iendly?"

Beverley heard, but the speech seemed to come out of vastness and
hollow distance; he could not realize it fairly. He felt as if in a
dream, far off somewhere in loneliness, with a big, shadowy form
looming before him. He heard the chill wind in the thickets round
about, and beyond Long-Hair rose a wall of giant trees.

"Ugh, not understand?" the savage presently demanded in his broken
English.

"Yes, yes," said Beverley, "I understand."

"Is the white man friendly now?" Long-Hair then repeated in his own
tongue, with a certain insistence of manner and voice.

"Yes, friendly."

Beverley said this absently in a tone of perfunctory dryness. His
throat was parched, his head seemed to waver. But he was beginning to
comprehend that Long-Hair, for some inscrutable reason of his own, was
desirous of making a friendship between them. The thought was
bewildering.

Long-Hair fumbled in his pouch and took out Alice's locket, which he
handed to Beverley. "White man love little girl?" he inquired in a tone
that bordered upon tenderness, again speaking in Indian.

Beverley clutched the disk as soon as he saw it gleam in the star-light.

"White man going to have little girl for his squaw--eh?"

"Yes, yes," cried Beverley without hearing his own voice. He was trying
to open the locket but his hands were numb and trembling. When at last
he did open it he could not see the child face within, for now even the
star-light was shut off by a scudding black cloud.

"Little girl saved Long-Hair's life. Long-Hair save white warrior for
little girl."

A dignity which was almost noble accompanied these simple sentences.
Long-Hair stood proudly erect, like a colossal dark statue in the
dimness.

The great truth dawned upon Beverley that here was a characteristic
act. He knew that an Indian rarely failed to repay a kindness or an
injury, stroke for stroke, when opportunity offered. Long-Hair was a
typical Indian. That is to say, a type of inhumanity raised to the last
power; but under his hideous atrocity of nature lay the indestructible
sense of gratitude so fixed and perfect that it did its work almost
automatically.

It must be said, and it may or may not be to the white man's shame,
that Beverley did not respond with absolute promptness and sincerity to
Long-Hair's generosity. He had suffered terribly at the hands of this
savage. His arms and legs were raw from the biting of the thongs; his
body ached from the effect