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 his head, and made her the hope and symbol of
his possible best.

A woman's long cry, like the appeal of that one on whom he meditated,
echoed through the woods and startled him out of his wallow.




III


I sat up with the water trickling down my back. The cry was repeated,
out of the west.

I knew the woods, but night alters the most familiar places. It was so
dark in vaults and tunnels of trees and thickets that I might have
burrowed through the ground almost as easily as thresh a path. The
million scarcely audible noises that fill a forest surrounded me, and
twigs not broken by me cracked or shook. Still I made directly toward
the woman's voice which guided me more plainly; but left off running as
my ear detected that she was only in perplexity. She called at
intervals, imperatively but not in continuous screams. She was a white
woman; for no squaw would publish her discomfort. A squaw if lost would
camp sensibly on a bed of leaves, and find her way back to the village
in the morning. The wilderness was full of dangers, but when you are