Lena Forest understood this language of the eyes, even though she could not understand the words. Jealousy is the same, and expresses itself much the same way; whether it burns in the heart of a white woman or of an Indian maid. She saw that this Indian girl loved Lightfoot, and guessed that she was probably his promised wife. The discovery, if it was a discovery, gave her hope.
She stretched out her hands to the Indian girl.
“Oh, tell him to let me go!” she begged, in pitiful tones. “You are a woman and can sympathize with me. Ask him to let me go!”
Wind Flower looked at her curiously, while a red flush crept into her brown cheeks, giving them an added beauty.
“Why white girl here?” she said, speaking English with difficulty, and giving the words a queer pronunciation. “Why white girl with Lightfoot?”
Lightfoot himself answered her.
“It is at the order of the great chief, Crazy Snake,” he explained. “The white girl is the prisoner of Crazy Snake. He took her from her cabin, after the Blackfeet had killed her father, and he has ordered me to take her on to the Blackfoot village. She is to become the white squaw of the great chief, Crazy Snake.”
Wind Flower looked at him so sharply that it seemed the fire of her black eyes burned into his very soul.
“Does the young chief speak with the forked tongue of the serpent?” she demanded. “Does he not love the white girl, and does he not take her for himself?”
Lightfoot protested that this was not true, and repeated his assertion that he was but obeying the orders of Crazy Snake.