“I am thirsty,” said Waldo, “and I have lost my way.”
“Is the gentleman living in a brown tent, shaped like half a melon?” she inquired, the queer, rumbling note drawling from one word to the next, her lips barely separated.
“I could guide the gentleman that way,” she droned; “but it is far, and there is no water on that side.”
“I want water first,” said Waldo, “or milk.”
“If you mean cow’s milk, we have none. But we have goat’s milk. There is to drink where I dwell,” she said, sing-songing the words. “It is not far. It is the other way.”
She began to walk, Waldo, his gun under his arm, beside her. She trod noiselessly and fast. Waldo could scarcely keep up with her. As they walked he often fell behind and noted how her swathing garments clung to a lithe, shapely back, neat waist and firm hips. Each time he hurried and caught up with her, he scanned her with intermittent glances, puzzled that her waist, so well-marked at the spine, showed no particular definition in front; that the outline of her from neck to knees, perfectly shapeless under her wrappings, was without any waist-line or suggestion of firmness or undulation. Likewise he remarked the amused flicker in her eyes and the compressed line of her red, her too red, lips.
“How long were you at the mission school?” he inquired.
“The Free-folk do not submit to baptism,” she stated simply, but with rather more of the droning growl between her words.
He felt a queer shiver as he watched the scarcely moved lips through which the syllables edged their way.
“But you are not veiled,” he could not resist saying.
“The Free-folk,” she rejoined, “are never veiled.”
“Then you are not a Mohammedan?” he ventured.
“Who are the Free-folk?” he blurted out incautiously.
She shot one baleful glance at him. Waldo remembered that he had to do with an Asiatic. He recalled the three permitted questions.
“That is a name from the ‘Arabian Nights,’” he hazarded.
“From the foolish tales of the believers,” she sneered. “The Free-folk know nothing of such follies.” The unvarying shutness of her speaking lips, the drawly burr between the syllables, struck him all the more as her lips curled but did not open.
“You utter your words in a strange way,” he said.