orm, and lay motionless as
marble.

Ascashe again called, "Why do you not come and eat, Skoke?"

Having no answer, she called out, "Wa-ain, come and eat;" and then
tired of this useless teasing, she arose, and shaking the white girl
by the arm, cried, "Bridget Vines, I bid you eat."

"I will, Ascashe," answered the other, taking corn and dried fish,
which the other presented.

"The spider caught a bad snake when she wove a net for Bridget Vines,"
muttered the tall woman. The other covered her face with her hands,
and the veins of her forehead swelled above her fingers; yet when she
uncovered her eyes they were red, not with tears, but the effort to
suppress their flow.

"It is a long, long time, that I have been here, Ascashe," answered
Bridget, sorrowfully.

"Have you never been out since Samoret left you here?" asked the
net-weaver; and she fixed her eyes searchingly upon the face of the
girl, who never quailed nor changed color beneath her gaze, but
replied in the same tone, "How should little Hope escape--where should
she go?" Hope being the name by which Mistress Vines had called her
child in moments of tenderness, as suggesting a mother's yearning hope
that she would at some time be less capricious, for Bridget had always
been a wayward, incoherent, and diminutive creature, and treated with
great gentleness by the family.

"Do you remember what I once told you?" continued the other. "You had
a friend--you have an enemy."

This time Bridget Vines started, and gave utterance to a long, low,
plaintive cry, as if her soul wailed, as it flitted from its frail
tenement, for she fell back as if dead upon the skins.

The woman muttered, "The white boy and girl shouldn't have scorned the
red woman," and she took her to the verge of the water and awaited her
recovery; when she opened her eyes, she continued, "Ascashe is
content--she has been very, very wretched, but so has been her enemy.
Look, my hair is black; Wa-ain's is like the white frost."

"I knew it would be so," answered the other, gently, "but it is
nothing. Tell me where you have been, Ascashe, and how came you here?
O-ya-ah died the other day." She alluded to an old squaw, who had been
her keeper in the cave.

At this moment a shadow darkened the room, another, and another, and
three stalwart savages stood before the two women. Each, as he passed,
patted the head of Bridget, who shook them off with moody impatience.

They gathered about the coal