"We can go home, then," said Mrs. Mackenzie.
"Isn't he splendid!" exclaimed Beatrice. "I'd like to paint his picture. Do you think he'd let me, Uncle John?"
It took a great deal of explanation to make Black Partridge understand, but he finally consented, on condition that the picture would be given to him. "He's afraid the white squaw will make a charm," said Mackenzie.
"All right," laughed Beatrice. "I can make several sketches, and he can have one of the pictures. He needn't know I make more than one."
By night the Mackenzies were in their own home again, and, as the weeks passed, the fear was forgotten by all save Beatrice. She could not enter her own room without a vivid remembrance of her fright, coupled with the consciousness that she had cried like a baby, and that the Ensign had put his arm around her unrebuked. She hated herself for her weakness and blamed herself bitterly for her foolishness, because, if she had only stopped to think, she would have known the difference in sound between a moccasin and an army boot.
Still, at night, she would sometimes start from troubled dreams with the same deadly fear upon her and tremble long after she knew she was awake and safe. Behind it all was something she did not care to think of, but memory gave her no peace.
Pictures, clear and distinct, intruded upon her mental vision against her will. She saw Robert leaning on his musket, the only man in the Fort who was not up and doing when danger seemed imminent, and shuddered at the look on his face when she called him a coward. In his eyes there had been something of the same reproach with which a dog regards the well-loved master who has unjustly struck him. "Lexington!" she said to herself over and over again; "his fathers fought there, and I called their son a coward!"
Swiftly upon the memory came the sound of his voice when he had cried, "Beatrice, do you despise me?" and the sight of his strained, eager face, as he waited for her to speak. The knowledge of her answer made her shrink from herself with bitterness and shame. The obvious course of apology lay open to her, but her pride refused to humble itself that far. Time and time again she had determined to make partial atonement in that way, but her stubborn lips would not move to shape the word "forgive."
Robert seemed to have forgotten, and each day he made himself dearer to the Mackenzies. Between the trader and his college-bred nephew there slowly grew one of those rare friendships possible only to men. Mackenzie had not spent his life upon the frontier without learning to understand his fellow-man, and to read, though perhaps roughly, the inner meaning of outward semblances. In Robert he saw the blood of the Forsyths undefiled—the martial spirit was there, educated, refined, and tempered until it was akin to polished steel. From his mother the boy had received broad charity and a great gentleness, as well as the adamantine pride which is at once the strength and terror of a woman's heart.