She became unconscious soon, a result largely of the choking and smothering blanket, and for a time thereafter she had no knowledge of anything.
When she was put down at last, arousing at the same time, she succeeded in whisking aside the blanket. Then she saw before her a large Indian, almost naked, smeared with paint, who was drawing a canoe from beneath the bank, and getting it ready, apparently, for a journey on the river that flowed before her.
She recognized the river as the cañon stream that rolled by her home, and she recognized this spot as one she had seen many a time, a mile below the cabin, at a point where the walls of the cañon began to contract on the grassy valley, in readiness for further narrowing farther down.
The Indian saw that she had recovered consciousness, and he swung around, lifting his hatchet menacingly.
“White girl no make noise!” he warned, speaking fair English.
The desire to cry out was frozen in her heart, which was filled with a strange terror of this painted redskin. She stared at him, as the bird is said to stare at the snake in whose power it has fallen.
The savage adjusted the light canoe in the water, stopping in his work now and then to listen, as if he anticipated pursuit.
“White girl go with Crazy Snake!” he commanded, again producing the fear-impelling hatchet, whose bright blade glanced the sunlight like burnished silver. To her imagination that hatchet edge was red with the blood of her murdered father.
She tried now to spring up, and to run; and she tried to cry out. But Crazy Snake, with a single bound, caught her by the hair, and threw her to the ground. He flashed forth a knife, now, and thrust it before her terrified eyes.
“Injun kill!” he gurgled, in a way to make her blood run cold. “White girl want Blackfoot kill?”