“Will you wait a moment for me?” she asked gently.

“Yes—­but—­no tricks, Teresa!  It isn’t worth the time.”

She looked him squarely in the eyes without a word.

“Enough,” he said; “go!”

She was absent for some moments.  He was beginning to become uneasy, when she made her appearance again, clad in her old faded black dress.  Her face was very pale, and her eyes were swollen, but she placed his hand on her shoulder, and bidding him not to fear to lean upon her, for she was quite strong, led the way.

“You look more like yourself now, and yet—­blast it all!—­you don’t either,” said Dunn, looking down upon her.  “You’ve changed in some way.  What is it?  Is it on account of that Injin?  Couldn’t you have found a white man in his place?”

“I reckon he’s neither worse nor better for that,” she replied bitterly; “and perhaps he wasn’t as particular in his taste as a white man might have been.  But,” she added, with a sudden spasm of her old rage, “it’s a lie; he’s not an Indian, no more than I am.  Not unless being born of a mother who scarcely knew him, of a father who never even saw him, and being brought up among white men and wild beasts less cruel than they were, could make him one!”

Dunn looked at her in surprise not unmixed with admiration.  “If Nellie,” he thought, “could but love me like that!” But he only said: 

“For all that, he’s an Injin.  Why, look at his name.  It ain’t Low.  It’s L’Eau Dormante, Sleeping Water, an Injin name.”

“And what does that prove?” returned Teresa.  “Only that Indians clap a nickname on any stranger, white or red, who may camp with them.  Why, even his own father, a white man, the wretch who begot him and abandoned him,—­he had an Indian name—­Loup Noir.”

“What name did you say?”

“Le Loup Noir, the Black Wolf.  I suppose you’d call him an Indian, too?  Eh?  What’s the matter?  We’re walking too fast.  Stop a moment and rest.  There—­there, lean on me!”

She was none too soon; for, after holding him upright a moment, his limbs failed, and stooping gently she was obliged to support him half reclining against a tree.

“It’s the heat!” he said.  “Give me some whiskey from my flask.  Never mind the water,” he added faintly, with a forced laugh, after he had taken a draught at the strong spirit.  “Tell me more about the other water—­the Sleeping Water, you know.  How do you know all this about him and his—­father?”

“Partly from him and partly from Curson, who wrote to me about him,” she answered, with some hesitation.

But Dunn did not seem to notice this incongruity of correspondence with a former lover.  “And he told you?”

“Yes; and I saw the name on an old memorandum-book he has, which he says belonged to his father.  It’s full of old accounts of some trading post on the frontier.  It’s been missing for a day or two, but it will turn up.  But I can swear I saw it.”