The Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics) - James Fenimore Cooper [186]
“What for you shoot?” she said. “What Huron gal do, dat you kill him? What you t‘ink Manitou say? What you t’ink Manitou feel? What Iroquois do? No get honor—no get camp—no get prisoner—no get battle—no get scalp—no get not‘ing at all. Blood come after blood! How you feel your wife killed? Who pity you when tear come from moder or sister? You big as great pine—Huron gal little slender birch—why you fall on her and crush her? You t’ink Huron forget it? No! redskin never forget. Never forget friend; never forget enemy. Redman Manitou is dat. Why you so wicked, great paleface?”
Hurry had never been so daunted as by this close and warm attack of the Indian girl. It is true that she had a powerful ally in his conscience; and while she spoke earnestly, it was in tones so feminine as to deprive him of any pretext for unmanly anger. The softness of her voice added to the weight of her remonstrance, by lending to the latter an air of purity and truth. Like most vulgar-minded men, he had only regarded the Indians through the medium of their coarser and fiercer characteristics. It had never struck him that the affections are human; that even high principles—modified by habits and prejudices, but not the less elevated within their circle—can exist in the savage state; and that the warrior who is most ruthless in the field can submit to the softest and gentlest influences in the moments of domestic quiet. In a word, it was the habit of his mind to regard all Indians as being only a slight degree removed from the wild beasts that roamed the woods, and to feel disposed to treat them accordingly, whatever interest or caprice supplied a motive or an impulse. Still, though daunted by these reproaches, the handsome barbarian could hardly be said to be penitent. He was too much rebuked by conscience to suffer an outbreak of temper to escape him; and perhaps he felt that he had already committed an act that might justly bring his manhood in question. Instead of resenting or answering the simple but natural appeal of Hist, he walked away like one who disdained entering into a controversy with a woman.
In the meanwhile the ark swept onward, and by the time the scene with the torches was enacting beneath the trees, it had reached the open lake; Floating Tom causing it to sheer farther from the land, with a sort of instinctive dread of retaliation. An hour now passed in gloomy silence, no one appearing disposed to break it. Hist had retired to her pallet, and Chingachgook lay sleeping in the forward part of the scow. Hutter and Hurry alone remained awake, the former at the steering oar, while the latter brooded over his own conduct with the stubbornness of one little given to confession of his errors, and the secret goadings of the worm that never dies. This was at the moment when Judith and Hetty reached the center of the lake, and had lain down to endeavor to sleep in their drifting canoe.
The night was calm, though so much obscured by clouds. The season was not one of storms, and those which did occur in the month of June on that embedded water, though frequently violent, were always of short continuance. Nevertheless, there was the usual current of heavy, damp night air, which, passing over the summits of the trees, scarcely appeared to descend so low as the surface of the glassy lake, but kept removing a short distance above it, saturated with the humidity that constantly arose from the woods, and apparently never proceeding far in any one direction. The currents were influenced by the formation of the hills, as a matter of course—a circumstance that rendered even fresh breezes baffling, and which reduced the feebler efforts of the night air to be a sort of capricious and fickle sighings of the woods. Several times the head of the ark pointed east, and once it was actually turned towards the south again; but on the whole, it worked its way north, Hutter making always a fair wind, if wind it could be called,