“White men hunting for the yellow earth threw a bad spell on the Blackfeet. The evil spirits were made mad, and killed the Blackfeet. They died. The son of Crazy Snake died. For that we kill the white men.”
She was sitting in the bow of the canoe, facing him, and he stared at her with his shining black eyes, that looked so like the eyes of a snake. She did not wonder that he was called, or called himself, Crazy Snake; for those snaky eyes, to her heated imagination, seemed like the eyes of some deadly serpent. They almost fascinated her.
“But—but why do you—take me?” she gasped at last.
Crazy Snake gave utterance to what seemed almost a chuckle.
“Brown Eyes purty squaw!” he said. “Wide Foot, the squaw of Crazy Snake, is old; he take a young squaw, who is white. The white men will be killed. But the Brown Eyes she will live.”
The statement roused her as nothing had done since the death of her father.
“I would rather die!” she said. “I will kill myself rather than become your—your wife!”
She half rose, and in another second would have leaped into the stream; but he stretched out his long right arm with a quick motion, catching her by her hair, which had come unbound in her struggles with him, and jerked her flat in the bottom of the canoe.
“Ugh!” he grunted. “Brown Eyes fool! Brown Eyes drown herself? No, no! Brown Eyes be the squaw of Crazy Snake.”
She lay there, in the bottom of the canoe, cowering.