In the first moment of astonishment, Dusty Star had not recognised his deliverer. Yet Goshmeelee it was, and no other, who now stood before him, gazing at him reprovingly out of her little pig-like eyes.
It was exactly as if she had said:
"You are out of bounds. You have no business to be here. If I hadn't happened to come in the nick of time you'd never have escaped to tell the tale!"
Dusty Star was well aware that all this was perfectly true, even though Goshmeelee didn't put it into plain Indian speech. Also he could see that her rescue of him had been at the cost of some damage to herself. In the brief moment of her grapple with the wolf, his long fangs had seized. It was not a serious wound, but it bled. Goshmeelee, with her immense practicalness, instantly produced from her mouth the washing apparatus dreaded by her cubs, and began to lick the injured spot. Dusty Star looked at her very solemnly with his big brown eyes.
"I never meant you to get hurt," he said in his throaty Indian voice. He kept repeating the words over and over again.
If Goshmeelee had ever been examined in the tongues spoken at Washington, London, Paris, and the other great centres of civilized gabble, by the learned gentlemen so high up in the educational world that it must make them dizzy to look down the precipices of their own minds, she would have been regarded as a perfect "dreadnought" of a dunce. But if they and she had to compete in the tongues used by the forest-folk, not to mention the running language of the water-voices and the wind, I should have been greatly surprised if she had not left them very far behind indeed! So, although she did not know a single word of Dusty Star's Indian talk, she grasped the meaning of it at once, and knew that he was being sorry with his mouth.
When she had licked as much as necessary, she looked pleasantly at Dusty Star with every bit of her good-natured face. That her wound was better, and that she was still ready for blueberries, was what she wanted him to understand.
And Dusty Star fortunately remembered the spot on the barren where the blueberries were on the point of being very nearly ripe. If Goshmeelee had not passed that way, Dusty Star was delighted to think that (although it was nothing in comparison with what she had done for him) he could nevertheless put her in the way of filling with berries that part of her which was wanting to be filled.
He grabbed her by the fur, and gave her a tug.
"You come with me, and I'll show you!" he said.