The old priest peered. "No," he meditated. "No, this is not Singing
Arrow." He wheeled on me with one of his flashes of temper. "I cannot
recognize this girl. Let her take off her blanket."

I motioned my men to take stations in the canoes. "Father Carheil, I
beg you to let me go at once," I implored. "You see you were wrong.
As to this Indian, you never saw her; she is a stranger here."

But the father was not pacified. "Let her take off her blanket," he
repeated, with all the aimless persistency of age.

Did I say that the man had grown close to my heart? Why, I could have
shaken him. But the Englishman cut the knot. He turned with a hunch
of the shoulder, and peered at us over the corner of his blanket.
Gesture, and roll of the head, he was an Indian. I was so pleased at
the mimicry, that I gave way to witless laughter.

"Now!" I cried triumphantly. "Now, are you satisfied?"

But the priest did not reply. He stared, and his eyes grew
ferret-sharp. Then he shifted his position, and stared again. It beat
into my brain that he had lived thirty years among the Indians, and
that his eyes were trained. He could see meanings, where I saw a blank
wall.

"This is no Indian woman," he said slowly, with a wagging forefinger
that beat off his words like the minute hand of Fate. "This is--this
is--why, this is the English prisoner!"

He brought out the last words in a crescendo, and again my hand clapped