it had been the night before, I waked after
many hours.

By that time the family breathing sawed the air within the walls, and a
fine starlight showed through the open door, for we had no window.
Outside the oak trees were pattering their leaves like rain, reminding
me of our cool spring in the woods. My bandaged head was very hot, in
that dark lair of animals where the log bunks stretched and deepened
shadow.

If Skenedonk had been there I would have asked him to bring me water,
with confidence in his natural service. The chief's family was a large
one, but not one of my brothers and sisters seemed as near to me as
Skenedonk. The apathy of fraternal attachment never caused me any pain.
The whole tribe was held dear.

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