Little did I realize my part in the terrible fulfilment of that prophecy.
"Look alive, lad! Where are y'r wits? What's that?" he cried, suddenly pointing to the river bank.
Up from the cliff sprang a form as if by magic. It came leaping straight to the fort gate.
"Some frightened half-breed wench," surmised the priest.
I saw it was a woman with a shawl over her head like a native.
"_Bon soir!_" said I after the manner of traders with Indian women; but she rushed blindly on to the gate.
The fort was deserted. Suspicion of treachery flashed on me. How many more half-breeds were beneath that cliff?
"Stop, huzzie!" I ordered, springing forward and catching her so tightly by the wrist that she swung half-way round before she could check herself. She wrenched vigorously to get free. "Stop! Be still, you huzzie!"
"Be still--you what?" asked a low, amazed voice that broke in ripples and froze my blood. A shawl fluttered to the ground, and there stood before us the apparition of a marble face.
"The Little Statue!" I gasped in sheer horror at what I had done.
"The little--what?" asked the rippling voice, that sounded like cold water flowing under ice, and a pair of eyes looked angrily down at the hand with which I was still unconsciously gripping her arm.
"I'd thank you, Sir," she began, with a mock courtesy to the priest, "I'd thank you, Sir, to call off your mastiff."
"Let her go, boy!" roared the priest with a hammering blow across my forearm that brought me to my senses and convinced me she was no wraith.
Mastiff! That epithet stung to the quick. I flung her wrist from me as if it had been hot coals. Now, a woman may tread upon a man--also stamp upon him if she has a mind to--but she must trip it daintily. Otherwise even a worm may turn against its tormentor. To have idolized that marble creature by day and night, to have laid our votive offerings on its shrine, to have hungered for the sound of a woman's lips for weeks, and to hear those lips cuttingly call me a dog--were more than I could stand.
"Ten thousand pardons, Mistress Sutherland!" I said with a pompous stiffness which I intended should be mighty crushing. "But when ladies deck themselves out as squaws and climb in and out of windows,"--that was brutal of me; she had done it for Miriam and me--"and announce themselves in unexpected ways, they need not hope to be recognized."