Page:The Souvenir of Western Women.djvu/67

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O you live in Nehalem?" There was no answer.

"I have never seen you with the Nehalem tribe; do you live in the hills?" The girl was silent, motionless.

Her great dark eyes stared at me, stared until they read my innermost soul. What they read there I do not know, but her lips curled in scorn. In the depths of her dark eyes I could read that a barrier lay between us. 1 could feel the freedom of unbounded, untrammeled generations. I could see the vast forests, the starlit water courses, the long shafts of moonlight shimmering through the trees. I could feel the strength of the great plains and the long, barren sandhills. I could hear the roar of mighty waterfalls. I could feel the latent force of the passionate love and hate which surged through the girl's blood—the passion of the primitive.

And in contrast to it all there arose before me the crowded cities, the sordid lives of thousands, huddled together in misery and squalor—the poor, petty passion which loves by contract and hates by law, and then the clanking of the chains of conventionality shut out the sight and the sound of everything else. The barrier was too strong, the very blood in my veins forbade me to grasp the primitive sweetness. J^nd so we stared.

When the girl took her eyes from my face it was to look upon a poor wizened atom of humanity which lay in her arms. And something sweeter than the scorn played about her lips.

The baby's face was pathetically thin. It seemed as old and wrinklcd as the buckskin wrapped around it. But the child did not cry—a faint little gasp came now and then from the baby lips.

"The baby is sick. You should get it some medicine at the company's store."

Then the girl spoke.

"At the company's store—yes, I have been. They not give. I have not money. They—they struck me when I asked again and again."

"How long—how long has the child been sick?"

"A moon, and now she dies. She is starving. I am starving." The words came brokenly in the soft Chinook.

"I have food—medicine," I said. "Will you come? You need no money." The words stuck in my throat. Even the Chinook could not cover their harshness.

For an instant her eyes flashed with the inborn hate; then the mother love overcame and she followed me.

Once she turned white and staggered. She would have fallen had I not been so near, and when I lifted the tiny bundle from her arms she sighed with relief as though the baby's slight weight had burdened her.