On returning to the wigwam, after the burial of the child, she found her sister there, more than usually bent upon an altercation. She endeavoured to avoid it by employing herself in silence. She eat for the first time since her child's death, and then applied herself to the task of finishing her lodge. Her bereaved condition might have excited the pity of her companion; but there was no sympathy in that breast. For a time, White Moon would not reply to her taunts. This the more enraged the other, who at length charged the heart-broken mother with the murder of her child!
White Moon heard her in stupified horror and amazement. That a mother could destroy her infant,—no such sentiment could reach her understanding or her heart. Yet again and again did her sister repeat the charge, dwelling upon the impossibility of the child's dying without a cause. No one, she said, had been with the infant during her absence; the young girl, who had promised to take care of it, having gone off soon after White Moon left. She then insisted, that as White Moon had been forced to marry her brother, she had thus resented upon him her wrong. She had killed his child, forgetting it was her own.
The despairing woman was roused by a sense of the injustice done her. She saw, too, her position,—the danger in which she stood. She felt, in anticipation, the reproaches, the hot anger of her husband.
She was roused even to madness. Her many wrongs stood up in witness against the woman who, in her deep sorrow, thus goaded her. Her slight frame expanded; the gentle and obedient wife, the submissive woman, had become a murderer; her knife lay in the heart of her husband's sister,—the strong had bowed before the weak!
The act was so instantaneous, that White Moon stood alone to behold the consequences of her passion. It was during the hottest part of the day, and their lodge stood apart from the rest. Most of the men were on the hunt with Fiery Man; the women, some sleeping away the sultry hours, others off at their different employments.
The hoarse groans of the dying woman were not heard outside the lodge, so that White Moon was not detected. On one of the mats lay the embroidered dress of a young warrior that Fiery Man's sister had just finished. She immediately determined upon making her escape, and taking these clothes with her as a disguise. She made them into a bundle before the eyes of the dying woman, and resolved upon flying from her husband's resentment.
How often she had called for death, yet how closely she now clung to life. The violent excitement through which she had passed had brought again the colour to her cheek. Brightness had succeeded to the expression of languor in her eyes. There was no tie to keep her in her husband's home. She now only thought of him as the avenger of his sister's blood.
She left the lodge without even a glance towards the cause of her misery and her sin. She turned from the places which would now know her no more.
CHAPTER IV.
Fiery Man and the large party of hunters came in sight of their home on the evening of the same day. They had brought a large number of buffalo, and were glad to reach the vicinity of their village, where their wives and other women came forward to relieve them of their burden. Merry work it was to them on this occasion, until they learned some of the hunters were missing.