A snake? The idea wound itself about me like the very coils of a
serpent. What was this in the beaded bag of my buckskin dress? This
little thing rolled in tan that my mother had given me at parting
with the words, "Don't touch much, but some time maybe you want it!"
Oh! I knew well enough what it was--a small flint arrow-head dipped
in the venom of some _strange snake_.
I knelt beside him and laid my hot lips on his hand. I worshipped
him, oh, how, how I worshipped him! Then again the vision of _her_
baby face, _her_ yellow-hair--I scratched his wrist twice with the
arrow-tip. A single drop of red blood oozed up; he stirred. I turned
the lamp down and slipped out of the room--out of the house.
* * * * *
I dream nightly of the horrors of the white man's hell. Why did they
teach me of it, only to fling me into it?
Last night as I crouched beside my mother on the buffalo-hide, Dan
Henderson, the trapper, came in to smoke with my father. He said old
Father Paul was bowed with grief, that with my disappearance I was
suspected, but that there was no proof. Was it not merely a snake
bite?
They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin.
They seem to have forgotten I am a woman.
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