The Huntress. Footner Hulbert
Charley, get a petticoat to cover your legs. My woman maybe give you her old one."
He sat down among them, grinning as a man might grin on the rack. He filled his pipe with a nonchalant air belied by his shaking hand, and sought to brave it out. They had no mercy on him. They out vied each other in outrageous chaffing.
Suddenly he turned on them shrilly. "Coyotes! Grave-robbers! May you be cursed with a woman-devil like I am. Then we'll see!"
This was what they desired. They stopped work and rolled on the ground in their laughter. They were stimulated to the highest flights of wit.
Charley walked away up the river-bank and hid himself in the bush. There he sat brooding and brooding on his wrongs until all the world turned red before his eyes. For years that fiend of a girl had made him a laughing-stock. She was none of his blood. He would stand it no longer.
The upshot of all his brooding was that he cut himself a staff of willow two fingers thick, and carrying it as inconspicuously as possible, crept back to the village.
At the door of his teepee he picked up the two little carcasses and entered. He had avoided the river-bank, but they saw him, and saw the stick, and drew near to witness the fun.
Within the circle of the teepee Charley's wife, Loseis, was mixing dough in a pan. Opposite her Bela, the cause of all the trouble, knelt on the ground carefully filing the points of her fish-hooks. Fish-hooks were hard to come by.
Charley stopped within the entrance, glaring at her. Bela, looking up, instantly divined from his bloodshot eyes and from the hand he kept behind him what was in store. Coolly putting her tackle behind her, she rose.
She was taller than her supposed father, full-bosomed and round-limbed as a sculptor's ideal. In a community of waist less, neckless women she was as slender as a young tree, and held her head like a swan.
She kept her mouth close shut like a hardy boy, and her eyes gleamed with a fire of resolution which no other pair of eyes in the camp could match. It was for the conscious superiority of her glance that she was hated. One from the outside would have remarked quickly how different she was from the others, but these were a thoughtless, mongrel people.
Charley flung the little beasts at her feet. "Skin them," he said thickly. "Now."
She said nothing – words were a waste of time, but watched warily for his first move.
He repeated his command. Bela saw the end of the stick and smiled.
Charley sprang at her with a snarl of rage, brandishing the stick. She nimbly evaded the blow. From the ground the wife and mother watched motionless with wide eyes.
Bela, laughing, ran in and seized the stick as he attempted to raise it again. They struggled for possession of it, staggering all over the teepee, falling against the poles, trampling in and out of the embers. Loseis shielded the pan of dough with her body. Bela finally wrenched the stick from Charley and in her turn raised it.
Charley's courage went out like a blown lamp. He turned to run. Whack! came the stick between his shoulders. With a mournful howl he ducked under the flap, Bela after him. Whack! Whack! A little cloud arose from his coat at each stroke, and a double wale of dust was left upon it.
A whoop of derision greeted them as they emerged into the air. Charley scuttled like a rabbit across the enclosure, and lost himself in the bush. Bela stood glaring around at the guffawing men.
"You pigs!" she cried.
Suddenly she made for the nearest, brandishing her staff. They scattered, laughing.
Bela returned to the teepee, head held high. Her mother, a patient, stolid squaw, still sat as she had left her, hands motionless in the dough. Bela stood for a moment, breathing hard, her face working oddly.
Suddenly she flung herself on the ground in a tempest of weeping. Her startled mother stared at her uncomprehendingly. For an Indian woman to cry is rare enough; to cry in a moment of triumph, unheard of. Bela was strange to her own mother.
"Pigs! Pigs! Pigs!" she cried between sobs. "I hate them! I not know what pigs are till I see them in the sty at the mission. Then I think of these people! Pigs they are! I hate them! They not my people!"
Loseis, with a jerk like an automaton, recommenced kneading the dough.
Bela raised a streaming, accusing face to her mother.
"What for you take a man like that?" she cried passionately. "A weasel, a mouse, a flea of a man! A dog is more of a man than he! He run from me squeaking like a puppy!"
"My mother gave me to him," murmured the squaw apologetically.
"You took him!" cried Bela. "You go with him! Was he the best man you could get? I jump in the lake before I shame my children with a coyote for a father!"
Loseis looked strangely at her daughter. "Charley not your father," she said abruptly.
Bela pulled up short in the middle of her passionate outburst, stared at her mother with fallen jaw.
"You twenty year old," went on Loseis. "Nineteen year I marry Charley. I have another husband before that."
"Why you never tell me?" murmured Bela, amazed.
"So long ago!" Loseis replied with a shrug. "What's the use?"
Bela's tears were effectually called in. "Tell me, what kind of man my father?" she eagerly demanded.
"He was a white man."
"A white man!" repeated Bela, staring. There was a silence in the teepee while it sunk in. A deep rose mantled the girl's cheeks.
"What he called?" she asked.
"Walter Forest." On the Indian woman's tongue it was "Hoo-alter."
"Real white?" demanded Bela.
"His skin white as a dog's tooth," answered Loseis, "his hair bright like the sun." A gleam in the dull eyes as she said this suggested that the stolid squaw was human, too.
"Was he good to you?"
"He was good to me. Not like Indian husband. He like dress me up fine. All the time laugh and make jokes. He call me 'Tagger-Leelee.'"
"Did he go away?"
Loseis shook her head. "Go through the ice with his team."
"Under the water – my father," murmured Bela.
She turned on her mother accusingly. "You have good white husband, and you take Charley after!"
"My mother make me," Loseis said with sad stolidity.
Bela pondered on these matters, filled with a deep excitement. Her mother kneaded the dough.
"I half a white woman," the girl murmured at last, more to herself than the other. "That is why I strange here."
Again her mother looked at her intently, presaging another disclosure. "Me, my father a white man too," she said in her abrupt way. "It is forgotten now."
Bela stared at her mother, breathing quickly.
"Then – I 'most white!" she whispered, with amazed and brightening eyes. "Now I understand my heart!" she suddenly cried aloud. "Always I love the white people, but I not know. Always I ask Musq'oosis tell me what they do. I love them because they live nice. They not pigs like these people. They are my people! All is clear to me!" She rose.
"What you do?" asked Loseis anxiously.
"I will go to my people!" cried Bela, looking away as if she envisaged the whole white race.
The Indian mother raised her eyes in a swift glance of passionate supplication – but her lips were tight. Bela did not see the look.
"I go talk to Musq'oosis," she said. "He tell me all to do."
CHAPTER II
MUSQ'OOSIS ADVISES
The village of the Fish-Eaters was built in a narrow meadow behind a pine grove and the little river. It was a small village of a dozen teepees set up in a rough semicircle open to the stream.
This