“True,” replied the young man. “Catching fish is easier.” He looked shyly at the girl, then very steadily at the gleaming dead trout. “You are like a trout,” he said, with hesitation. “You are bright—and slender—and the beads on your skirt are red and blue like the spots along the trout’s sides. I might name you Beautiful Trout, or Little Trout—but your eyes——” He paused and glanced at her uncertainly.
She did not return his glance, but sat with her head bent and her hands clasped loosely in her beaded lap. Her hair, in two dusky braids, was drawn in front of her slender shoulders, and hung down her breast.
“They are not like a trout’s,” he said. “No, they are not at all like the eyes of a fish.”
“What are they like?” she asked, her voice small and shy.
Walking Moose fiddled with the line in his fingers and shuffled his feet uneasily. “How should I know? I cannot see them.”
“But you have seen them. Can’t you remember?”
“I remember. They are like—like things that have never been seen by any man alive, for they are like black stars.”
The girl laughed, and the sound was like the music of thin water flittering over small pebbles.
“Is Walking Moose a poet as well as the conqueror of the Mohawks, that he makes a fool of a poor young woman with talk of black stars?” she asked, turning her gaze full upon him for a moment with a look of tender mockery.
His heart expanded, then twitched with a pang of doubt. This mention of the Mohawks was grateful to his vanity, but it was disturbing too. Here he had been talking to a girl and catching a trout, when his mind should have been intent on plans against the enemy. He felt ashamed of himself. What would be the end of his good fighting and great dreams if he spent any more time in such foolishness?