She was telling Tail-Feathers to stop killing me. As if I cared!
Tail-Feathers was a mighty warrior, who could never stoop to killing a mere boy with no scalp, a boy with a false wig of woman's hair. She begged me to set to the camp work, the squaw's work, so I could stay alive until the soldiers got me.
Blind with tears, moaning with rage, I shot back the lever and jammed it home, as though I were loading my rifle. Tail-Feathers should think he had an armed man to fight, not a squaw begging his mercy. I knelt down and took a sight at the approaching horseman. If it were only loaded!
Rain was nervous. Her little toil-worn hands were trembling as they caressed my head. "You're not an Indian," she crooned. "Not like an Indian, kneeling out here in the open, exposed, with an empty rifle. Fight-in-the-open-with-an-empty-gun is the sort of person who makes my man laugh. Oh, surely he must see that you're a mere boy, a child, too young for killing.
"See how he leaves his pony and climbs down—and comes from bush to bush and hides behind the rocks— He's coming very near to see what's wrong, why you don't fire. And I stand behind you, so if he fires he'll get us both. Hear how he shouts— Wants me to get out of his line of fire. I'm so frightened!" She rumpled up my hair, and laughed with queer, little, tremulous chuckles. "Ho, Tail-Feathers," she called, "you're not to kill my funny boy any more. I'll never love you if you hurt my boy."
But Tail-Feathers yelled from behind a rock, denouncing her for a wanton unfit to be his woman.
"Men are so stupid," she whispered in my ear. "He's going to shoot us both."
I asked her quickly and roughly if she would be my wife. If I had brought her to such a pass as this, it was her due, and as a gentleman I could do no less. Yet when she answered, "No," I felt relieved.
"To marry you," she chuckled, "to be your woman? Boy-drunk-in-the-morning will take me to his lodge of all the winds, a queer person who can not hunt or fight or even run away. He'll feed me through the hunger-death next winter. Oh, you funny boy, I hope my man won't get you."
Now she had roused me to such a pitch of frenzy that death was easy compared with the shame of life. I could see the Indian creeping behind a rock not fifty feet away. The Blackfeet have no oaths, but I could swear, and did, until Rain shrank back in horror. I sprang straight at the man, who was so startled that he fired high.