cause of her fierce indignation we excused her in our hearts at once. The fact was, Kate had just discovered that one of the interesting youths of the hamlet had stolen her watch from her tent, and, having a shrewd suspicion as to the identity of the culprit, she was piling the agony on his head and surely never was there such an oration as that just so vehemently declaimed by this roused Pythoness.
Amid interjections, exclamations, soothing entreaties, and wild outcries, the torrent of her invective went on, until in sheer physical exhaustion she was compelled to pause; and then, turning to our party, she explained her loss to us in English, and ever and anon turned round to still further lash with her scorpion tongue the supposed thief, who cowered before her like a guilty thing.
"My word!" says McRae. "If Kate does not get her watch back, I pity the whole tribe of them. She rules the roost here when she likes."
The thief seemed to think he had made a bad job of it too; for by-and-by Kate found the watch restored to its wonted position at the head of her bed, and she soon regained her accustomed composure.
In the meantime, however, she had certainly altered our first impressions, and revealed to us an unsuspected phase in her curiously complex character.
Kate is really a curiosity. She is a half-blood—her father having been a Scotchman. She was, I believe, educated for several years at a school in
