Still the brown eyes were fixed on him. Her blood spurted out of the gash he had cut open, splashed over his knife blade, poured hot on his hand. It spread down over her dress and over the gold lace on his sleeve. He looked down at his red hand and felt some force within him stretch his lips and bare his teeth.
He thrust the woman away from him. Her eyes were still open, but she looked at no one and nothing. She fell to the ground like a bundle of sticks. She lay on her back, the deep wound in her throat spread wide, her eyes staring up.
He stood over her and saw that something shiny had fallen out of the front of her dress and lay beside her head. Tied around her neck with a purple ribbon was an oval metal case splashed with blood.
He had seen the case, or one like it. He reached down with the knife and slashed the ribbon. He wiped his knife on his jacket and slammed it into its sheath, then picked up the slippery case and opened it.
A pair of spectacles. Round, gold frames, thick glass lenses.
They looked exactly like Pierre's old spectacles. Was that possible? How could this Indian woman have gotten them? Stolen from Victoire, when the Sauk burned it?
Or had the mongrel somehow gotten his father's spectacles, taken them with him when he fled from Victor? Pierre's watch had disappeared then; Raoul was sure Auguste had stolen it. And if this woman had Pierre's glasses now, could she be the Sauk woman Pierre had lived with, the mother of his bastard son?
Despite the August heat beating down on the clearing, the air around Raoul suddenly felt winter cold. All day long while he fought the Indians he'd struggled with his fear of being killed. Now a worse fear had him in its grip, a fear of something worse than death, of having called down upon himself a vengeance that would follow him beyond the grave.
My God! I've just killed Pierre's squaw.
The spectacles stared up at him like accusing eyes. The flesh of his back prickled.