“Now!” I cried triumphantly.  “Now, are you satisfied?”

But the priest did not reply.  He stared, and his eyes grew ferret-sharp.  Then he shifted his position, and stared again.  It beat into my brain that he had lived thirty years among the Indians, and that his eyes were trained.  He could see meanings, where I saw a blank wall.

“This is no Indian woman,” he said slowly, with a wagging forefinger that beat off his words like the minute hand of Fate.  “This is—­this is—­why, this is the English prisoner!”

He brought out the last words in a crescendo, and again my hand clapped tight against his mouth.

“Be still!  Be still!” I spluttered wildly, and I threw a disordered glance at the horizon, and at my astonished crew.  I had not meant that the men, except Pierre, should be taken into the secret until we were well afloat.  Here was another contretemps.

“Are you mad, Father Carheil!” I began, with a sorry show of dignity, while my palm stuck like a leech against his lips.  “This is not”——­

“Not any one but the prisoner himself,” interrupted the Englishman’s voice.  He dropped his blanket, and sprang to the sand.  “Do not lie for me, monsieur,” he went on in his indolent, drawling French that already had come to have a pleasant quaintness in my ears.  “Monsieur, let me speak to the father.”

If Nature had given me a third hand, I should have used it to throttle the Englishman.  “Get back in the canoe!” I stormed.

He motioned me away.  Standing slim and tall in Singing Arrow’s dress, he put me—­such creatures of outward seeming are we—­absurdly in the wrong, as if I had been rude to a woman.

“Father Carheil,” he began, “your ears at least are not fettered.  Listen, if you will.  This man is not to blame.  I was thrown in his way, and he took me from pity, to save my life.  Now that I am discovered, I will go back to prison with you.  Let this man go west.  Whatever his business, it is pressing.”

With two mad men on my hands, I had to choose between them.  I dropped the priest, and gripped the Englishman.

“If you go back, I go with you!” I raged in his ear.  Then I turned to Father Carheil.  “Are you going to report this, father?  It is as the Englishman says.  I take him as the only way to save him from torture.  May we go?”

The father thought a moment.  “No,” he said.

I gripped my sword.  “You have seen torture, Father Carheil.  Would you hand this man over to it?”

The father looked at me as if I were print for his reading.  “I am piecing facts together,” he said, with unmoved slowness.  “Singing Arrow is in league with you, for the prisoner is wearing her clothes.  The Indians are wild with brandy, which, it is rumored, Singing Arrow furnished.  The brandy must have come from you.  Is that so?  Answer me.  Answer, in the name of the Holy Church.  Is that so?”