Pedro smiled slightly and tipped the ash from the end of his cigarette, but made no answer.
“Nay, I will not pry into other people’s affairs,” said Lawrence, in his usual tone, “but you once told me she is the daughter of a chief, and assuredly no lady in this land could equal her in grace or dignity of carriage and manner, to say nothing of modesty, which is the invariable evidence.”
“Not of high rank?” interrupted the guide, with a quick and slightly sarcastic glance.
“No, but of nobility of mind and heart,” replied the youth, with much enthusiasm. In which feeling he was earnestly backed up by Quashy, who, with eyes that absolutely glowed, said—
“You’s right, massa—sure an’ sartin! Modesty am de grandest t’ing I knows. Once I knowed a young nigger gal what libbed near your fadder’s mill—Sooz’n dey calls ’er—an’ she’s so modest, so—oh! I not kin ’splain rightly—but I say to ’er one day, when I’d got my courage screwed up, ‘Sooz’n,’ ses I. ‘Well,’ ses she. ‘I—I lub you,’ ses I, ‘more nor myself, ’cause I t’ink so well ob you. Eberybody t’inks well ob you, Sooz’n. What—what—’ (I was gitten out o’ bref by dis time from ’citement, and not knowin’ what more to say, so I ses) ‘what—what you t’ink ob you’self Sooz’n?’
“‘Nuffin’,’ ses she! Now, wasn’t dat modest?”
“It certainly was, Quashy. Couldn’t have been more so,” said Pedro. “And after that we couldn’t, I think, do better than turn in.”
The fire had by that time burned low, and the gale was still raging around them, driving the snowdrift wildly against the hut, and sometimes giving the door so violent a shake as to startle poor Quashy out of sweet memories of Sooz’n into awful thoughts of the ghost that had not yet been laid.
Each man appropriated a vacant corner of the hut in which to spread his simple couch, the negro taking care to secure that furthest from the door.
Lawrence Armstrong thought much over his supposed discovery before falling asleep that night, and the more he thought the more he felt convinced that the Indian girl was indeed a princess, and owed her good looks, sweet disposition, graceful form and noble carriage to her descent from a race which had at one period been highly civilised when all around them were savage. It was a curious subject of contemplation. The colour of his waking thoughts naturally projected itself into the young man’s dreams. He was engaged in an interesting anthropological study. He found himself in the ancient capital of the Incas. He beheld a princess of great beauty surrounded by courtiers, but she was brown! He thought what an overwhelming pity it was that she was not white! Then he experienced a feeling of intense disappointment that he himself had not been born brown. By degrees his thoughts became more confused and less decided in colour—whitey-brown, in fact,—and presented a series of complicated regrets and perplexing impossibilities, in a vain effort to disentangle which he dropped asleep.