"
The meal was eaten in silence, and during its progress Wentworth in a
measure recovered his nerve.
"You haven't told me yet what you want," he suggested when they had
lighted their pipes and thrown on an armful of greens for a smudge.
Between the narrowed lids the black eyes seemed to smoulder as they
fixed upon the face of the white man. "I wan' you heart," he said,
casually. "Red in my han's I wan' it, an' squeeze de blood out, an'
watch it splash on de rocks. Mebbe-so I'm eat a piece dat heart, an'
feed de res' to my dog."
Wentworth's pipe dropped to the gravel and lay there. He uttered no
sound. The wind had died down and save for the droning hum of a
billion mosquitoes the silence was absolute. A thin column of smoke
streamed from the bowl of the neglected pipe. In profound fascination
Wentworth watched it flow smoothly upward. An imperceptible air
current set the column swaying and wavering, and a light puff of breeze
dispersed it in a swirl of heavy yellow smoke from the smudge. Dully,
impersonally, he sensed that the half-breed had just told him that he
would squeeze the red blood from his heart and watch it splash upon the
rocks. His eyes rested upon the rocks rimmed up by the ice above the
gravelly beach. The blood would splash there, and there, and those
other rocks would be spattered with tiny drops of it--his blood, the
blood from his own heart which Alex Thumb would squeeze dry, as one
would wring water from a sponge.
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