They had just emerged from a thicket into an open space, where the ground was comparatively dry. Overhead the stars were shining in great clusters of silver and gold against a dark, cavernous looking sky, here and there overrun with careering black clouds. Beverley shivered, not so much with cold as on account of the stress of excitement which amounted to nervous rigor. Long-Hair faced him and leaned toward him, until his breathing was audible and his massive features were dimly outlined. A dragon of the darkest age could not have been more repulsive.
"Ugh, friend, damn!"
Beverley started when these words were followed by a sentence in an Indian dialect somewhat familiar to him, a dialect in which he had tried to talk with Long-Hair during the day's march. The sentence, literally translated, was:
"Long-Hair is friendly now."
A blow in the face could not have been so surprising. Beverley not only started, but recoiled as if from a sudden and deadly apparition. The step between supreme exhilaration and utter collapse is now and then infinitesimal. There are times, moreover, when an expression on the face of Hope makes her look like the twin sister of Despair. The moment falling just after Long-Hair spoke was a century condensed in a breath.
"Long-Hair is friendly now; will white man be friendly?"
Beverley heard, but the speech seemed to come out of vastness and hollow distance; he could not realize it fairly. He felt as if in a dream, far off somewhere in loneliness, with a big, shadowy form looming before him. He heard the chill wind in the thickets round about, and beyond Long-Hair rose a wall of giant trees.
"Ugh, not understand?" the savage presently demanded in his broken English.
"Yes, yes," said Beverley, "I understand."
"Is the white man friendly now?" Long-Hair then repeated in his own tongue, with a certain insistence of manner and voice.