As he spoke a still deeper idea flashed into his little brain. To the surprise of Betty, he suddenly threw his arms round her waist and clung to her as if for protection with a look of fear in his face, and when the work of binding the captives was completed the Indians found him still labouring to all appearance under great alarm. Unaco cast on him one look of supreme scorn, and then, leaving him, like Betty, unbound, turned towards Paul Bevan.
“The white man is one of wicked band?” he said, in his broken English.
“I don’t know what ye mean, Redskin,” replied Paul; “but speak your own tongue, I understand it well enough to talk with ye.”
The Indian repeated the question in his native language, and Paul, replying in the same, said—
“No, Redskin, I belong to no band, either wicked or good.”
“How come you, then, to be in company with this man?” demanded the Indian.
In reply Paul gave a correct account of the cause and object of his being there, explained that the starving man before them was the friend for whom he sought, that Betty was his daughter, though how she came to be there beat his comprehension entirely, and that the botanist was a stranger, whose name even he did not yet know.
“It is false,” returned the chief. “The white man speaks with a forked tongue. He is one of the murderers who have slain my wife and my child.”
A dark fierce frown passed over the chief’s countenance as he spoke, but it was quickly replaced by the habitual look of calm gravity.
“What can stop me,” he said, reverting again to English as he turned and addressed Betty, “from killing you as my wife was killed by white man?”