"Was it Blakely told you all this, sir?" Wren had asked, still
wrong-headed and suspicious.
"No, Wren. It was I told Blakely. All this was given me by Lola's
father, the interpreter, back from Chevlon's Fork only yesterday. I
sent him to try to persuade Natzie and her kinsfolk to return. I have
promised them immunity."
Then Plume and Graham had gone, leaving Wren to brood and ponder, and
this had he been doing two mortal days and nights without definite
result, and now came Janet to bring things to a head. In grim and
ominous silence he listened to her recital, saying never a word until
her final appeal: "R-r-robert, is our girlie going daft, do you think? She solemnly said
to me--to me--but a minute ago, 'I mean to go to him myself--and thank
him!'"
And solemnly the soldier looked up from his reclining-chair and
studied his sister's amazed and anxious face. Then he took her thin,
white hand between his own thin, brown paws and patted it gently. She
recoiled slowly as she saw contrition, not condemnation, in his
blinking eyes.
"God forgive us all, Janet! It's what I ought to have done days ago."
* * * * * Another cloudless afternoon had come, and, under the willows at the
edge of the pool, a young girl sat daydreaming, though the day was
nearly done. All in the valley was wrapped in shadow, though the
cliffs and turrets across the stream were resplendent in a radiance of
slanting sunshine. Not a whisper of breeze stirred the drooping
foliage along the sandy shores, or ruffled the liquid mirror surface.
Not a sound, save drowsy hum of beetle or soft murmur of rippling
waters among the pebbly shadows below, broke the vast silence of the
scene. Just where Angela was seated that October day on which our
story opened, she was seated now, with the greyhounds stretched
sprawling in the warm sands at her feet, with Punch blinking lazily
and switching his long tail in the thick of the willows.
And somebody else was there, close at hand. The shadows of the
westward heights had gradually risen to the crest of the rocky cliffs
across the stream. A soft, prolonged call of distant trumpet summoned
homeward for the coming night the scattered herds and herd guards of
the post, and, rising suddenly, her hand upon a swift-throbbing heart,
her red lips parted in eagerness or excitement uncontrollable, Angela
stood intently listening. Over among the thickets across the pool the
voice of an Indian girl was uplifted in some weird, uncanny song. The
voice was shrill, yet not unmusical. The song was savage, yet not
lacking some crude harmony. She could not see the singer, but she
knew. Natzie's people had returned to the agency, accepting the olive
branch that Plume had tendered them--Natzie herself was here.