But you're not. You just wish you had murdered me. You hate girls--you said so. And I don't know what business it is of yours, if I want to play a joke on my cousin, or why you had to be sleeping outside, anyway. I've a perfect right to be a ghost if I choose--and I don't call it nice, or polite, or gentlemanly for you to chase me all over the place with a gun, trying to kill me! I'll never speak to you again as long as I live. When I say that I mean it. I never liked you from the very start, when Ifirst saw you this afternoon. Now I hate and despise you. Isuppose I oughtn't to expect you to apologize or be sorry because you almost killed me. I suppose that's just your real nature coming to the surface. Indians love to hurt and torture people!
I shouldn't have expected anything else of you, I suppose. Imade the mistake of treating you like a white man.""Don't you think you're making another mistake right now?"Grant's whole attitude changed, as well as his tone. "Aren't you afraid to push the white man down into the dirt, and raise up--the INDIAN?"She cast a swift, half-frightened glance up into his face and the eyes that glowed ominously in the moonlight.
"When people make the blunder of calling up the Indian," he went on steadily, "they usually find that they have to deal with--the Indian."Evadna looked at him again, and turned slowly white before her temper surged to the surface again.
"I didn't call up the Indian," she defended hotly; "but if the Indian wants to deal with me according to his nature--why, let him! But you don't ACT like other people! I don't know another man who wouldn't have been horrified at shooting me, even such a tiny little bit; but you don't care at all. You never even said you were sorry.""I'm not in the habit of saying all I think and feel.""You were quick enough to apologize, after supper there, when you hadn't really done anything; and now, when one would expect you to be at least decently sorry, you--you--well, you act like the savage you are! There, now! It may not be nice to say it, but it's the truth."Grant smiled bitterly. "All men are savages under the skin," he said. "How do YOU know what I think and feel? If I fail to come through with the conventional patter, I am called an Indian--because my mother was a half-breed." He threw up his head proudly, let his eyes rest for a moment upon the moon, swimming through a white river of clouds just over the tall poplar hedge planted long ago to shelter the orchard from the sweeping west winds; and, when he looked down at her again, he caught a glimpse of repentant tears in her eyes, and softened.
"Oh, you're a girl, and you demand the usual amount of poor-pussy talk," he told her maliciously. "So I'm sorry. I'm heartbroken.
If it will help any, I'll even kiss the hurt to make it well--and I'm not a kissing young man, either, let me tell you.""I'd die before I'd let you touch me!" Her repentance, if it was that, changed to pure rage. She snatched the torn sheet from him and turned abruptly toward the fence. He followed her, apparently unmoved by her attitude; placed his foot upon the lower wire and pressed it into the soft earth, lifted the one next above it as high as it would go, and thus made it easier for her to pass through. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, as though tempted to reject even that slight favor, then stooped, and went through.
