For five full seconds, to him they seemed hours, she stood, white-lipped and staring. Then, turning, she walked with uncertain steps toward her pony, adjusted the reins, attempted to mount, swayed as if to fall, but clutched the mane and hung there.
Gaspard and the girl both sprang to her aid.
“Don’t—don’t—don’t touch me, Hugh!” she gasped, thrusting him from her.
“Marion,” he cried, his voice hurried and broken, “let me tell you.”
“No, no! Please go.” She stood a moment or two, shuddering, her hands over her face as if to shut from her sight a terrible thing, with a choking cry.
“My God, it has come.” Gaspard turned from his wife, plunged into the underbrush and was lost to sight.
The Indian woman ran to the other and, clutching her skirt, fell upon her knees crying, “Call him back, call him back quick. Let me call him back. You will lose him forever.”
The white woman took her hands from her face, looked down upon the Indian and said in a voice from which all hope had died, “Why call him back? He is lost to me now.”
“No, no,” said the other, springing to her feet and seizing the white woman’s arm. “He is yours, he is yours, only yours. Me! I am nothing to him. It was my fault, my mistake. I knew nothing. I went to him. But to him now I am nothing, nothing. Oh, let me call him back quick.” In her vehemence she shook the white woman violently. But to her violence there was no reaction. The wife slowly drew away from the grasp of the Indian woman, climbed somehow on to her pony, and, with the face of one stricken with her death wound, she set off slowly down the homeward trail.
For a single moment the Indian woman followed her with scornful eyes. This supreme, this mad folly in a woman who would turn away from a man who so obviously and so passionately was hers, she could not understand. It was the madness of the white race. White women did not know how to love. She caught up her boy, ran with him to the chief.