direction of the highroad.
Belinda followed them with her eyes till distance and intervening trees shut out the sight; then, utterly oblivious of everything but her own guilty, miserable thoughts and fears, dropped her face into her hands with a shudder and a sigh that was half a moan.
“Frettin’ arter that there handsome young Irishman, be ye, eh?” sneered Himes’s voice close at her side. “Well, ye needn’t; ye won’t never see him no more. I begun to suspect, this last day or two, that ye had most too big a likin’ fer each other, and I’ll look out that he don’t git near ye again.”
She made no reply, nor even lifted her head; and after regarding her a moment with silent scorn, he walked away to the other side of the raft.
Subsequently he twitted her several times on her excessive pallor, her silence and abstraction, attributing them to the fright of her narrow escape from falling into the river, and telling her she was an arrant coward, even for a woman.
“Oh, do let me alone!” she said at length, wearily. “You seem determined to make me hate the very sight of you, the very sound of your voice.”
“And what do I care if you do?” he returned, with a mocking laugh; “you can’t get away from me, and I ain’t afeard o’ you.”
“Go away! go away!” she cried, covering her ears with her hands and turning her back upon him, while she shuddered from head to foot and her face grew ghastly in the dim light, for the sun had set and darkness was slowly creeping over the earth.
He lighted his pipe, turned from her with an air of supreme indifference, and passing around to the farther side of the rude cabin, which occupied the centre of the raft, sat down for the smoke with which he was accustomed to finish the day, little dreaming that it might be his last.