You are
annoyed all the time. I vex you by my silence, still more by my
speech. We are to be some time together, and I do not want to be a
constant canker. Is it not possible for you to forget me, to ignore
me?"
I saw he was in earnest. "And so you really do not know what irritated
me? Are you so little of a woodsman?"
"I have never traveled through the woods."
I gave him a dubious glance. "Yet you were weeks with the Hurons after
your capture."
I saw him set his teeth hard as if at a memory. "We traveled by water
ways. I was little on the shore except at night."
A sudden picture sickened me. The nightly camp and this slender lad
with his curious air of daintiness, and the great oily Hurons lounging
in the dirt and smoke.
"Were they cruel to you?" I broke out.
He shook his head. "No," he said, with the air of justice I had liked
in him heretofore; "no, they were not cruel. Indeed they were almost
kind, in that they left me a great deal alone. I feared from the
clemency they showed me that they were reserving me for torture."
I eyed him with some skepticism. "It was not the Hurons, but their
rivals, the Ottawas, who would have sent you to the stake," I explained
curtly.
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