Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/128

 Henry turned, startled and amazed, yet a trifle thrilled—for he had recognized the voice. It was Lahleet, playing Indian again. Fifteen feet behind him she sat half-cradled in the limbs of a freshly felled madrone tree, smiling mockingly, one graceful arm clutching a branch above her head, one moccasined foot swinging idly and unsupported, while with the other she teetered gently like a child at play.

"Eavesdropper!" Harrington reproved, yet welcomed her as an ally; for in their last meeting she had covenanted to help him in a far more important project of Mr. Boland. "Look here, Lahleet," he began at once as losing no instant of time. "If you've been here long you can see that I've rather a job on my hands. I'm here on a very important mission—important to Mr. Boland because his engineers have recommended this island as the best, in fact the only feasible site for the new shingle mill; important to me, because it's the first commission of this kind Mr. Boland has ever entrusted to me, and I want to make good on it; important to Adam John because it's a chance to get five thousand dollars for his island. Won't you—won't you make him see reason?"

But as her tone had indicated, the girl was seeing Adam John's side of it. "What do you mean—reason, Mr. Harrington? Adam John has accepted the white man's ideals—some of them. It seems to him a fine feat, a proof that he is redeemed from savagery, if by painful labor he can turn this wilderness of his fathers into a white man's farm."

Adam John threw his foster-sister a grateful look. Her glib tongue was saying the things his slow lips could never have managed.