They blended curiously with
the impressions left by the romances she had read in M.
Roussillon's mildewed books.
Long-Hair was not a young man; but it would have been impossible
to guess near his age. His form and face simply showed long
experience and immeasurable vigor. Alice remembered with a
shuddering sensation the look he gave her when she took the locket
from his hand. It was of but a second's duration, yet it seemed to
search every nook of her being with its subtle power.
Romancers have made much of their Indian heroes, picturing them as
models of manly beauty and nobility; but all fiction must be taken
with liberal pinches of salt. The plain truth is that dark savages
of the pure blood often do possess the magnetism of perfect
physical development and unfathomable mental strangeness; but real
beauty they never have. Their innate repulsiveness is so great
that, like the snake's charm, it may fascinate; yet an
indescribable, haunting disgust goes with it. And, after all, if
Alice had been asked to tell just how she felt toward the Indian
she had labored so hard to save, she would promptly have said:
"I loathe him as I do a toad!"
Nor would Father Beret, put to the same test, have made a
substantially different confession. His work, to do which his life
went as fuel to fire, was training the souls of Indians for the
reception of divine grace; but experience had not changed his
first impression of savage character.
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