“Weeum!” she murmured, in a faint voice. “I thought I heard him speak.”
“No, dear mother,” said Eve, beginning to weep silently. “Your spirit was in the land of dreams.”
“See,” said I, pouring some hot tea into a cup and stirring it. “I have brought you some of the pale-faces’ sweet-water. I always carry a little of it about with me when I go hunting, and had some in my wallet when we started on this wild race. Was it not fortunate? Come, take a little, it will strengthen you, mother.”
It was the first time I had called her mother, and I did so from a feeling of tenderness, for she seemed to me at the time certainly to be dying; but she misunderstood my meaning, for she looked at me with pleased surprise, and then laughed very softly as she glanced at Eve. I perceived, however, from the innocent look of inquiry returned by the latter, that she did not understand her.
After taking some of the tea, the poor woman revived, and I whispered to her daughter,— “Don’t you think it might please her to see the little picture?”
“Perhaps. I am not sure. Yes, give it to me. I will show it, but say nothing about my father’s writing or wishes. I have not yet been able to speak to her.”
To our disappointment she could make nothing of the portrait. Perhaps the moonlight was insufficient, though very bright, but it is more probable that her sight was even then failing.
“What is that?” said Eve, with a startled look, pointing at something behind me.
I turned sharply round, and beheld a column of bright flame shooting high up into the night-air. An exclamation of bitter chagrin escaped me, for I knew well what it was. After I had got the fire kindled down in the thicket on our arrival, I had noticed that I had laid it close to the roots of a dead fir-tree, the branches of which were covered to the top with a species of dried moss. At the time I knew that there was danger in this, but as our fire was to be very small, and to be extinguished the moment we were done with it, I had allowed it to remain rather than be at the trouble of shifting and rekindling it. I afterwards found that Big Otter had left the fire in charge of Salamander, and gone to shift the position of the horses; and Salamander had left it to fetch water from a neighbouring spring. Thus left to itself, the fire took advantage of the chance to blaze up; the moss on the dead tree had caught fire, and the instantaneous result was a blaze that told of our whereabouts to whoever might be on the look-out within ten or fifteen miles of us in every direction.
Immediately afterwards Big Otter and Salamander came leaping into our fortress.