Page:In Desert and Wilderness (Sienkiewicz, tr. Drezmal).djvu/209

 Rh slipped out of the zareba. In the meantime Nell came out of the tent.

Saba rose at once and, pressing his nose close to her, claimed his usual caress. But she, extending at first her hand, withdrew it at once as if with aversion.

"Stas, what has happened?" she asked.

"Nothing. Those two horses came running up. Did their hoof-beats awaken you?"

"I was awake before then and even wanted to come out of the tent, but—"

"But what?"

"I thought that you might get angry."

"I? At you?"

And Nell raised her eyes and began to gaze at him with a peculiar look with which she had never eyed him before. Great astonishment stole over Stas' face, for in her words and gaze he plainly read fear.

"She fears me," he thought.

And in the first moment he felt something like a gleam of satisfaction. He was flattered by the thought that, after what he had accomplished, even Nell regarded him not only as a man fully matured, but as a formidable warrior spreading alarm about. But this lasted only a short time, for misfortune had developed in him an observing mind and talent; he discerned, therefore, that in those uneasy eyes of the little girl could be seen, besides fright, abhorrence, as it were, of what had happened, of the bloodshed and the horrors which she that day had witnessed. He recalled how, a few moments before, she withdrew her hand, not wishing to pat Saba, who had finished, by strangling, one of the Bedouins. Yes! Stas himself felt an incubus on his breast. It was one thing to read in Port Said about American trappers, killing in the far west red-skinned Indians by the dozens, and