"Me no sabe, Señor."
Jack was nonplussed. In her he found the same ability to dissemble that predominated in the well-known character of the first lady in the Garden of Eden. He tried to recall some Spanish words that she might understand, but none of the few which he essayed to use met with any better reception.
"Chiquita heap brave," said Jack, to which she made no reply.
"Chiquita save Jack; make 'em glad Jack's heart. What Jack do to make Chiquita's heart glad?"
He at last had struck the right chord, as her face beamed with a glad response, but it brought questions causing a train of thought which made him smile even at the risk of incurring her displeasure. To express gratitude to an Indian requires much more diplomacy and skill than is required under like circumstances in civilized communities.
"Would the fair-faced sister of the white man save Jack all same Chiquita? Would the pale-face maiden bring firewood and sleep in willow bed to save white man's life?"
Her eyes blazed in the consciousness of knowing that in the present age on the American Continent no white woman had ever been put to a like test. Whether she felt this intuitively or whether she had learned it from the squaws who had visited the big cities as they recounted the adoration extended by the male to the weaker sex as a part and parcel of civilization, it matters not.
Jack knew that he was at as great a disadvantage in her presence as if at the mercy of the divinest coquette in all of God's country. He essayed to answer, but something restrained him. It was not fear; it was not because he had his own misgivings on the subject, nor was it because he had no ready reply. Nevertheless, he waited and in his mind he tried to picture one of the belles of society bucking snow to save some football graduate from death, or one sleeping in the open air, without a chaperon, and a man in the same cañon. What would Mrs. Grundy say? Of course he thought of the story by an eminent author where there was a scuttled ship laden with gold, a clergyman and a rich man's daughter cast upon an unknown island, and Jack acknowledged he had never heard of Mrs. Grundy making unkind remarks about that tale. But that was the result of accident, and mortuary tables classify accidental risks in a category by themselves.
Chiquita had suggested the society belle who would voluntarily give up half her estate for a real live, accidental romance that did not incur too much danger. Would she leave her maid and steam radiator and in the midst of a western blizzard sally forth to carry coal up three flights of stairs to a poor, benighted student, and then sleep on the doormat, for any reward there might be in store for her, either from a consciousness of having performed a creditable act or because she loved him?
Of course, Jack knew there was no occasion ever presented where a loving young thing, just out of the sixth grade, had been called upon to carry anything any more formidable than a bunch of roses to a sick friend, and the modern equipages splashed only a little dirty water over roads well kept from snowdrifts by indulgent taxpayers. Still, the question had been asked, and he manfully determined to stand up for the fair ones across the range.