“Cos it’s—bad ole puffer, eh?”
“Ess.”
The child nodded his dark tuque-enveloped head in solemn agreement. Then he turned away and grabbed again at his stanchion. Finally he lurched to his window in comparative safety and gazed out of it.
Luana watched him, a hungry light in her smiling eyes. The half-breed in her was passionately stirring. A creature of almost volcanic impulse and hot emotion, there was something lawless in her mentality. It was her heritage from savage forbears.
The long journey was nearing its end. More than half the continent had passed under train wheels since the Reverend Arthur Steele and his little family had set out to return from the cities of the East to his mission on Lake Mataba. Vacation came to him once in three years, and this was the end of his first holiday since taking up his appointment.
Luana was glad it was over. Civilization had no appeal for her. She was of the outlands. Bred in the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains, she had no love for the crowded streets of the city. She felt that only in the hills, in the twilit forests, on the wind-swept waterways, was it possible to breathe. It was only where Indians dwelt could she feel that she was at home.
No, she did not want the white folks’ cities, with their dazzling life and their paved roads, and where white women eyed her askance. She wanted the great lake, and the mission that was full of those whose blood she shared. She wanted that, and the knowledge that little Ivan Steele looked to her for everything necessary to his small life.
Luana loved the white child with all her woman’s soul. Hers had been the first arms to caress, to nurse him. Helen Steele was too deeply immersed in the work of her husband’s mission to fulfill all the natural demands of motherhood. She was one of those whose sense of duty would never allow her to be wholly satisfied with the simple felicities of her humanity. The domestic claims of home and wifehood came under the ban of her distorted view of all that which she looked upon as selfishness. So her boy-child, from the earliest moment of his small life, was relegated to the only too willing care of his half-Indian nurse.
In a woman of Luana’s temperament the result was inevitable. She looked upon Ivan as something of her very own. She even believed that the boy looked to her as his mother. And she rejoiced in the thought. She was consumed with jealousy when Helen Steele found time to notice the infant; and a frenzy possessed her at the sight of the white woman’s caresses. It was at such moments that she hated the white woman with all the savage in her. But she bore these trials without outward sign or protest, and consoled herself that the boy’s love was wholly hers.
Away from the mission, and on vacation, Luana’s emotional trials had been profoundly increased. During the four months of respite from the routine at the mission, Helen Steele, in a measure, had discovered her child. The mother in her had found opportunity to assert itself. The result to the half-breed had been almost unendurable. And so it came that within a dozen hours of the end of their homeward journey a certain sense of content and easement was already settling down upon the nurse’s passionate soul.