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Suffice it to record that, while tramping at Long-Hair's side and growing more and more desirous of seeing the picture again, Beverley began trying to converse with his taciturn captor. He had a considerable smattering of several Indian dialects, which he turned upon Long-Hair to the best of his ability, but apparently without effect.
Strangely enough it happened that, at the very time of this chat between Madame Roussillon and Rene Alice was bandaging Long-Hair's wounded leg with strips of her apron. It was under some willows which overhung the bank of a narrow and shallow lagoon or slough, which in those days extended a mile or two back into the country on the farther side of the river.
The order was accompanied with a push of such violence from Long-Hair's left elbow that Beverley plunged and fell, for his limbs, after their long and painful confinement in the raw-hide bonds, were stiff and almost useless. Long-Hair in no gentle voice bade him get up. The shock of falling seemed to awaken his dormant forces; a sudden resolve leaped into his brain.
Alice sealed Jean's lips as to their adventure; for she had made up her mind to save Long-Hair if possible, and she felt sure that the only way to do it would be to trust no one but Father Beret. It turned out that Long-Hair's wound was neither a broken bone nor a cut artery. The flesh of his leg, midway between the hip and the knee, was pierced; the bullet had bored a neat hole clean through.
He easily felt the fine bit of gratitude at the bottom of it all; but there was too much in the other side of the balance; justice, the discipline and confidence of his little army, and the claim of the women and children on the frontier demanded firmness in dealing with a case like Long-Hair's.
Having the quick insight bred of frontier experience, Alice instantly caught the terrible significance of the dilemma in which she and Beverley would be placed by Long-Hair's situation. Moreover, something in her heart arose with irresistible power demanding the final, the absolute human sympathy and gratitude.
Rene de Ronville probably felt himself in bad luck when he arrived at the river house just too late to share in the liquor or to join in chasing the bold thief. He listened with interest, however, to the story of Long-Hair's capture of the commandant's demijohn and could not refrain from saying that if he had been present there would have been a quite different result.
"Now go and sin no more," said good Father Beret; but he well knew that his words were mere puffs of articulate wind in the ear of the grim and silent savage, who limped away with an air of stately dignity into the wilderness. A load fell from Alice's mind when Father Beret informed her of Long-Hair's recovery and departure.
Long-Hair's imperturbable calmness, his stolid, immobile countenance, the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by the romances she had read in M. Roussillon's mildewed books.
Beverley was free to run if he wished to, and the thought did surge across his mind; but a restraining something, like a hand laid upon him, would not let his limbs move. Down deep in his heart a calm voice seemed to be repeating Long-Hair's Indian sentence "Wait here a little while."
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