The latest picture you have of
him in health and strength must be such a comfort to you! You pledged
your honor that if he would let you blindfold him no harm should come to
him; and then, giggling and choking over the rare fun of the joke, you
led him to a brook thinly glazed with ice, and pushed him in; and how you
did laugh! Man, you will never forget the gentle, reproachful look he
gave you as he struggled shivering out, if you live a thousand years!
Oh! you see it now, you see it now!"
"Beast, I have seen it a million times, and shall see it a million more!
and may you rot away piecemeal, and suffer till doomsday what I suffer
now, for bringing it back to me again!"
The dwarf chuckled contentedly, and went on with his accusing history of
my career. I dropped into a moody, vengeful state, and suffered in
silence under the merciless lash. At last this remark of his gave me a
sudden rouse:
"Two months ago, on a Tuesday, you woke up, away in the night, and fell
to thinking, with shame, about a peculiarly mean and pitiful act of yours
toward a poor ignorant Indian in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains in the
winter of eighteen hundred and--"
"Stop a moment, devil! Stop! Do you mean to tell me that even my very
thoughts are not hidden from you?"
"It seems to look like that.
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