She had brought a long, keen-bladed hunting-knife into the willows, and she dipped the point of it into the concoction—blowing upon it until it dried, then repeating the process. When the point of the blade was well discolored, she muttered:
“Dat’s de strong medicine!”
Her eyes glittered like the eyes of the snakes among the rocks, and they seemed smaller. Their roundness and the liquid softness of them was gone. She looked “pure Injun,” as Smith would have phrased it, with murder in her heart. Deliberately, malevolently, she spat upon the earth beneath which the letter lay, before she returned to the house.
She heard Susie’s voice in the Schoolmarm’s room, and quickly hid the knife behind a mirror in the living-room, where she hid everything which she wished to conceal, imagining, for
