That trouble would be brewed again I felt was inevitable. The chief had somewhat manifested a spirit of doubt and alarm, in common with the others, when he found me aroused, but this he was daily attempting to overcome. I could see that the fire of jealousy, especially in regard to the manœuvres of his fickle and silly mate was getting more assertive. It could only be a matter of time till his animal-rage would burst all bounds, and then—one or the other of us would get hurt, for I had early decided that my life was quite as important as his, and I therefore watched him narrowly, always. The work on the boat and weapons was progressing, but I was all impatience to make things ready for my contemplated flight. In the midst of this state of affairs, the albino increased her advances, by bolder demonstrations. Exasperated beyond endurance, I seemed powerless to perform anything which should end the matter decisively. Upon coming from my shelter, one morning, after having been to the spring, I saw her down the hill, adoring my tracks. She was on “all fours,” worshipping, by placing her forehead on the ground where I had stepped, just as Reds and Blacks had done to the tracks of the bear. She was obviously in a state of ecstasy which was most insane. She had never before proceeded so far as this, to my knowledge. It made me boil with wrath. I should have liked to box her ears smartly. How alert and “secret” she was in her unseemly behaviour was demonstrated by the activity with which she made off when her chief appeared around the slope. Two days later I was exceptionally provoked to find this female within a rod of my dug-out, indulging in more of this madness. Moreover she was being observed by the angry chief, although I was not aware of this at the moment. So disgusted and desperate did I feel that I stepped quickly to a rock, whereon my tortoise basin was standing, filled with water in which I had washed, and grabbing it up I jumped toward her and dashed the contents all over her head and body, while she was still upon the ground, adoring. She was simply wild. A wet cat could not begin to be half so surprised, indignant and outraged as her ladyship became, instantly. She leaped to her feet, gasping, dripping, shuddering at the contact of all that water, her mouth wide open, her eyes afire with the light of sudden hatred and fury. Not even a “woman scorned” could have been so ready to shred my flesh from my bones. I thought for a second she would fly at my throat, in her passion, and gouge out my eyes, but the fiendish laughter of the chief and of ten or a dozen other females—who, of course, had seen the whole performance—turned her attention. This derision, however, made her face the more diabolical in its expressions of wrath.