I stripped off Doctor Chantry’s unendurable bandages, and put on my clothes, for there were brambles along the path.  The lodges and the dogs were still, and I crept like a hunter after game, to avoid waking them.  Our village was an irregular camp, each house standing where its owner had pleased to build it on the lake shore.  Behind it the blackness of wooded wilderness seemed to stretch to the end of the world.

The spring made a distinct tinkle in the rush of low sound through the forest.  A rank night sweetness of mints and other lush plants mixed its spirit with the body of leaf earth.  I felt happy in being a part of all this, and the woods were to me as safe as the bed-chamber of a mother.  It was fine to wallow, damming the span of escaping water with my fevered head.  Physical relief and delicious shuddering coolness ran through me.

From that wet pillow I looked up and thought again of what had happened that day, and particularly of the girl whom De Chaumont had called Madame de Ferrier and Eagle.  Every word that she had spoken passed again before my mind.  Possibilities that I had never imagined rayed out from my recumbent body as from the hub of a vast wheel.  I was white.  I was not an Indian.  I had a Bourbon ear.  She believed I was a dauphin.  What was a dauphin, that she should make such a deep obeisance to it?  My father the chief, recommending me to the squaws, had appeared to know nothing about it.

All that she believed De Chaumont denied.  The rich book which stirred such torment in me—­“you know it was his mother’s!” she said—­De Chaumont thought I merely coveted.  I can see now that the crude half-savage boy wallowing in the spring stream, set that woman as high as the highest star above his head, and made her the hope and symbol of his possible best.

A woman’s long cry, like the appeal of that one on whom he meditated, echoed through the woods and startled him out of his wallow.

III

I sat up with the water trickling down my back.  The cry was repeated, out of the west.

I knew the woods, but night alters the most familiar places.  It was so dark in vaults and tunnels of trees and thickets that I might have burrowed through the ground almost as easily as thresh a path.  The million scarcely audible noises that fill a forest surrounded me, and twigs not broken by me cracked or shook.  Still I made directly toward the woman’s voice which guided me more plainly; but left off running as my ear detected that she was only in perplexity.  She called at intervals, imperatively but not in continuous screams.  She was a white woman; for no squaw would publish her discomfort.  A squaw if lost would camp sensibly on a bed of leaves, and find her way back to the village in the morning.  The wilderness was full of dangers, but when you are elder brother to the bear and the wildcat you learn their habits, and avoid or outwit them.