Part 16 (1/2)

”I say, Maple Leaf,” Percy Rapson declared with boyish frankness, ”you're lookin' awfully charmin' at this moment, standin' there peelin'

those apples with the light of the settin' sun on you! I don't think you ever realise how good-lookin' you are. If I were an artist, I should want to paint a picture of you; only you should be dressed in fringed and beaded buckskins, and wear a feathered head-dress like a war-chief's daughter. Of course, I should never be able to do you justice, but your portrait would look rippin' fine on the top of a chocolate box.”

The Indian girl's naturally ruddy cheeks took on a deeper tinge, which was not wholly due to the rosy glow from the western sky.

”Maple Leaf is glad that you are not an artist,” she responded with dignity and a slightly contemptuous curl of her lip.

Percy stood near to her in the kitchen at Rattlesnake Ranch. He had one of a litter of bull pups on the dresser beside him, and was tempting the fat, ungainly animal to take more nourishment than it needed from a saucer of milk. He looked at the girl very closely and his eyes lingered, not for the first time, upon a curious scar in the smooth skin of her right temple. It was a long, very straight scar, that ran into the midst of the ebony black hair above her ear.

”Maple Leaf!” he said, after a considerable pause.

”Well?” She glanced aside at him.

”I've often wanted to ask you,” he went on. ”How did you get that wound on your temple? It's like the cut of a knife. It must have been a good deal more than a scratch to leave a mark like that. How was it done?”

Maple Leaf continued with her work of peeling and quartering apples.

She had turned her back to him.

”Don't you want to tell me?” he asked. ”Indians are usually proud of their wounds. At least, the men are, the chiefs and warriors and braves.

I don't know about the women. Perhaps you got yours in some childish accident?”

”I have never told any one,” she answered. And then, after a pause, she added: ”And I am not going to. It is my secret. It is no business of yours.”

Percy laughed awkwardly, feeling the rebuff, and took up his wriggling bull pup.

”All right,” he said, knowing by experience that Maple Leaf was like the rest of her race and that wild horses couldn't drag from her anything that she did not wish to tell. ”You can keep your secret, for all I care. But I could easily find out if I wanted, you know. I could even ask Sergeant Silk. I daresay Silk knows. There isn't much that he doesn't know about you and every one else on the Rattlesnake patrol.”

She turned sharply and her dark eyes flashed. But only for an instant.

”You had better not ask Sergeant Silk,” she said in a slow, level voice, which had in it something of warning. ”He knows. Yes, he knows.

But he would not tell you.”

She watched him go out into the back garden towards the shed which he used as a kennel. When he was out of sight, she put forth her hand to the plate rack and drew a small square of looking-gla.s.s from behind a cracked dish.

Propping the mirror against the shelf, she drew aside the strands of black hair from above her ear in such a way that the scar was revealed more clearly, running upward and backward from her temple.

”Yes,” she nodded with a smile of satisfaction at her own reflection, ”it is still there. It will always be there. Maple Leaf is not sorry.

She is glad. It helps her to remember.”

She put the mirror back in its hiding-place and went to the door and looked out across the ripening cornfields and the more distant prairie to the blue foothills behind which the sun was sinking.

It was just such an evening as this, she reflected. And she recalled one by one the incidents of the adventure in which she had taken so prominent a part.

It had happened that her father, The Moose That Walks, and her brother, Rippling Water, had been absent many days from Mrs. Medlicott's ranch, where they lived and worked. The crops were not yet ready for harvesting, and there was not much for them to do on the farm lands, whereas the beaver were plentiful on the creeks and in their best condition; so the father and son had gone trapping on the head waters of the Bow River.

They had left word at the ranch that if they did not return within a stated time it would mean that they were having good luck, and that Maple Leaf was to go to them with some further supplies of the white man's food--tea, sugar, flour, with rifle cartridges, not forgetting tobacco.

So Maple Leaf had filled her saddle-bags, mounted her pony, and gone off on the trail alone to the trappers' dug-out on far-away b.u.t.terfly Creek.