I knew that if in this girl anything was truly appealing to my unquiet heart I should silence even the slightest threat of any response--discourage, ignore, exterminate the last unruly trace of sentiment in her regard.
Yet I remained there motionless, thinking, thinking--her faded rosebud lying in my hand, drooping but still fragrant.
Dismiss her from my thoughts I could not.

The steady, relentless desire to see her; the continual apprehension that some mischance might overtake her, left me no peace of mind, so that the memory of her, not yet a pleasure even, nagged, nagged, nagged, till every weary nerve in me became unsteady.
I stretched out above the river bank, composing my body to rest--sleep perhaps.

But flies and sun kept me awake, even if I could have quieted my mind.
So up again, and walked to the hut door, where within I beheld the Sagamore gravely repainting himself with the terrific emblems of death.
He was seated cross-legged on the floor, my camp mirror before him--a superb specimen of manhood, naked save for clout, beaded sporran, and a pair of thigh moccasins, the most wonderful I had ever seen.
I admired his war-girdle and moccasins, speaking somewhat carelessly of the beautiful shell-work designs as "wampum"-- an Iroquois term.
"Seawan," he said coldly, correcting me and using the softer Siwanois term.

Then, with that true courtesy which ever seeks to ease a merited rebuke, he spoke pleasantly concerning shell-beads, and how they were made and from what, and how it was that the purple beads were the gold, the white beads the silver, and the black beads the copper equivalents in English coinage.

And so we conducted very politely and agreeably there in the hut, the while he painted himself like a ghastly death, and brightened the scarlet clan-symbol tatooed on his breast by touching its outlines with his brilliant paint.