# Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 9

AFTER a few minutes, as it seemed to Harrington, he awoke, feeling much better—it was miraculous how much better. But not only had his sleep been invigorating; it had been entertaining; it had been accompanied by dreams. He had dreamed about playing golf with Billie Boland. Oddest of all, he had dreamed that he was in love with her and, while it was a dream, that state was blissful in the extreme; but now that he was awake, he chuckled at the idea. She was charming and he was charmed; she was intriguing and he was intrigued but—his love life was in the past. He thought that, and stretched his long limbs indolently, but a twinge of pain reminded him that there was still a sore spot at the back of his head.
Yet his mood was happy.
"Lahleet!" he called. "I'm awake. I feel fine. You're a wiz. You're big medicine all right—Lahleet!"
The girl did not answer. Mystified, Harrington eased himself experimentally to an upright position and felt only the slightest dizziness. Yes, he was better, much better; but the room was empty.
Impatient he peered out the window above the couch—peered and was astonished. No sun was blazing yonder over the shoulder of Mount Gregory. He turned to the opposite window, and lo, the folds of the cretonne over there were alive with a golden glow. Perplexed he took a hasty stride in that direction but ​was brought up with a sudden bang in the head—a bang of warning that he would have to avoid abrupt movements for some little time yet. With slower, chastened steps he gained this window and held its curtains wide; then muttered in astonished wrath. The sun was there, on that side, and half-way down the heavens—more than half-way. The time was no longer morning—it was afternoon. He had slept all day—he had missed the appointment to play golf with Miss Boland.
"Lahleet!" he called sharply; and this time there came an answer, but not from the Indian girl. To his utter astonishment there stepped from between curtains beyond the piano Miss Marceau, the teacher of the Indian School at Shell Point who had come to his office yesterday morning. She was dressed as then; she looked as then, prim, pretty and dignified, only a little reproving as at the harshness of his tone.
"Miss Marceau!" Harrington stammered. "How do you come here? I was looking for the little Indian girl. I was a trifle provoked with her. She has been awful kind to me—a regular good Samaritan. But she let me oversleep!"
"Yes?" queried Miss Marceau, in a concerned voice, but faintly tinged with rebuke. "You were sleeping so soundly that she wouldn't rouse you. Exhausted nature, no doubt; and, as it was only a golf game!"
"Hum! I see!" commented Henry, rather glumly. "Well, the damage is done now. Hum!" His eyes skirted the room. "Excuse me, Miss Marceau, if I sit!" he said, and sank down upon the stool to think it out. Yes—seven minutes past four by the ivory clock there upon the piano. The whole day gone! And—by ​George, this was the day when Scanlon was coming to his office to—Scanlon! Scanlon! The thought of Scanlon was wildly inflaming. Scanlon, he had discovered, was a traitor—and a particularly base kind of traitor—planning a betrayal so gross and vile as to be almost unbelievable.
"I've got to get ashore, Miss Marceau," he announced desperately; "and as quickly as possible. Just who is this girl, Miss Marceau? One of your Shell Pointers, I take it? One of your pupils, perhaps? But—is she some relation to Adam John?"
"You have guessed it," smiled Miss Marceau; although in that shadow in which she kept her face a smile was but faintly distinguishable. "Adam John is Lahleet's foster-brother."
"Which reminds me, Miss Marceau!" exclaimed Henry with the challenging emphasis of a new thought. "Mr. Boland took up with me last night that matter of the Shell Point land. He wants to buy it."
"Boland? What!" cried the school-teacher in a startled voice. "I told you so!" she blazed, and came darting forward, then halted suddenly, as somehow dismayed with herself. But she had halted this time in the spotlight of that filtering glory from the parted cretonne curtain.
Harrington gaped with sudden wonder and rose slowly, staring. "You!" he exclaimed in amazement. "You are Lahleet?" he breathed incredulously, peering closer into the face now framed so differently from the one he had been looking at before he slept. The beads were gone; the strings of shells and the braids were gone; the whole environment of feature was changed.
"Lahleet Marceau," the little school-teacher mur​mured in momentary confusion, for she had not meant to disclose herself so soon. Yet a mischievous twinkle came into her eyes at Harrington's bewilderment.
"Good Lord!" He reddened to the roots of his hair. "And I patted your hand. . . . I patted your cheek . . . I treated you like—like a child! I even asked you to kiss me."
Miss Marceau made no pretense of not enjoying his discomfiture.
"And you did kiss me!" he suddenly recalled.
"That was my aboriginal self which likes to be agreeable," Miss Marceau answered, mischievously demure as Lahleet had been.
"Well, I guess it was my aboriginal self that wanted you to on such short acquaintance," confessed Henry. "But then"—his countenance assumed a rueful expression—"I thought I had found such a nice little playmate."
"And haven't you?" Now the straight and dignified lips of Miss Marceau did not say this. It was exclaimed by the roguish black eyes of Lahleet; but Henry, a trifle put out with himself at having been hoaxed for five whole minutes, muffed that glance.
"You aren't the same in your tailor-mades," he declared. "Besides, what is the big idea? You and this conglomeration of savagery and civilization?"
"Just that there's the same conglomeration in me!" exclaimed Miss Marceau, with a frank, almost apologetic spreading of both her hands in an odd little gesture which comprehended all of her small full-bosomed figure. "I've parts of two college educations. I've had a lot of the white man's civilization—and some of its thrills.
​"But the call of my people was too strong for me. I came back to them—I had to come, bringing, as you see, some of civilization with me. But sometimes"—her black lashes were lowered for an instant—"sometimes the call of those coppery drops in my blood is too strong for me; and I have to answer that also. I have to become what you saw me this morning—what you called me—a little Siwash."
Harrington found himself listening with both understanding and sympathy. "By George!" he said, "I don't blame you. There are times when I have wanted to get away from the white man and from the white man's civilization. I was wanting to . . . only"—and he passed a hand before his face—"only yesterday morning I was wanting to."
"And don't you want to—now?" The velvet eyes seemed to coax and challenge. Despite the tailor-mades, she was not the teacher now but the wild, impish creature he had seen this morning.
"You temptress!" he denounced, his tones big and robust. "No, I don't want to—now!" And then as if her subtle thrust had opened a way for the full humor of the joke she had played to strike home, Henry broke into laughter.
"How you fooled me!" he laughed. "Ha, ha, ha!" laughing till his head hurt him, laughing till tears forced themselves into his eyes. "You little witch, come here; and don't you ever dare to get dignified with me again!"
The pose of the teacher fell off from Miss Marceau like Cleopatra's last veil before the eye of Caesar. She was the Indian girl again, and laughing as excitedly as he. She advanced to the plea of his outstretched hands ​and met them with her own. Henry shook them heartily, It might have seemed that he was going to presume a basis of familiarity as already established and kiss her; but he did not. Her action had been too naively trustful to be presumed upon. He merely swung her round him playfully—or started to.
"Gosh! my head!" he cried, and stood with one hand raised to the bandages while, with half-rueful expression, he gazed at the girl and laughed again. "You played me a good one, didn't you—didn't you?" he demanded, and then something . . . some triumphant quirk of the berry-red lips, something meaningful in her dark glance, a half-mystical twinkle of exultation as over a successful ruse, made him halt and stare at her—stare at her and divine: "You—you doped my broth, you little devil!"
The smile went out of Lahleet's face. She straightened proudly, a mild defiance in her glance as one who scorned to lie.
"You little aborigine! What did you do that for?" Harrington demanded, sternness not all simulated.
"To spite Miss Boland," she confessed coolly. "I do not like her. I saw you looking at her out of the window yesterday. I do not like designing women." A red spot enlarged in the center of each of Lahleet's cheeks, enlarged and burned, and a lip curled scornfully with the gleam of a white tooth that looked as if it could bite. Yet the little woman was so naively earnest, so childishly, so deliciously frank in her jealousy, that Henry could not even be resentful. He laughed, vastly amused.
"Designing? Fiddlesticks! On whom has she designs?"
​"You! You said you would help me against John Boland and you are falling for her."
Henry's eyes widened again, but he was being deliciously entertained. So obviously this was not Miss Marceau, but the little Siwash accusing.
"She spoke to you at the Country Club yesterday afternoon, and just for that you went off and lay down and pulled up handfuls of grass on Pigeon Point."
"Oh, look here now!" Henry seized the girl by the elbows almost angrily. "I'm not going to have you spying upon me."
"It was lucky for you that somebody was spying last night when that yeggman slugged you on the head." The black eyes were bold now—impudent even.
"Adam John!" Henry cried out, humbled and shamed. "So that's how Adam John was there! Come here, you child!" he commanded sternly.
The girl obeyed him meekly.
"Listen," he said in the voice of one no longer to be trifled with. "For me, Miss Marceau is gone—sunk without a trace. You are Lahleet, the little Siwash. Get down there where you were this morning, while I sit on the couch and lecture you."
Half-jesting, half-serious, but sinking before the frown and the sheer power of a pointed index finger, the small brunette in the tailored suit, the brown silk stockings and oxfords to match, dropped cross-legged, Lahleet-fashion, to the floor. But when Harrington continued to frown so fiercely, the playful twitch went away from the corners of her mouth. She betrayed a guilty flush and stared up sober and submissive, as to someone infinitely older, who had the right to castigate her verbally.
​"Now, look here, you little cougar kitten!" the lawyer warned. "You cut out this movie stuff. I'm not going to have you spying round on me. I can take care of myself. Besides, it's not nice, Lahleet—spying on your friends that way. It was luck, of course, that Adam John was around last night—by George, it was! And I'm grateful as a dog to him and you. But that sort of thing won't happen again.
"You must think of me as your friend—a thousand times your friend for what you and Adam did for me last night; and—especially, first and forever, you must put out of your head these absurd suspicions about the Bolands."
But the soft black eyes hardened at the name, and Harrington noticed it.
"Now, listen," he commanded very gravely, shaking his finger till almost it smote her little nose. "Listen!"
The girl's manner became dutifully attentive while Harrington expounded to her very clearly and earnestly and glowingly, with necessary elaborations of detail, all that great project for the benefit of the Shell Point Indians which John Boland had committed to him. The little woman listened at first wonderingly, then doubtingly, battling each point, but finally contritely, with a shamed light in her eyes.
"I'll help you!" she exclaimed impulsively, thrusting a warm little hand into his. "I'll help you. We'll get the signature of every member of the tribe within two weeks."
"Within two weeks?" glowed Henry. "Mr. Boland thought that might take two or three years."
The girl smiled, her accustomed pose of self-assurance quite reëstablished. "We can do it in two weeks," ​she affirmed with a delightful little emphasis upon the we. "But"—and the girl rose from her place at his feet—"you must be hungry."
"I am," confessed Henry, "hungry as a wolf; but I simply mustn't linger here another instant. You have done so much for me. Won't you please put me on the mainland at once?"
"Yes," assented the girl. "Come," and she led him outside.
"Do I understand you stay here alone at night?" Harrington asked, noting the wildness of the lodge's environment. "Aren't you afraid?"
"Afraid? The daughter of a chief afraid? Besides I do not go unarmed. I can shoot like a white man. I can throw a knife like an Indian. I—I can fight like the devil." Lahleet wrinkled her nose and grimaced at him delightfully.
"By Jove, I believe you would!" admired Henry.
"Just to prove that I'm not a marplot, that I kept you here because I thought your condition required it, Miss Boland will be waiting for you over at the landing," she announced over her shoulder as she led the way down the knoll through towering spruce and tamarack.
"Miss Boland! Oh, my Lord!" Henry was thinking of the figure he would make in his water-soaked and fire-dried evening clothes and sheik-like headgear of bandages.
"Yes," assured Lahleet, quite pleased with herself. "Adam had a job for this afternoon and I told him to telephone Miss Boland."
"But she—but she," stammered Henry. "You see I don't know her that well."
​"She'll be there at five," announced Lahleet, as drily settling that question. "It's ten minutes of, now."
"But——" Harrington's brow was puckered with a new perplexity. This Indian girl had rather—rather come it over him in some ways, and he didn't want to make himself appear ridiculous in Billie Boland's eyes. "By the way, Lahleet, how much did Adam John tell Miss Boland, I wonder? I have reasons for being vague about some things that happened last night—at least for the present."
If Lahleet's face had been toward him he would have seen a dark smile, almost feline, illuminate her features; but she was again leading down the trail. "You can be as vague as you like," she answered in an uninflected voice. "Be sure Adam John told her no more than that you would be expecting her at Hurricane Island landing at five."
"The nerve of that!" reflected Henry, yet was considerably relieved, until he realized that with Billie waiting at the landing and Lahleet paddling him over, vagueness might not be feasible.
But when they emerged from a belt of fern to stand upon the basin's edge, lo, there was Charlie Bigwind waiting in a launch to take him across. Had the girl divined? No telling. Her face was quite inscrutable and with one last touch of her hand he stepped into the launch.
"Good-by!" her fluted tone carried out to him across the widening stretch of water. He waved his hand and watched that magnetic little figure with a strange, speculative interest until the rounding of a point of greenery cut her from his view. The last glimpse was of the little brown hat snatched off and waved at him.
​"Bless her heart!" reflected Harrington. "Doggone her mischievous little hide!"
With these conflicting observations he dismissed Lahleet Marceau from his mind and, as the rounding of another point of greenery brought the Cub Creek landing into view, his eyes sought eagerly for the shining coupé of Miss Billie Boland. It was not there.
"The gall of me—expecting it!" mumbled Henry to himself, but was disappointed for all that.