A slow comprehension of his meaning crept into her eyes, and she covered them with her hands. The halfbreed stood in the doorway coiling and uncoiling the lash of his whip. He wanted some indication of how she was going to take it.
"Understand?" he repeated.
She merely shuddered.
"Damn it! can't you answer?" he cried impatiently. "What do you think I've raised you for anyway? You're none of my breed. Answer, you——," and he spat out an epithet.
She lowered her hands and looked at him again with wide-open eyes from which all expression had faded. This stony silence irritated Lafond.
"You've had your head long enough. Now you're going to show what you're made for. Understand? Great God!" he cried, "you've got a tongue, haven't you? Why don't you answer when I ask you a question?" In one of the sudden Latin gusts of passion, which generally he held so well in control, Lafond lashed her across the breast with his black-snake whip. Almost before the impulse had quitted his brain he regretted it, for her scream would bring out the camp, and Lafond could see the awkwardness of an explanation. It was better to break her in gradually. To his relief, she did not cry out, but merely shivered pitifully and closed her eyes.
"That's what you'll get if you don't toe the mark," threatened Lafond, only too glad to avoid a scene. He slouched out of the door, climbed into his light wagon shaking his heavy head sullenly, and drove away in the direction of Rapid.
After he had gone and the sound of his wheels had died away, the girl arose staggeringly from her bed. The bright world had crumbled. For the first time in her young existence her thoughts turned to the vague conception of a higher Being which she had built, Heaven knows how, from materials gathered, Heaven knows where.
"God, God, God!" she cried, "I thought this was a happy world where people laughed. I did not know there was so much sorrow in the world. You did not make the world to be sorrowful, did you, God?"
She was almost blind. She knew that she must kill herself: that alone was clear. It was that or the dance hall. She was to be like Bismarck Anne. And she realized in a moment that she knew Black Mike, his iron will and his cruel heart; and she was afraid of him, deadly afraid. She began to grope about the room. There was a dim square: that must be the window. Her hands passed fumblingly over the table, just missing the long sewing scissors. Nothing there. Quick, quick, he might come back! She almost fell over the cloak, which had fallen to the floor, and was now entangled about her feet. There was another square of light: it must be the door. She stumbled out into a glare of merciless sunshine that filled her brain and beat on the walls of her understanding until she covered her eyes, and still stumbled on. She thought she heard men shouting. She was not sure.