It jarred upon all his instincts of race feeling to even approach the subject of Manuelita's wrongs to this Indian. The Navajoes and Pueblos might be mutually hostile, and the Pueblo cacique for the present was his friend, but he was an Indian after all, a member of the race to which belonged those Sioux and Cheyennes whose dreadful deeds were burned in upon the American's brain. Ill-treatment of women captives makes an unbridgeable division between race and race. It constitutes
"——the inexpiable wrong, the unutterable shame,
That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."
Nevertheless, so great was his anxiety on the subject that he had broken through the reserve natural to him in this matter.
Before answering, the cacique threw a look of pity at him. It was neither pity for her lot, nor for his state of anxious suspense concerning it. It was the contemptuous pity of superior knowledge for the uninstructed person who did not understand Navajos and their ways.
"She's all right," said he; "the Navajos won't do her any harm unless they are driven to kill her."
"You don't mean to tell me that's true?" cried Stephens eagerly. "I can't understand how it can be. I know some things about the plains Indians, and I know no woman is spared by them for one hour after she becomes a captive. Do you mean to say that the Navajos are different from all other Indians?"
The cacique laughed with conscious superiority.
"Of course they are different," he answered, "and they always have been. Didn't I say before that they are very foolish, ignorant people? And it is quite true that they are afraid to use violence to captive women, and I will tell you why. It is all because of a foolish religion of their own that they have. You know they are mere heathens; they don't know anything about heaven and purgatory and the rest of it, about all the things the padre tells when he comes to see us. They have foolish stories which they believe, and which the devil has taught them."