Title: The Moccasin Maker
Author: Johnson, E. Pauline, 1861-1913
Language: English
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This collection of prose written by Pauline Johnson was first
assembled and published shortly after her death in 1913.



THE MOCCASIN MAKER

By E. Pauline Johnson


With introduction by Sir Gilbert Parker and
appreciation by Charles Mair.


Dedicated to Sir Gilbert Parker, M.P.
Whose work in literature has brought honour to Canada


CONTENTS

  Introduction
  Pauline Johnson: An Appreciation
  My Mother
  Catharine of the "Crow's Nest"
  A Red Girl's Reasoning
  The Envoy Extraordinary
  A Pagan in St. Paul's Cathedral
  As It Was in the Beginning
  The Legend of Lillooet Falls
  Her Majesty's Guest
  Mother o' the Men
  The Nest Builder
  The Tenas Klootchman
  The Derelict



INTRODUCTION


The inducement to be sympathetic in writing a preface to a book like
this is naturally very great. The authoress was of Indian blood,
and lived the life of the Indian on the Iroquois Reserve with her
chieftain father and her white mother for many years; and though
she had white blood in her veins was insistently and determinedly
Indian to the end. She had the full pride of the aboriginal of pure
blood, and she was possessed of a vital joy in the legends, history
and language of the Indian race from which she came, crossed by
good white stock. But though the inducement to be sympathetic in
the case of so chivalrous a being who stood by the Indian blood
rather than by the white blood in her is great, there is, happily,
no necessity for generosity or magnanimity in the case of Pauline
Johnson. She was not great, but her work in verse in sure and
sincere; and it is alive with the true spirit of poetry. Her skill
in mere technique is good, her handling of narrative is notable,
and if there is no striking individuality--which might have been
expected from her Indian origin--if she was often reminiscent in her
manner, metre, form and expression, it only proves her a minor poet
and not a Tennyson or a Browning. That she should have done what
she did do, devotedly, with an astonishing charm and the delight
of inspired labour, makes her life memorable, as it certainly made
both life and work beautiful. The pain and suffering which attended
the latter part of her life never found its way into her work save
through increased sweetness and pensiveness. No shadow of death
fell upon her pages. To the last the soul ruled the body to its
will. Phenomenon Pauline Johnson was, though to call her a genius
would be to place her among the immortals, and no one was more
conscious of her limitations than herself. Therefore, it would do
her memory poor service to give her a crown instead of a coronet.

Poet she was, lyric and singing and happy, bright-visioned,
high-hearted, and with the Indian's passionate love of nature
thrilling in all she did, even when from the hunting-grounds of
poesy she brought back now and then a poor day's capture. She was
never without charm in her writing; indeed, mere charm was too
often her undoing. She could not be impersonal enough, and
therefore could not be great; but she could get very near to human
sympathies, to domestic natures, to those who care for pleasant,
happy things, to the lovers of the wild.

This is what she has done in this book called "The Moccasin Maker."
Here is a good deal that is biographical and autobiographical in
its nature; here is the story of her mother's life told with rare
graciousness and affection, in language which is never without
eloquence; and even when the dialogue makes you feel that the real
characters never talked as they do in this monograph, it is still
unstilted and somehow really convincing. Touching to a degree is
the first chapter, "My Mother," and it, with all the rest of the
book, makes one feel that Canadian literature would have been
poorer, that something would have been missed from this story of
Indian life if this volume had not been written. It is no argument
against the book that Pauline Johnson had not learnt the art of
short-story writing; she was a poetess, not a writer of fiction;
but the incidents described in many of these chapters show that,
had she chosen to write fiction instead of verse, and had begun at
an early stage in her career to do so, she would have succeeded.
Her style is always picturesque, she has a good sense of the
salient incident that makes a story, she could give to it the
touch of drama, and she is always interesting, even when there is
discursiveness, occasional weakness, and when the picture is not
well pulled together. The book had to be written; she knew it, and
she did it. The book will be read, not for patriotic reasons, not
from admiration of work achieved by one of the Indian race; but
because it is intrinsically human, interesting and often compelling
in narrative and event.

May it be permitted to add one word of personal comment? I never
saw Pauline Johnson in her own land, at her own hearthstone, but
only in my house in London and at other houses in London, where
she brought a breath of the wild; not because she dressed in Indian
costume, but because its atmosphere was round her. The feeling of
the wild looked out of her eyes, stirred in her gesture, moved in
her footstep. I am glad to have known this rare creature who had
the courage to be glad of her origin, without defiance, but with an
unchanging, if unspoken, insistence. Her native land and the Empire
should be glad of her for what she was and for what she stood; her
native land and the Empire should be glad of her for the work,
interesting, vivid and human, which she has done. It will preserve
her memory. In an age growing sordid such fresh spirits as she
should be welcomed for what they are, for what they do. This book
by Pauline Johnson should be welcomed for what she was and for what
it is.

                            Gilbert Parker.



PAULINE JOHNSON: AN APPRECIATION.

By Charles Mair.


The writer, having contributed a brief "Appreciation" of the
late Miss E. Pauline Johnson to the July number of The Canadian
Magazine, has been asked by the editor of this collection of her
hitherto unpublished writings to allow it to be used as a Preface,
with such additions or omissions as might seem desirable. He has
not yet seen any portion of the book, but quite apart from its
merits it is eagerly looked for by Miss Johnson's many friends
and admirers as a final memorial of her literary life. It will now
be read with an added interest, begot of her painfully sad and
untimely end.

In the death of Miss Johnson a poet passed away of undoubted
genius; one who wrote with passion, but without extravagance, and
upon themes foreign, perhaps, to some of her readers, but, to
herself, familiar as the air she breathed.

When her racial poetry first appeared, its effect upon the reader
was as that of something abnormal, something new and strange, and
certainly unexampled in Canadian verse. For here was a girl whose
blood and sympathies were largely drawn from the greatest tribe of
the most advanced nation of Indians on the continent, who spoke
out, "loud and bold," not for it alone, but for the whole red race,
and sang of its glories and its wrongs in strains of poetic fire.

However aloof the sympathies of the ordinary business world may be
from the red man's record, even it is moved at times by his fate,
and stirred by his persistent, his inevitable romance. For the
Indian's record is the background, and not seldom the foreground,
of American history, in which his endless contests with the invader
were but a counterpart of the unwritten, or recorded, struggles of
all primitive time.

In that long strife the bitterest charge against him is his
barbarity, which, if all that is alleged is to be believed--and
much of it is authentic--constitutes in the annals of pioneer
settlement and aggression a chapter of horrors.

But equally vindictive was his enemy, the American frontiersman.
Burnings at the stake, scalping, and other savageries, were not
confined to the red man. But whilst his are depicted by the
interested writers of the time in the most lurid colours, those of
the frontiersman, equally barbarous, are too often palliated, or
entirely passed by. It is manifestly unjust to characterize a whole
people by its worst members. Of such, amongst both Indians and
whites, there were not a few; but it is equally unfair to ascribe
to a naturally cruel disposition the infuriated red man's reprisals
for intolerable wrongs. As a matter of fact, impartial history
not seldom leans to the red man's side; for, in his ordinary and
peaceful intercourse with the whites, he was, as a rule, both
helpful and humane. In the records of early explorers we are told
of savages who possessed estimable qualities lamentably lacking
in many so-called civilized men. The Illinois, an inland tribe,
exhibited such tact, courtesy and self-restraint, in a word, such
good manners, that the Jesuit Fathers described them as a community
of gentlemen. Such traits, indeed, were natural to the primitive
Indian, and gave rise, no doubt, to the much-derided phrase--"The
Noble Red Man."

There may be some readers of these lines old enough to remember
the great Indians of the plains in times past, who will bear the
writer out in saying that such traits were not uncommon down to
comparatively recent years. Tatonkanazin the Dahcota, Sapo-Maxika
the Blackfoot, Atakakoop the Cree, not to speak of Yellow Quill
and others, were noted in their day for their noble features and
dignified deportment.

In our history the Indians hold an honoured place, and the average
reader need not be told that, at one time, their services were
essential to Canada. They appreciated British justice, and their
greatest nations produced great men, who, in the hour of need,
helped materially to preserve our independence. They failed,
however, for manifest reasons, to maintain their own. They had to
yield; but, before quitting the stage, they left behind them an
abiding memory, and an undying tradition. And, thus, "Romanticism,"
which will hold its own despite its hostile critics, is their
debtor. Their closeness to nature, their picturesque life in the
past, their mythical religion, social system and fateful history
have begot one of the wide world's "legends," an ideal not wholly
imaginary, which, as a counterpoise to Realism, our literature
needs, and probably never shall outgrow.

These references to the Indian character may seem too extended for
their place, yet they are genre to the writer's subject. For Miss
Johnson's mentality was moulded by descent, by ample knowledge of
her people's history, admiration of their character, and profound
interest in their fate.

Hence the oncoming into the field of letters of a real Indian poet
had a significance which, aided by its novelty, was immediately
appreciated by all that was best in Canadian culture. Hence, too,
and by reason of its strength, her work at once took its fitting
place without jar or hindrance; for there are few educated Canadians
who do not possess, in some measure, that aboriginal, historic sense
which was the very atmosphere of Pauline Johnson's being.

But while "the Indian" was never far from her thoughts, she was a
poet, and therefore inevitably winged her way into the world of
art, into the realm common to all countries, and to all peoples.
Here there was room for her imaginings, endowed, as she was, with
power to appeal to the heart, with refinement, delicacy, pathos,
and, above all, sincerity; an Idealist who fused the inner and the
outer world, and revelled in the unification of scenery and mind.

The delight of genius in the act of composition has been called the
keenest of intellectual pleasures; and this was the poet's almost
sole reward in Canada a generation ago, when nothing seemed to
catch the popular ear but burlesque, or trivial verse. In strange
contrast this with a remoter age! In old Upper Canada, in its
primitive days, there was no lack of educated men and women, of
cultivated pioneers who appreciated art and good literature in all
its forms. Even the average immigrant brought his favourite books
with him from the Old Land, and cherished a love of reading, which
unfortunately was not always inherited by his sons. It was a fit
audience, no doubt; but in a period when all alike were engrossed in
a stern struggle for existence, the poets, and we know there were
some, were forced, like other people, to earn, by labour of hand,
their daily bread. Thackeray's "dapper" George is credited with the
saying, that, "If beebles will be boets they must starve." If in
England their struggle was severe, in Canada it was unrelenting; a
bald prospect, certainly, which lasted, one is sorry to say, far
down in our literary history.

Probably owing to this, and partly through advice, and partly by
inclination, Miss Johnson took to the public platform for a living,
and certainly justified her choice of a vocation by her admirable
performances. They were not sensational, and therefore not
over-attractive to the groundling; but to discerners, who thought
highly of her art, they seemed the perfection of monologue, graced
by a musical voice, and by gesture at once simple and dignified.

As this is an appreciation and a tribute to Miss Johnson's memory
rather than a criticism, the writer will touch but lightly upon
the more prominent features of her productions. Without being
obtrusive, not the least of these is her national pride, for
nothing worthier, she thought, could be said of a man than

"That he was born in Canada, beneath the British flag."

In her political creed wavering and uncertainty had no place. She
saw our national life from its most salient angles, and, in
current phrase, she saw it whole. In common, therefore, with every
Canadian poet of eminence, she had no fears for Canada, if she be
but true to herself.

Another opinion is not likely to be challenged, viz., that much
of her poetry is unique, not only in subject, but also in the
sincerity of her treatment of themes so far removed from the common
range. Intense feeling distinguishes her Indian poems from all
others; they flow from her very veins, and are stamped with the seal
of heredity. This strikes one at every reading, and not less their
truth to fact, however idealized. Indeed the wildest of them,
"Ojistoh" (The White Wampum), is based upon an actual occurrence,
though the incident took place on the Western plains, and the
heroine was not a Mohawk. The same intensity marks "The Cattle
Thief," and "A Cry From an Indian Wife." Begot of her knowledge
of the long-suffering of her race, of iniquities in the past and
present, they poured red-hot from her inmost heart.

One turns, however, with a sense of relief from those fierce
dithyrambics to the beauty and pathos of her other poems. Take,
for example, that exquisite piece of music, "The Lullaby of the
Iroquois," simple, yet entrancing! Could anything of its kind be
more perfect in structure and expression? Or the sweet idyll,
"Shadow River," a transmutation of fancy and fact, which ends with
her own philosophy:

  "O! pathless world of seeming!
   O! pathless life of mine whose deep ideal
   Is more my own than ever was the real.
   For others fame
   And Love's red flame,
   And yellow gold: I only claim
   The shadows and the dreaming."

And this ideality, the hall-mark of her poetry, has a character of
its own, a quality which distinguishes it from the general run of
subjective verse. Though of the Christian faith, there is yet an
almost pagan yearning manifest in her work, which she indubitably
drew from her Indian ancestry. That is, she was in constant contact
with nature, and saw herself, her every thought and feeling,
reflected in the mysterious world around her.

This sense of harmony is indeed the prime motive of her poetry,
and therein we discern a brightness, a gleam, however fleeting,
of mystic light--

  "The light that never was on sea or land,
   The consecration and the poet's dream."

A suggestion of her attitude and sense of inter-penetration lurks
in this stanza:

  "There's a spirit on the river, there's a ghost upon the shore,
   And they sing of love and loving through the starlight evermore,
   As they steal amid the silence and the shadows of the shore."

And in the following verses this "correspondence" is more
distinctly drawn:

  "O! soft responsive voices of the night
     I join your minstrelsy,
   And call across the fading silver light
     As something calls to me;
   I may not all your meaning understand,
   But I have touched your soul in Shadow Land."

"Sweetness and light" met in Miss Johnson's nature, but free from
sentimentality; and even a carping critic will find little to cavil
at in her productions. If fault should be found with any of them it
would probably be with such a narrative as "Wolverine." It "bites,"
like all her Indian pieces, and conveys a definite meaning. But,
written in the conventional slang of the frontier, it jars with her
other work, and seems out of form, if not out of place.

However, no poet escapes a break at times, and Miss Johnson's
work is not to be judged, like a chain, by its weakest links.
Its beauty, its strength, its originality are unmistakable, and
although, had she lived, we might have looked for still higher
flights of her genius, yet what we possess is beyond price, and
fully justifies the feeling, everywhere expressed, that Canada has
lost a true poet.

Such a loss may not be thought a serious one by the sordid man
who decries poetry as the useless product of an art already in
its decay. Should this ever be the case, it would be a monstrous
symptom, a symptom that the noblest impulses of the human heart are
decaying also. The truth is, as the greatest of English critics,
Hazlitt, has told us, that "poetry is an interesting study, for
this reason, that it relates to whatever is most interesting in
human life. Whoever, therefore, has a contempt for poetry, has a
contempt for himself and humanity."

Turning from Miss Johnson's verse to her prose, there is ample
evidence that, had she applied herself, she would have taken high
rank as a writer of fiction. Her "Legends of Vancouver" is a
remarkable book, in which she relates a number of Coast-Indian
myths and traditions with unerring insight and literary skill.
These legends had a main source in the person of the famous old
Chief, Capilano, who, for the first time, revealed them to her in
Chinook, or in broken English, and, as reproduced in her rich and
harmonious prose, belong emphatically to what has been called "The
literature of power." Bound together, so to speak, in the retentive
memory of the old Chief, they are authentic legends of his people,
and true to the Indian nature. But we find in them, also, something
that transcends history. Indefinable forms, earthly and unearthly,
pass before us in mystical procession, in a world beyond ordinary
conception, in which nothing seems impossible.

The origin of the Indian's myths, East or West, cannot be traced,
and must ever remain a mystery. But, from his immemorial ceremonies
and intense conservatism, we may reasonably infer that many of
them have been handed down from father to son, unchanged, from
the prehistoric past to the present day; a past contemporary,
perhaps, with the mastodon, but certainly far back in the mists of
antiquity. The importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain
enough, and therefore the untimely death of Miss Johnson, who was
evidently turning with congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to
be regretted. For as Mr. Bernard McEnvoy well says in his preface
to her "Vancouver Legends," she "has linked the vivid present with
the immemorial past.... In the imaginative power that she has
brought to these semi-historical Sagas, and in the liquid flow
of her rhythmical prose she has shown herself to be a literary
worker of whom we may well be proud."

It is believed to be the general wish of Miss Johnson's friends
that some tribute of a national and permanent character should be
paid to her memory; not indeed to preserve it--her own works will
do that--but as a visible mark of public esteem. In this regard,
what could be better than a bronze statue of life-size, with such
accompanying symbols as would naturally suggest themselves to a
competent artist? Vancouver, in which she spent her latter years,
the city she loved, and in which she died, is its proper home; and,
as to its site, the spot in Stanley Park where she wished her ashes
to be laid is surely, of all places, the most appropriate.

But whatever shape, in the opinion of her friends, the memorial
should take, it is important, in any case, that it should be worthy
of her genius, and a fitting memento of her services to Canadian
letters.

Fort Steele, B.C., September, 1913.



My Mother

The Story of a Life of Unusual Experiences


[Author's Note.--This is the story of my mother's life, every
incident of which she related to me herself. I have neither
exaggerated nor curtailed a single circumstance in relating this
story. I have supplied nothing through imagination, nor have I
heightened the coloring of her unusual experiences. Had I done so
I could not possibly feel as sure of her approval as I now do, for
she is as near to me to-day as she was before she left me to join
her husband, my beloved father, whose feet have long since wandered
to the "Happy Hunting Grounds" of my dear Red Ancestors.]


PART I.

It was a very lonely little girl that stood on the deck of a huge
sailing vessel while the shores of England slipped down into the
horizon and the great, grey Atlantic yawned desolately westward.
She was leaving so much behind her, taking so little with her, for
the child was grave and old even at the age of eight, and realized
that this day meant the updragging of all the tiny roots that clung
to the home soil of the older land. Her father was taking his wife
and family, his household goods, his fortune and his future to
America, which, in the days of 1829, was indeed a venturesome
step, for America was regarded as remote as the North Pole, and
good-byes were, alas! very real good-byes, when travellers set
sail for the New World in those times before steam and telegraph
brought the two continents hand almost touching hand.

So little Lydia Bestman stood drearily watching with sorrow-filled
eyes the England of her babyhood fade slowly into the distance--eyes
that were fated never to see again the royal old land of her birth.
Already the deepest grief that life could hold had touched her
young heart. She had lost her own gentle, London-bred mother when
she was but two years old. Her father had married again, and on her
sixth birthday little Lydia, the youngest of a large family, had
been sent away to boarding-school with an elder sister, and her
home knew her no more. She was taken from school to the sailing
ship; little stepbrothers and sisters had arrived and she was no
longer the baby. Years afterwards she told her own little children
that her one vivid recollection of England was the exquisite
music of the church chimes as the ship weighed anchor in Bristol
harbor--chimes that were ringing for evensong from the towers of
the quaint old English churches. Thirteen weeks later that sailing
vessel entered New York harbor, and life in the New World began.

Like most transplanted Englishmen, Mr. Bestman cut himself
completely off from the land of his fathers; his interests and
his friends henceforth were all in the country of his adoption,
and he chose Ohio as a site for his new home. He was a man of
vast peculiarities, prejudices and extreme ideas--a man of
contradictions so glaring that even his own children never
understood him. He was a very narrow religionist, of the type
that say many prayers and quote much Scripture, but he beat his
children--both girls and boys--so severely that outsiders were
at times compelled to interfere. For years these unfortunate
children carried the scars left on their backs by the thongs of
cat-o'-nine-tails when he punished them for some slight misdemeanor.
They were all terrified at him, all obeyed him like soldiers, but
none escaped his severity. The two elder ones, a boy and a girl,
had married before they left England. The next girl married in
Ohio, and the boys drifted away, glad to escape from a parental
tyranny that made home anything but a desirable abiding-place.
Finally but two remained of the first family--Lydia and her sister
Elizabeth, a most lovable girl of seventeen, whose beauty of
character and self-sacrificing heart made the one bright memory
that remained with these scattered fledglings throughout their
entire lives.

The lady who occupied the undesirable position of stepmother to
these unfortunate children was of the very cold and chilling type
of Englishwoman, more frequently met with two generations ago than
in this age. She simply let her husband's first family alone. She
took no interest in them, neglected them absolutely, but in her
neglect was far kinder and more humane than their own father. Yet
she saw that all the money, all the pretty clothes, all the
dainties, went to her own children.

Perhaps the reader will think these unpleasant characteristics of a
harsh father and a self-centred stepmother might better be omitted
from this narrative, particularly as death claimed these two many
years ago; but in the light of after events, it is necessary to
reveal what the home environment of these children had been, how
little of companionship or kindness or spoken love had entered
their baby lives. The absence of mother kisses, of father
comradeship, of endeavor to understand them individually, to probe
their separate and various dispositions--things so essential to
the development of all that is best in a child--went far towards
governing their later actions in life. It drove the unselfish,
sweet-hearted Elizabeth to a loveless marriage; it flung poor,
little love-hungry Lydia into alien but, fortunately, loyal and
noble arms. Outsiders said, "What strange marriages!" But Lydia, at
least, married where the first real kindness she had ever known
called to her, and not one day of regret for that marriage ever
entered into her life.

It came about so strangely, so inevitably, from such a tiny
source, that it is almost incredible.

One day the stepmother, contrary to her usual custom, went into the
kitchen and baked a number of little cakelets, probably what we
would call cookies. For what sinister reason no one could divine,
but she counted these cakes as she took them from the baking-pans
and placed them in the pantry. There were forty-nine, all told.
That evening she counted them again; there were forty-eight.
Then she complained to her husband that one of the children had
evidently stolen a cake. (In her mind the two negro servants
employed in the house did not merit the suspicion.) Mr. Bestman
inquired which child was fond of the cakes. Mrs. Bestman replied
that she did not know, unless it was Lydia, who always liked them.

Lydia was called. Her father, frowning, asked if she had taken the
cake. The child said no.

"You are not telling the truth," Mr. Bestman shouted, as the poor
little downtrodden girl stood half terrified, consequently half
guilty-mannered, before him.

"But I am truthful," she said. "I know nothing of the cake."

"You are not truthful. You stole it--you know you did. You shall be
punished for this falsehood," he stormed, and reached for the
cat-o'-nine-tails.

The child was beaten brutally and sent to her room until she could
tell the truth. When she was released she still held that she had
not taken the cooky. Another beating followed, then a third, when
finally the stepmother interfered and said magnanimously:

"Don't whip her any more; she has been punished enough." And once
during one of the beatings she protested, saying, "Don't strike the
child _on the head_ in that way."

But the iron had entered into Lydia's sister's soul. The injustice
of it all drove gentle Elizabeth's gentleness to the winds.

"Liddy darling," she said, taking the thirteen-year-old girl-child
into her strong young arms, "_I_ know truth when I hear it.
_You_ never stole that cake."

"I didn't," sobbed the child, "I didn't."

"And you have been beaten three times for it!" And the sweet young
mouth hardened into lines that were far too severe for a girl of
seventeen. Then: "Liddy, do you know that Mr. Evans has asked me to
marry him?"

"Mr. Evans!" exclaimed the child. "Why, you can't marry _him_,
'Liza! He's ever so old, and he lives away up in Canada, among the
Indians."

"That's one of the reasons that I should like to marry him," said
Elizabeth, her young eyes starry with zeal. "I want to work among
the Indians, to help in Christianizing them, to--oh! just to help."

"But Mr. Evans is so _old_," reiterated Lydia.

"Only thirty," answered the sister; "and he is such a splendid
missionary, dear."

Love? No one talked of love in that household except the
contradictory father, who continually talked of the love of God,
but forgot to reflect that love towards his own children.

Human love was considered a non-essential in that family.
Beautiful-spirited Elizabeth had hardly heard the word. Even Mr.
Evans had not made use of it. He had selected her as his wife more
for her loveliness of character than from any personal attraction,
and she in her untaught womanhood married him, more for the reason
that she desired to be a laborer in Christ's vineyard than because
of any wish to be the wife of this one man.

But after the marriage ceremony, this gentle girl looked boldly
into her father's eyes and said:

"I am going to take Liddy with me into the wilds of Canada."

"Well, well, well!" said her father, English-fashion. "If she wants
to go, she may."

Go? The child fairly clung to the fingers of this saviour-sister--the
poor little, inexperienced, seventeen-year-old bride who was giving
up her youth and her girlhood to lay it all upon the shrine of
endeavour to bring the radiance of the Star that shone above
Bethlehem to reflect its glories upon a forest-bred people of the
North!

It was a long, strange journey that the bride and her little sister
took. A stage coach conveyed them from their home in Ohio to Erie,
Pennsylvania, where they went aboard a sailing vessel bound for
Buffalo. There they crossed the Niagara River, and at Chippewa, on
the Canadian side, again took a stage coach for the village of
Brantford, sixty miles west.

At this place they remained over night, and the following day Mr.
Evans' own conveyance arrived to fetch them to the Indian Reserve,
ten miles to the southeast.

In after years little Lydia used to tell that during that entire
drive she thought she was going through an English avenue leading
up to some great estate, for the trees crowded up close to the
roadway on either side, giant forest trees--gnarled oaks, singing
firs, jaunty maples, graceful elms--all stretching their branches
overhead. But the "avenue" seemed endless. "When do we come to the
house?" she asked, innocently. "This lane is very long."

But it was three hours, over a rough corduroy road, before the
little white frame parsonage lifted its roof through the forest,
its broad verandahs and green outside shutters welcoming the
travellers with an atmosphere of home at last.

As the horses drew up before the porch the great front door was
noiselessly opened and a lad of seventeen, lithe, clean-limbed,
erect, copper-colored, ran swiftly down the steps, lifted his hat,
smiled, and assisted the ladies to alight. The boy was Indian to
the finger-tips, with that peculiar native polish and courtesy,
that absolute ease of manner and direction of glance, possessed
only by the old-fashioned type of red man of this continent.
The missionary introduced him as "My young friend, the church
interpreter, Mr. George Mansion, who is one of our household."
(Mansion, or "Grand Mansion," is the English meaning of this young
Mohawk's native name.)

The entire personality of the missionary seemed to undergo a change
as his eyes rested on this youth. His hitherto rather stilted
manner relaxed, his eyes softened and glowed, he invited confidence
rather than repelled it; truly his heart was bound up with these
forest people; he fairly exhaled love for them with every breath.
He was a man of marked shyness, and these silent Indians made him
forget this peculiarity of which he was sorrowfully conscious. It
was probably this shyness that caused him to open the door and turn
to his young wife with the ill-selected remark: "Welcome home,
madam."

_Madam_! The little bride was chilled to the heart with the austere
word. She hurried within, followed by her wondering child-sister,
as soon as possible sought her room, then gave way to a storm of
tears.

"Don't mind me, Liddy," she sobbed. "There's nothing wrong; we'll
be happy enough here, only I think I looked for a little--petting."

With a wisdom beyond her years, Lydia did not reply, but went to
the window and gazed absently at the tiny patch of flowers beyond
the door--the two lilac trees in full blossom, the thread of
glistening river, and behind it all, the northern wilderness. Just
below the window stood the missionary and the Indian boy talking
eagerly.

"Isn't George Mansion _splendid_!" said the child.

"You must call him Mr. Mansion; be very careful about the _Mister_,
Liddy dear," said her sister, rising and drying her eyes bravely.
"I have always heard that the Indians treat one just as they are
treated by one. Respect Mr. Mansion, treat him as you would treat a
city gentleman. Be sure he will gauge his deportment by ours. Yes,
dear, he _is_ splendid. I like him already."

"Yes, 'Liza, so do I, and he _is_ a gentleman. He looks it and acts
it. I believe he _thinks_ gentlemanly things."

Elizabeth laughed. "You dear little soul!" she said. "I know what
you mean, and I agree with you."

That laugh was all that Lydia wanted to hear in this world, and
presently the two sisters, with arms entwined, descended the
stairway and joined in the conversation between Mr. Evans and young
George Mansion.

"Mrs. Evans," said the boy, addressing her directly for the first
time, "I hoped you were fond of game. Yesterday I hunted; it was
partridge I got, and one fine deer. Will you offer me the
compliment of having some for dinner to-night?"

His voice was low and very distinct, his accent and expressions
very marked as a foreigner to the tongue, but his English was
perfect.

"Indeed I shall, Mr. Mansion," smiled the girl-bride, "but I'm
afraid that I don't know how to cook it."

"We have an excellent cook," said Mr. Evans. "She has been with
George and me ever since I came here. George is a splendid shot,
and keeps her busy getting us game suppers."

Meanwhile Lydia had been observing the boy. She had never seen an
Indian, consequently was trying to reform her ideas regarding
them. She had not expected to see anything like this self-poised,
scrupulously-dressed, fine-featured, dark stripling. She thought
all Indians wore savage-looking clothes, had fierce eyes and stern,
set mouths. This boy's eyes were narrow and shrewd, but warm and
kindly, his lips were like Cupid's bow, his hands were narrower,
smaller, than her own, but the firmness of those slim fingers, the
power in those small palms, as he had helped her from the carriage,
remained with her through all the years to come.

That evening at supper she noted his table deportment; it was
correct in every detail. He ate leisurely, silently, gracefully;
his knife and fork never clattered, his elbows never were in
evidence, he made use of the right plates, spoons, forks, knives;
he bore an ease, an unconsciousness of manner that amazed her. The
missionary himself was a stiff man, and his very shyness made him
angular. Against such a setting young Mansion gleamed like a brown
gem.

       *       *       *       *       *

For seven years life rolled slowly by. At times Lydia went to visit
her two other married sisters, sometimes she remained for weeks
with a married brother, and at rare intervals made brief trips to
her father's house; but she never received a penny from her strange
parent, and knew of but one home which was worthy the name. That
was in the Canadian wilderness where the Indian Mission held out
its arms to her, and the beloved sister made her more welcome than
words could imply. Four pretty children had come to grace this
forest household, where young George Mansion, still the veriest
right hand of the missionary, had grown into a magnificent type
of Mohawk manhood. These years had brought him much, and he had
accomplished far more than idle chance could ever throw in his
way. He had saved his salary that he earned as interpreter in the
church, and had purchased some desirable property, a beautiful
estate of two hundred acres, upon which he some day hoped to build
a home. He had mastered six Indian languages, which, with his
knowledge of English and his wonderful fluency in his own tribal
Mohawk, gave him command of eight tongues, an advantage which soon
brought him the position of Government interpreter in the Council
of the great "Six Nations," composing the Iroquois race. Added to
this, through the death of an uncle he came into the younger title
of his family, which boasted blood of two noble lines. His father,
speaker of the Council, held the elder title, but that did not
lessen the importance of young George's title of chief.

Lydia never forgot the first time she saw him robed in the full
costume of his office. Hitherto she had regarded him through all
her comings and goings as her playmate, friend and boon companion;
he had been to her something that had never before entered her
life--he had brought warmth, kindness, fellowship and a peculiar
confidential humanity that had been entirely lacking in the chill
English home of her childhood. But this day, as he stood beside
his veteran father, ready to take his place among the chiefs of
the Grand Council, she saw revealed another phase of his life and
character; she saw that he was destined to be a man among men, and
for the first time she realized that her boy companion had gone a
little beyond her, perhaps a little above her. They were a strange
pair as they stood somewhat apart, unconscious of the picture they
made. She, a gentle-born, fair English girl of twenty, her simple
blue muslin frock vying with her eyes in color. He, tawny skinned,
lithe, straight as an arrow, the royal blood of generations of
chiefs and warriors pulsing through his arteries, his clinging
buckskin tunic and leggings fringed and embroidered with countless
quills, and endless stitches of colored moosehair. From his small,
neat moccasins to his jet black hair tipped with an eagle plume he
was every inch a man, a gentleman, a warrior.

But he was approaching her with the same ease with which he wore
his ordinary "white" clothes--garments, whether buckskin or
broadcloth, seemed to make but slight impression on him.

"Miss Bestman," he said, "I should like you to meet my mother and
father. They are here, and are old friends of your sister and Mr.
Evans. My mother does not speak English, but she knows you are my
friend."

And presently Lydia found herself shaking hands with the elder
chief, speaker of the council, who spoke English rather well, and
with a little dark woman folded within a "broadcloth" and wearing
the leggings, moccasins and short dress of her people. A curious
feeling of shyness overcame the girl as her hand met that of
George Mansion's mother, who herself was the most retiring, most
thoroughly old-fashioned woman of her tribe. But Lydia felt that
she was in the presence of one whom the young chief held far and
away as above himself, as above her, as the best and greatest woman
of his world; his very manner revealed it, and Lydia honored him
within her heart at that moment more than she had ever done
before.

But Chief George Mansion's mother, small and silent through long
habit and custom, had acquired a certain masterful dignity of her
own, for within her slender brown fingers she held a power that no
man of her nation could wrest from her. She was "Chief Matron" of
her entire blood relations, and commanded the enviable position
of being the one and only person, man or woman, who could appoint
a chief to fill the vacancy of one of the great Mohawk law-makers
whose seat in Council had been left vacant when the voice of the
Great Spirit called him to the happy hunting grounds. Lydia had
heard of this national honor which was the right and title of this
frail little moccasined Indian woman with whom she was shaking
hands, and the thought flashed rapidly through her girlish mind:
"Suppose some _one_ lady in England had the marvellous power of
appointing who the member should be in the British House of Lords
or Commons. _Wouldn't_ Great Britain honor and tremble before her?"

And here was Chief George Mansion's silent, unpretentious little
mother possessing all this power among her people, and she, Lydia
Bestman, was shaking hands with her! It seemed very marvellous.

But that night the power of this same slender Indian mother was
brought vividly before her when, unintentionally, she overheard
young George say to the missionary:

"I almost lost my new title to-day, after you and the ladies had
left the Council."

"Why, George boy!" exclaimed Mr. Evans. "What have you done?"

"Nothing, it seems, except to be successful. The Council objected
to my holding the title of chief and having a chief's vote in the
affairs of the people, and at the same time being Government
interpreter. They said it would give me too much power to retain
both positions. I must give up one--my title or my Government
position."

"What did you do?" demanded Mr. Evans, eagerly.

"Nothing, again," smiled the young chief. "But my mother did
something. She took the floor of the Council, and spoke for forty
minutes. She said I must hold the positions of chief which she had
made for me, as well as of interpreter which I had made for myself;
that if the Council objected, she would forever annul the chief's
title in her own family; she would never appoint one in my place,
and that we proud, arrogant Mohawks would then have only eight
representatives in Council--only be on a level with, as she
expressed it, 'those dogs of Senecas.' Then she clutched her
broadcloth about her, turned her back on us all, and left the
Council."

"What did the Council do?" gasped Mr. Evans.

"Accepted me as chief and interpreter," replied the young man,
smiling. "There was nothing else to do."

"Oh, you royal woman! You loyal, loyal mother!" cried Lydia to
herself. "How I love you for it!"

Then she crept away just as Mr. Evans had sprung forward with both
hands extended towards the young chief, his eyes beaming with
almost fatherly delight.

Unconsciously to herself, the English girl's interest in the young
chief had grown rapidly year after year. She was also unconscious
of his aim at constant companionship with herself. His devotion to
her sister, whose delicate health alarmed them all, more and more,
as time went on, was only another royal road to Lydia's heart.
Elizabeth was becoming frail, shadowy, her appetite was fitful, her
eyes larger and more wistful, her fingers smaller and weaker. No
one seemed to realize the insidious oncreepings of "the white man's
disease," consumption, that was paling Elizabeth's fine English
skin, heightening her glorious English color, sapping her delicate
English veins. Only young George would tell himself over and over:
"Mrs. Evans is going away from us some day, and Lydia will be left
with no one in the world but me--no one but me to understand--or
to--care."

So he scoured the forest for dainties, wild fruits, game, flowers,
to tempt the appetite and the eye of the fading wife of the man
who had taught him all the English and the white man's etiquette
that he had ever mastered. Night after night he would return from
day-long hunting trips, his game-bag filled with delicate quail,
rare woodcock, snowy-breasted partridge, and when the illusive
appetite of the sick woman could be coaxed to partake of a morsel,
he felt repaid for miles of tramping through forest trails, for
hours of search and skill.


PART II.

Perhaps it was this grey shadow stealing on the forest mission, the
thought of the day when that beautiful mothering sister would leave
his little friend Lydia alone with a bereft man and four small
children, or perhaps it was a yet more personal note in his life
that brought George Mansion to the realization of what this girl
had grown to be to him.

Indian-wise, his parents had arranged a suitable marriage for him,
selecting a girl of his own tribe, of the correct clan to mate with
his own, so that the line of blood heritage would be intact, and
the sons of the next generation would be of the "Blood Royal,"
qualified by rightful lineage to inherit the title of chief.

This Mohawk girl was attractive, young, and had a partial English
education. Her parents were fairly prosperous, owners of many
acres, and much forest and timber country. The arrangement was
regarded as an ideal one--the young people as perfectly and
diplomatically mated as it was possible to be; but when his parents
approached the young chief with the proposition, he met it with
instant refusal.

"My father, my mother," he begged, "I ask you to forgive me this
one disobedience. I ask you to forgive that I have, amid my fight
and struggle for English education, forgotten a single custom of my
people. I have tried to honor all the ancient rules and usages of
my forefathers, but I forgot this one thing, and I cannot, cannot do
it! My wife I must choose for myself."

"You will marry--whom, then?" asked the old chief.

"I have given no thought to it--yet," he faltered.

"Yes," said his mother, urged by the knowing heart of a woman,
"yes, George, you have thought of it."

"Only this hour," he answered, looking directly into his mother's
eyes. "Only now that I see you want me to give my life to someone
else. But my life belongs to the white girl, Mrs. Evans' sister, if
she will take it. I shall offer it to her to-morrow--to-day."

His mother's face took on the shadow of age. "You would marry a
_white_ girl?" she exclaimed, incredulously.

"Yes," came the reply, briefly, decidedly.

"But your children, your sons and hers--they could never hold the
title, never be chief," she said, rising to her feet.

He winced. "I know it. I had not thought of it before--but I know
it. Still, I would marry her."

"But there would be no more chiefs of the Grand Mansion name,"
cut in his father. "The title would go to your aunt's sons. She
is a Grand Mansion no longer; she, being married, is merely a
Straight-Shot, her husband's name. The Straight-Shots never had
noble blood, never wore a title. Shall our family title go to
a _Straight-Shot_?" and the elder chief mouthed the name
contemptuously.

Again the boy winced. The hurt of it all was sinking in--he hated
the Straight-Shots, he loved his own blood and bone. With lightning
rapidity he weighed it all mentally, then spoke: "Perhaps the white
girl will not marry me," he said slowly, and the thought of it
drove the dark red from his cheeks, drove his finger-nails into his
palms.

"Then, then you will marry Dawendine, our choice?" cried his
mother, hopefully.

"I shall marry no one but the white girl," he answered, with set
lips. "If she will not marry me, I shall never marry, so the
Straight-Shots will have our title, anyway."

The door closed behind him. It was as if it had shut forever
between him and his own.

But even with this threatened calamity looming before her, the old
Indian mother's hurt heart swelled with a certain pride in his
wilful actions.

"What bravery!" she exclaimed. "What courage to hold to his
own choice! What a _man_!"

"Yes," half bemoaned his father, "he is a red man through and
through. He defies his whole nation in his fearlessness, his
lawlessness. Even I bow to his bravery, his self-will, but that
bravery is hurting me here, here!" and the ancient chief laid his
hand above his heart.

There was no reply to be made by the proud though pained mother.
She folded her "broadcloth" about her, filled her small carved pipe
and sat for many hours smoking silently, silently, silently. Now
and again she shook her head mournfully, but her dark eyes would
flash at times with an emotion that contradicted her dejected
attitude. It was an emotion born of self-exaltation, for had she
not mothered a _man_?--albeit that manhood was revealing itself in
scorning the traditions and customs of her ancient race.

And young George was returning from his father's house to the
Mission with equally mixed emotions. He knew he had dealt an almost
unforgivable blow to those beloved parents whom he had honored and
obeyed from his babyhood. Once he almost turned back. Then a vision
arose of a fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had
learned of years ago, a sweet, homeless face of great beauty, lips
that were made for love they had never had, eyes that had already
known more of tears than they should have shed in a lifetime.
Suppose some other youth should win this girl away from him?
Already several of the young men from the town drove over more
frequently than they had cause to. Only the week before he had
found her seated at the little old melodeon playing and singing a
duet with one of these gallants. He locked his teeth together and
strode rapidly through the forest path, with the first full
realization that she was the only woman in all the world for him.

Some inevitable force seemed to be driving him
towards--circumstances seemed to pave the way to--their ultimate
union; even now chance placed her in the path, literally, for as he
threaded his way uphill, across the open, and on to the little log
bridge which crossed the ravine immediately behind the Mission, he
saw her standing at the further side, leaning upon the unpeeled
sapling which formed the bridge guard. She was looking into the
tiny stream beneath. He made no sound as he approached. Generations
of moccasin-shod ancestors had made his own movements swift and
silent. Notwithstanding this, she turned, and, with a bright
girlish smile, she said:

"I knew you were coming, Chief."

"Why? How?" he asked, accepting his new title from her with a
graceful indifference almost beyond his four and twenty years.

"I can hardly say just how--but--" she ended with only a smile. For
a full minute he caught and held her glance. She seemed unable to
look away, but her grave, blue English eyes were neither shy nor
confident. They just seemed to answer his--then,

"Miss Bestman, will you be my wife?" he asked gently. She was
neither surprised nor dismayed, only stood silent, as if she had
forgotten the art of speech. "You knew I should ask this some day,"
he continued, rather rapidly. "This is the day."

"I did not really know--I don't know how I feel--" she began,
faltering.

"I did not know how I felt, either, until an hour ago," he
explained. "When my father and my mother told me they had arranged
my marriage with--"

"With whom?" she almost demanded.

"A girl of my own people," he said, grudgingly. "A girl I honor and
respect, but--"

"But what?" she said weakly, for the mention of his possible
marriage with another had flung her own feelings into her very
face.

"But unless you will be my wife, I shall never marry." He folded
his arms across his chest as he said it--the very action expressed
finality. For a second he stood erect, dark, slender, lithe,
immovable, then with sudden impulse he held out one hand to her and
spoke very quietly. "I love you, Lydia. Will you come to me?"

"Yes," she answered clearly. "I will come."

He caught her hands very tightly, bending his head until his fine
face rested against her hair. She knew then that she had loved him
through all these years, and that come what might, she would love
him through all the years to be.

That night she told her frail and fading sister, whom she found
alone resting among her pillows.

"'Liza dear, you are crying," she half sobbed in alarm, as the great
tears rolled slowly down the wan cheeks. "I have made you unhappy,
and you are ill, too. Oh, how selfish I am! I did not think that
perhaps it might distress you."

"Liddy, Liddy darling, these are the only tears of joy that I have
ever shed!" cried Elizabeth. "Joy, joy, girlie! I have wished this
to come before I left you, wished it for years. I love George
Mansion better than I ever loved brother of mine. Of all the world
I should have chosen him for your husband. Oh! I am happy, happy,
child, and you will be happy with him, too."

And that night Lydia Bestman laid her down to rest, with her heart
knowing the greatest human love that had ever entered into her
life.

Mr. Evans was almost beside himself with joyousness when the young
people rather shyly confessed their engagement to him. He was
deeply attached to his wife's young sister, and George Mansion had
been more to him than many a man's son ever is. Seemingly cold and
undemonstrative, this reserved Scotch missionary had given all his
heart and life to the Indians, and this one boy was the apple of
his eye. Far-sighted and cautious, he saw endless trouble shadowing
the young lovers--opposition to the marriage from both sides of the
house. He could already see Lydia's family smarting under the
seeming disgrace of her marriage to an Indian; he could see George's
family indignant and hurt to the core at his marriage with a white
girl; he could see how impossible it would be for Lydia's people to
ever understand the fierce resentment of the Indian parents that
the family title could never continue under the family name. He
could see how little George's people would ever understand the
"white" prejudice against them. But the good man kept his own
counsel, determining only that when the war did break out, he would
stand shoulder to shoulder with these young lovers and be their
friend and helper when even their own blood and kin should cut them
off.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was two years before this shy and taciturn man fully realized
what the young chief and the English girl really were to him, for
affliction had laid a heavy hand on his heart. First, his gentle
and angel-natured wife said her long, last good-night to him. Then
an unrelenting scourge of scarlet fever swept three of his children
into graves. Then the eldest, just on the threshold of sweet young
maidenhood, faded like a flower, until she, too, said good-night
and slept beside her mother. Wifeless, childless, the stricken
missionary hugged to his heart these two--George and Lydia--and
they, who had labored weeks and months, night and day, nursing and
tending these loved ones, who had helped fight and grapple with
death five times within two years, only to be driven back heartsore
and conquered by the enemy--these two put away the thought of
marriage for the time. Joy would have been ill-fitting in that
household. Youth was theirs, health was theirs, and duty also was
theirs--duty to this man of God, whose house was their home, whose
hand had brought them together. So the marriage did not take place
at once, but the young chief began making preparations on the estate
he had purchased to build a fitting home for this homeless girl who
was giving her life into his hands. After so many dark days, it was
a relief to get Mr. Evans interested in the plans of the house
George was to build, to select the proper situation, to arrange for
a barn, a carriage house, a stable, for young Mansion had saved
money and acquired property of sufficient value to give his wife a
home that would vie with anything in the large border towns. Like
most Indians, he was recklessly extravagant, and many a time the
thrifty Scotch blood of the missionary would urge more economy,
less expenditure. But the building went on; George determined it
was to be a "Grand Mansion." His very title demanded that he give
his wife an abode worthy of the ancestors who appropriated the name
as their own.

"When you both go from me, even if it is only across the fields to
the new home, I shall be very much alone," Mr. Evans had once said.
Then in an agony of fear that his solitary life would shadow their
happiness, he added quickly, "But I have a very sweet and lovely
niece who writes me she will come to look after this desolated home
if I wish it, and perhaps her brother will come, too, if I want
him. I am afraid I _shall_ want him sorely, George. For though you
will be but five minutes walk from me, your face will not be at my
breakfast table to help me begin each day with a courage it has
always inspired. So I beg that you two will not delay your
marriage; give no thought to me. You are young but once, and youth
has wings of wonderful swiftness. Margaret and Christopher shall
come to me; but although they are my own flesh and blood, they will
never become to me what you two have been, and always will be."

Within their recollection, the lovers had never heard the
missionary make so long a speech. They felt the earnestness of it,
the truth of it, and arranged to be married when the golden days of
August came. Lydia was to go to her married sister, in the eastern
part of Canada, whose husband was a clergyman, and at whose home
she had spent many of her girlhood years. George was to follow. They
were to be quietly married and return by sailing vessel up the
lakes, then take the stage from what is now the city of Toronto,
arrive at the Indian Reserve, and go direct to the handsome home
the young chief had erected for his English bride. So Lydia Bestman
set forth on her long journey from which she was to return as the
wife of the head chief of a powerful tribe of Indians--a man
revered, respected, looked up to by a vast nation, a man of
sterling worth, of considerable wealth as riches were counted in
those days, a man polished in the usages and etiquette of her own
people, who conducted himself with faultless grace, who would have
shone brilliantly in any drawing-room (and who in after years was
the guest of honor at many a great reception by the governors of
the land), a man young, stalwart, handsome, with an aristocratic
lineage that bred him a native gentleman, with a grand old title
that had come down to him through six hundred years of honor in
warfare and high places of his people. That this man should be
despised by her relatives and family connections because of his
warm, red skin and Indian blood, never occurred to Lydia. Her angel
sister had loved the youth, the old Scotch missionary little short
of adored him. Why, then, this shocked amazement of her relatives,
that she should wish to wed the finest gentleman she had ever met,
the man whose love and kindness had made her erstwhile blackened
and cruel world a paradise of sunshine and contentment? She was
but little prepared for the storm of indignation that met her
announcement that she was engaged to marry a Mohawk Indian chief.

Her sister, with whom she never had anything in common, who was
years older, and had been married in England when Lydia was but
three years of age, implored, entreated, sneered, ridiculed and
stormed. Lydia sat motionless through it all, and then the outraged
sister struck a vital spot with: "I don't know what Elizabeth has
been thinking of all these years, to let you associate with Indians
on an equality. _She_ is to blame for this."

Then and only then, did Lydia blaze forth. "Don't you _dare_ speak
of 'Liza like that!" flung the girl. "She was the only human being
in our whole family, the only one who ever took me in her arms, who
ever called me 'dear,' who ever kissed me as if she meant it. I
tell you, she loved George Mansion better than she loved her cold,
chilly English brothers. She loved _me_, and her house was my home,
which yours never was. Yes, she loved me, angel girl that she was,
and she died in a halo of happiness because I was happy and
because I was to marry the noblest, kingliest gentleman I ever
met." The girl ceased, breathless.

"Yes," sneered her sister, "yes, marry an _Indian_!"

"Yes," defied Lydia, "an _Indian_, who can give me not only a
better home than this threadbare parsonage of yours"--here she
swept scornful eyes about the meagre little, shabby room--"yes, a
home that any Bestman would be proud to own; but better than that,"
she continued ragingly, "he has given me love--_love_, that you in
your chilly, inhuman home sneer at, but that I have cried out for;
love that my dead mother prayed should come to me, from the moment
she left me a baby, alone, in England, until the hour when this one
splendid man took me into his heart."

"Poor mother!" sighed the sister. "I am grateful she is spared
_this_."

"Don't think that she doesn't know it!" cried Lydia. "If 'Liza
approved, mother does, and she is glad of her child's happiness."

"Her child--yes, her child," taunted the sister. "Child! child!
Yes, and what of the _child_ you will probably mother?"

The crimson swept painfully down the young girl's face, but she
braved it out.

"Yes," she stammered, "a child, perhaps a _son_, a son of mine,
who, poor boy, can never inherit his father's title."

"And why not, pray?" remarked her sister.

"Because the female line of lineage will be broken," explained the
girl. "He _should_ marry someone else, so that the family title
could follow the family name. His father and mother have
practically cast him off because of me. _Don't_ you see? Can't you
understand that I am only an untitled commoner to his people? I am
only a white girl."

"_Only_ a white girl!" repeated the sister, sarcastically. "Do you
mean to tell me that you believe these wretched Indians don't want
him to marry you? _You_, a _Bestman_, and an English girl?
Nonsense, Lydia! You are talking utter nonsense." But the sister's
voice weakened, nevertheless.

"But it's true," asserted the girl. "You don't understand the
Indian nation as 'Liza did; it's perfectly true--a son of mine can
claim no family title; the honor of it must leave the name of
Mansion forever. Oh, his parents have completely shut him out of
their lives because I am only a white girl!" and the sweet young
voice trembled woefully.

"I decline to discuss this disgraceful matter with you any
further," said the sister coldly. "Perhaps my good husband can
bring you to your senses," and the lady left the room in a fever of
indignation.

But her "good husband," the city clergyman, declined the task of
"bringing Lydia to her senses." He merely sent for her to go to his
study, and, as she stood timidly in the doorway, he set his small
steely eyes on her and said:

"You will leave this house at once, to-night. _To-night_, do you
hear? I'll have no Indian come _here_ after my wife's sister. I
hope you quite understand me?"

"Quite, sir," replied the girl, and with a stiff bow she turned and
went back to her room.

In the haste of packing up her poor and scanty wardrobe, she heard
her sister's voice saying to the clergyman: "Oh! how _could_ you
send her away? You know she has no home, she has nowhere to go. How
_could_ you do it?" All Lydia caught of his reply was: "Not another
night, not another meal, in this house while _I_ am its master."

Presently her sister came upstairs carrying a plate of pudding.
Her eyes were red with tears, and her hands trembled. "Do eat
this, my dear; some tea is coming presently," she said.

But Lydia only shook her head, strapped her little box, and,
putting on her bonnet, she commanded her voice sufficiently to say:
"I am going now. I'll send for this box later."

"Where are you going to?" her sister's voice trembled.

"I--don't know," said the girl. "But wherever I do go, it will be
a kindlier place than this. Good-bye, sister." She kissed the
distressed wife softly on each cheek, then paused at the bedroom
door to say, "The man I am to marry loves me, honors me too much to
treat me as a mere possession. I know that _he_ will never tell me
he is 'master.' George Mansion may have savage blood in his veins,
but he has grasped the meaning of the word 'Christianity' far more
fully than your husband has."

Her sister could not reply, but stood with streaming eyes and
watched the girl slip down the back stairs and out of a side door.

For a moment Lydia Bestman stood on the pavement and glanced up and
down the street. The city was what was known as a garrison town in
the days when the British regular troops were quartered in Canada.
Far down the street two gay young officers were walking, their
brilliant uniforms making a pleasant splash of color in the
sunlight. They seemed to suggest to the girl's mind a more than
welcome thought. She knew the major's wife well, a gracious,
whole-souled English lady whose kindness had oftentimes brightened
her otherwise colorless life. Instinctively the girl turned to the
quarters of the married officers. She found the major's wife at
home, and, burying her drawn little face in the good lady's lap,
she poured forth her entire story.

"My dear," blazed out the usually placid lady, "if I were only the
major for a few moments, instead of his wife, I should--I
should--well, I should just _swear_! There, now I've said it, and
I'd _do_ it, too. Why, I never heard of such an outrage! My dear,
kiss me, and tell me--when, how, do you expect your young chief to
come for you?"

"Next week," said the girl, from the depths of those sheltering
arms.

"Then here you stay, right here with me. The major and I shall go
to the church with you, see you safely married, bring you and your
Hiawatha home for a cosy little breakfast, put you aboard the boat
for Toronto, and give you both our blessing and our love." And
the major's wife nodded her head with such emphasis that her
quaint English curls bobbed about, setting Lydia off into a fit of
laughter. "That's right, my dear. You just begin to laugh now, and
keep it up for all the days to come. I'll warrant you've had little
of laughter in your young life," she said knowingly. "From what
I've known of your father, he never ordered laughter as a daily
ingredient in his children's food. Then that sweet Elizabeth
leaving you alone, so terribly alone, must have chased the sunshine
far from your little world. But after this," she added brightly,
"it's just going to be love and laughter. And now, my dear, we must
get back the rosy English color in your cheeks, or your young
Hiawatha won't know his little white sweetheart. Run away to my
spare room, girlie. The orderly will get a man to fetch your box.
Then you can change your frock. Leave yesterday behind you forever.
Have a little rest; you look as if you had not slept for a week.
Then join the major and me at dinner, and we'll toast you and your
redskin lover in true garrison style."

And Lydia, with the glorious recuperation of youth, ran joyously
upstairs, smiling and singing like a lark, transformed with the
first unadulterated happiness she had ever felt or known.


PART III.

Upon George Mansion's arrival at the garrison town he had been met
on the wharf by the major, who took him to the hotel, while
hurriedly explaining just why he must not go near Lydia's sister and
the clergyman whom George had expected would perform the marriage
ceremony. "So," continued the major, "you and Lydia are not to be
married at the cathedral after all, but Mrs. Harold and I have
arranged that the ceremony shall take place at little St. Swithin's
Church in the West End. So you'll be there at eleven o'clock, eh,
boy?"

"Yes, major, I'll be there, and before eleven, I'm afraid, I'm so
anxious to take her home. I shall not endeavour to thank you and
Mrs. Harold for what you have done for my homeless girl. I can't
even--"

"Tut, tut, tut!" growled the major. "Haven't done anything. Bless
my soul, Chief, take my word for it, haven't done a thing to be
thanked for. Here's your hotel. Get some coffee to brace your
nerves up with, for I can assure you, boy, a wedding is a trying
ordeal, even if there is but a handful of folks to see it through.
Be a good boy, now--good-bye until eleven--St. Swithin's, remember,
and God bless you!" and the big-hearted, blustering major was
whisked away in his carriage, leaving the young Indian half
overwhelmed with his kindness, but as happy as the golden day.

An hour or so later he stood at the hotel door a moment awaiting
the cab that was to take him to the church. He was dressed in
the height of the fashion of the early fifties--very dark wine
broadcloth, the coat shaped tightly to the waist and adorned with
a silk velvet collar, a pale lavender, flowered satin waistcoat,
a dull white silk stock collar, a bell-shaped black silk hat. He
carried his gloves, for throughout his entire life he declared he
breathed through his hands, and the wearing of gloves was abhorrent
to him. Suddenly a gentleman accosted him with:

"I hear an Indian chief is in town. Going to be married here this
morning. Where is the ceremony to take place? Do you know anything
of it?"

Like all his race, George Mansion had a subtle sense of humor. It
seized upon him now.

"Certainly I know," he replied. "I happened to come down on the
boat with the chief. I intend to go to the wedding myself. I
understand the ceremony was arranged to be at the cathedral."

"Splendid!" said the gentleman. "And thank you, sir."

Just then the cab arrived. Young Mansion stepped hastily in, nodded
good-bye to his acquaintance, and smilingly said in an undertone to
the driver, "St. Swithin's Church--and quickly."

       *       *       *       *       *

"With this ring I thee wed," he found himself saying to a little
figure in a soft grey gown at his side, while a gentle-faced
old clergyman in a snowy surplice stood before him, and a
square-shouldered, soldierly person in a brilliant uniform almost
hugged his elbow.

"I pronounce you man and wife." At the words she turned towards her
husband like a carrier pigeon winging for home. Then somehow the
solemnity all disappeared. The major, the major's wife, two handsome
young officers, one girl friend, the clergyman, the clergyman's
wife, were all embracing her, and she was dimpling with laughter
and happiness; and George Mansion stood proudly by, his fine dark
face eager, tender and very noble.

"My dear," whispered the major's wife, "he's a perfect prince--he's
just as royal as he can be! I never saw such manners, such ease.
Why, girlie, he's a courtier!"

"Confound the young rogue!" growled the major, in her ear. "I
haven't an officer on my staff that can equal him. You're a lucky
girl. Yes, confound him, I say!"

"Bless you, child," said the clergyman's wife. "I think he'll make
you happy. Be very sure that you make _him_ happy."

And to all these whole-hearted wishes and comments, Lydia replied
with smiles and care-free words. Then came the major, watch in
hand, military precision and promptitude in his very tone.

"Time's up, everybody! There's a bite to eat at the barracks,
then these youngsters must be gone. The boat is due at one
o'clock--time's up."

As the little party drove past the cathedral they observed a huge
crowd outside, waiting for the doors to be opened. Lydia laughed
like a child as George told her of his duplicity of the morning,
when he had misled the inquiring stranger into thinking the Indian
chief was to be married there. The little tale furnished fun for
all at the pretty breakfast in the major's quarters.

"Nice way to begin your wedding morning, young man!" scowled the
major, fiercely. "Starting this great day with a network of
falsehoods."

"Not at all," smiled the Indian. "It was arranged for the
cathedral, and I did attend the ceremony."

"No excuses, you bare-faced scoundrel! I won't listen to them. Here
you are happily married and all those poor would-be sight-seers
sizzling out there in this glaring August sun. I'm ashamed of you!"
But his arm was about George's shoulders, and he was wringing the
dark, slender hand with a genuine good fellowship that was pleasant
to see. "Bless my soul, I love you, boy!" he added, sincerely.
"Love you through and through; and remember, I'm your white father
from this day forth."

"And I am your white mother," said the major's wife, placing her
hands on his shoulders.

For a second the bridegroom's face sobered. Before him flashed a
picture of a little old Indian woman with a broadcloth folded about
her shoulders, a small carven pipe between her lips, a world of
sorrow in her deep eyes--sorrow that he had brought there. He bent
suddenly and kissed Mrs. Harold's fingers with a grave and courtly
deference. "Thank you," he said simply.

But motherlike, she knew that his heart was bleeding. Lydia had
told of his parents' antagonism, of the lost Mansion title. So the
good lady just gave his hand a little extra, understanding squeeze,
and the good-byes began.

"Be off with you, youngsters!" growled the major. "The boat is
in--post haste now, or you'll miss it. Begone, both of you!"

And presently they found themselves once more in the carriage, the
horses galloping down to the wharf. And almost before they realized
it they were aboard, with the hearty "God bless you's" of the
splendid old major and his lovable wife still echoing in their
happy young hearts.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was evening, five days later, when they arrived at their new
home. All about the hills, and the woods, above the winding river,
and along the edge of the distant forest, brooded that purple
smokiness that haunts the late days of August--the smokiness that
was born of distant fires, where the Indians and pioneers were
"clearing" their lands. The air was like amethyst, the setting sun
a fire opal. As on the day when she first had come into his life,
George helped her to alight from the carriage, and they stood a
moment, hand in hand, and looked over the ample acres that composed
their estate. The young Indian had worked hard to have most of the
land cleared, leaving here and there vast stretches of walnut
groves, and long lines of majestic elms, groups of sturdy oaks, and
occasionally a single regal pine tree. Many a time in later years
his utilitarian friends would say, "Chief, these trees you are
preserving so jealously are eating up a great deal of your land.
Why not cut away and grow wheat?" But he would always resent the
suggestion, saying that his wheat lands lay back from the river.
They were for his body, doubtless, but here, by the river, the
trees must be--they were for his soul. And Lydia would champion him
immediately with, "Yes, they were there to welcome me as a bride,
those grand old trees, and they will remain there, I think, as long
as we both shall live." So, that first evening at home they stood
and watched the imperial trees, the long, open flats bordering the
river, the nearby lawns which he had taken such pains to woo from
the wilderness; stood palm to palm, and that moment seemed to
govern all their after life.

Someone has said that never in the history of the world have two
people been perfectly mated. However true this may be, it is an
undeniable fact that between the most devoted of life-mates there
will come inharmonious moments. Individuality would cease to exist
were it not so.

These two lived together for upwards of thirty years, and never had
one single quarrel, but oddly enough, when the rare inharmonious
moments came, these groups of trees bridged the fleeting difference
of opinion or any slight antagonism of will and purpose; when these
unresponsive moments came, one or the other would begin to admire
those forest giants, to suggest improvements, to repeat the
admiration of others for their graceful outlines--to, in fact,
direct thought and conversation into the common channel of love
for those trees. This peculiarity was noticeable to outsiders, to
their own circle, to their children. At mere mention of the trees
the shadow of coming cloud would lessen, then waste, then grow
invisible. Their mutual love for these voiceless yet voiceful and
kingly creations was as the love of children for a flower--simple,
nameless, beautiful and powerful beyond words.

That first home night, as she stepped within doors, there awaited
two inexpressible surprises for her. First, on the dining-room
table a silver tea service of seven pieces, imported from
England--his wedding gift to her. Second, in the quaint little
drawing-room stood a piano. In the "early fifties" this latter
was indeed a luxury, even in city homes. She uttered a little cry
of delight, and flinging herself before the instrument, ran her
fingers over the keys, and broke into his favorite song, "Oft in
the Stilly Night." She had a beautiful voice, the possession of
which would have made her renowned had opportunity afforded its
cultivation. She had "picked up" music and read it remarkably well,
and he, Indian wise, was passionately fond of melody. So they
laughed and loved together over this new luxurious toy, until
Milly, the ancient Mohawk maid, tapped softly at the drawing-room
and bade them come to tea. With that first meal in her new home,
the darkened hours and days and years smothered their haunting
voices. She had "left yesterday behind her," as the major's royal
wife had wished her to, and for the first time in all her checkered
and neglected life she laughed with the gladness of a bird at song,
flung her past behind her, and the grim unhappiness of her former
life left her forever.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a golden morning in July when the doctor stood grasping
George Mansion's slender hands, searching into his dusky, anxious
eyes, and saying with ringing cheeriness, "Chief, I congratulate
you. You've got the most beautiful son upstairs--the finest boy I
ever saw. Hail to the young chief, I say!"

The doctor was white. He did not know of the broken line of
lineage--that "the boy upstairs" could never wear his father's
title. A swift shadow fought for a second with glorious happiness.
The battlefield was George Mansion's face, his heart. His unfilled
duty to his parents assailed him like a monstrous enemy, then
happiness conquered, came forth a triumphant victor, and the young
father dashed noiselessly, fleetly up the staircase, and, despite
the protesting physician, in another moment his wife and son were
in his arms. Title did not count in that moment; only Love in its
tyrannical majesty reigned in that sacred room.

The boy was a being of a new world, a new nation. Before he was two
weeks old he began to show the undeniable physique of the two great
races from whence he came; all the better qualities of both bloods
seemed to blend within his small body. He was his father's son,
he was his mother's baby. His grey-blue eyes held a hint of the
dreaming forest, but also a touch of old England's skies. His hair,
thick and black, was straight as his father's, except just above
the temples, where a suggestion of his mother's pretty English curls
waved like strands of fine silk. His small mouth was thin-lipped;
his nose, which even in babyhood never had the infantile "snub,"
but grew straight, thin as his Indian ancestors', yet displayed
a half-haughty English nostril; his straight little back--all
combined likenesses to his parents. But who could say which blood
dominated his tiny person? Only the exquisite soft, pale brown of
his satiny skin called loudly and insistently that he was of a
race older than the composite English could ever boast; it was the
hallmark of his ancient heritage--the birthright of his father's
son.

But the odd little half-blood was extraordinarily handsome even as
an infant. In after years when he grew into glorious manhood he
was generally acknowledged to be the handsomest man in the Province
of Ontario, but to-day--his first day in these strange, new
surroundings--he was but a wee, brown, lovable bundle, whose tiny
gossamer hands cuddled into his father's palm, while his little
velvet cheek lay rich and russet against the pearly whiteness of
his mother's arm.

"I believe he is like you, George," she murmured, with a wealth of
love in her voice and eyes.

"Yes," smiled the young chief, "he certainly has Mansion blood; but
your eyes, Lydia, your dear eyes."

"Which eyes must go to sleep and rest," interrupted the physician,
severely. "Come, Chief, you've seen your son, you've satisfied
yourself that Mrs. Mansion is doing splendidly, so away you go,
or I shall scold."

And George slipped down the staircase, and out into the radiant
July sunshine, where his beloved trees arose about him, grand and
majestic, seeming to understand how full of joy, of exultation,
had been this great new day.

       *       *       *       *       *

The whims of women are proverbial, but the whims of men are things
never to be accounted for. This beautiful child was but a few weeks
old when Mr. Bestman wrote, announcing to his daughter his
intention of visiting her for a few days.

So he came to the Indian Reserve, to the handsome country home his
Indian son-in-law had built. He was amazed, surprised, delighted.
His English heart revelled in the trees. "Like an Old Country
gentleman's estate in the Counties," he declared. He kissed his
daughter with affection, wrung his son-in-law's hand with a warmth
and cordiality unmistakable in its sincerity, took the baby in his
arms and said over and over, "Oh, you sweet little child! You sweet
little child!" Then the darkness of all those harsh years fell away
from Lydia. She could afford to be magnanimous, so with a sweet
silence, a loving forgetfulness of all the dead miseries and bygone
whip-lashes, she accepted her strange parent just as he presented
himself, in the guise of a man whom the years had changed from
harshness to tenderness, and let herself thoroughly enjoy his
visit.

But when he drove away she had but one thing to say; it was,
"George, I wonder when _your_ father will come to us, when your
_mother_ will come. Oh, I want her to see the baby, for I think my
own mother sees him."

"Some day, dear," he answered hopefully. "They will come some day;
and when they do, be sure it will be to take you to their hearts."

She sighed and shook her head unbelievingly. But the "some day"
that he prophesied, but which she doubted, came in a manner all too
soon--all too unwelcome. The little son had just begun to walk
about nicely, when George Mansion was laid low with a lingering
fever that he had contracted among the marshes where much of his
business as an employee of the Government took him. Evils had begun
to creep into his forest world. The black and subtle evil of the
white man's firewater had commenced to touch with its poisonous
finger the lives and lodges of his beloved people. The curse began
to spread, until it grew into a menace to the community. It was the
same old story: the white man had come with the Bible in one hand,
the bottle in the other. George Mansion had striven side by side
with Mr. Evans to overcome the dread scourge. Together they fought
the enemy hand to hand, but it gained ground in spite of all their
efforts. The entire plan of the white liquor dealer's campaign was
simply an effort to exchange a quart of bad whiskey for a cord of
first-class firewood, or timber, which could be hauled off the
Indian Reserve and sold in the nearby town markets for five or
six dollars; thus a hundred dollars worth of bad whiskey, if
judiciously traded, would net the white dealer a thousand dollars
cash. And the traffic went on, to the depletion of the Indian
forests and the degradation of the Indian souls.

Then the Canadian Government appointed young Mansion special forest
warden, gave him a "V. R." hammer, with which he was to stamp
each and every stick of timber he could catch being hauled off
the Reserve by white men; licensed him to carry firearms for
self-protection, and told him to "go ahead." He "went ahead." Night
after night he lay, concealing himself in the marshes, the forests,
the trails, the concession lines, the river road, the Queen's
highway, seizing all the timber he could, destroying all the
whisky, turning the white liquor traders off Indian lands, and
fighting as only a young, earnest and inspired man can fight. These
hours and conditions began to tell on his physique. The marshes
breathed their miasma into his blood--the dreaded fever had him in
its claws. Lydia was a born nurse. She knew little of thermometers,
of charts, of technical terms, but her ability and instincts in the
sick-room were unerring; and, when her husband succumbed to a
raging fever, love lent her hands an inspiration and her brain a
clarity that would have shamed many a professional nurse.

For hours, days, weeks, she waited, tended, watched, administered,
labored and loved beside the sick man's bed. She neither slept nor
ate enough to carry her through the ordeal, but love lent her
strength, and she battled and fought for his life as only an
adoring woman can. Her wonderful devotion was the common talk of
the country. She saw no one save Mr. Evans and the doctors. She
never left the sick-room save when her baby needed her. But it all
seemed so useless, so in vain, when one dark morning the doctor
said, "We had better send for his father and mother."

Poor Lydia! Her heart was nearly breaking. She hurriedly told the
doctor the cause that had kept them away so long, adding, "Is it so
bad as that? Oh, doctor, _must I send for them_? They don't want to
come." Before the good man could reply, there was a muffled knock
at the door. Then Milly's old wrinkled face peered in, and Milly's
voice said whisperingly, "His people--they here."

"Whose people? Who are here?" almost gasped Lydia.

"His father and his mother," answered the old woman. "They
downstairs."

For a brief moment there was silence. Lydia could not trust herself
to speak, but ill as he was, George's quick Indian ear had caught
Milly's words. He murmured, "Mother! mother! Oh, my mother!"

"Bring her, quickly, _quickly_!" said Lydia to the doctor.

It seemed to the careworn girl that a lifetime followed before the
door opened noiselessly, and there entered a slender little old
Indian woman, in beaded leggings, moccasins, "short skirt," and a
blue "broadcloth" folded about her shoulders. She glanced swiftly
at the bed, but with the heroism of her race went first towards
Lydia, laid her cheek silently beside the white girl's, then looked
directly into her eyes.

"Lydia!" whispered George, "Lydia!" At the word both women moved
swiftly to his side. "Lydia," he repeated, "my mother cannot speak
the English, but her cheek to yours means that you are her blood
relation."

The effort of speech almost cost him a swoon, but his mother's
cheek was now against his own, and the sweet, dulcet Mohawk
language of his boyhood returned to his tongue; he was speaking it
to his mother, speaking it lovingly, rapidly. Yet, although Lydia
never understood a word, she did not feel an outsider, for the old
mother's hand held her own, and she knew that at last the gulf was
bridged.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was two days later, when the doctor pronounced George Mansion
out of danger, that the sick man said to his wife: "Lydia, it is
all over--the pain, the estrangement. My mother says that you are
her daughter. My father says that you are his child. They heard of
your love, your nursing, your sweetness. They want to know if you
will call them 'father, mother.' They love you, for you are one of
their own."

"At last, at last!" half sobbed the weary girl. "Oh, George, I am
so happy! _You_ are going to get well, and _they_ have come to us
at last."

"Yes, dear," he replied. Then with a half humorous yet wholly
pathetic smile flitting across his wan face, he added, "And my
mother has a little gift for you." He nodded then towards the
quaint old figure at the further side of the bed. His mother arose,
and, drawing from her bosom a tiny, russet-colored object, laid it
in Lydia's hand. It was a little moccasin, just three and a quarter
inches in length. "Its mate is lost," added the sick man, "but I
wore it as a baby. My mother says it is yours, and should have been
yours all these years."

For a second the two women faced each other, then Lydia sat down
abruptly on the bedside, her arms slipped about the older woman's
shoulders, and her face dropped quickly, heavily--at last on a
mother's breast.

George Mansion sighed in absolute happiness, then closed his eyes
and slept the great, strong, vitalizing sleep of reviving forces.


PART IV.

How closely the years chased one another after this! But many a
happy day within each year found Lydia and her husband's mother
sitting together, hour upon hour, needle in hand, sewing and
harmonizing--the best friends in all the world. It mattered not
that "mother" could not speak one word of English, or that Lydia
never mastered but a half dozen words of Mohawk. These two were
friends in the sweetest sense of the word, and their lives swept
forward in a unison of sympathy that was dear to the heart of the
man who held them as the two most precious beings in all the world.

And with the years came new duties, new responsibilities, new
little babies to love and care for until a family, usually called
"A King's Desire," gathered at their hearthside--four children, the
eldest a boy, the second a girl, then another boy, then another
girl. These children were reared on the strictest lines of both
Indian and English principles. They were taught the legends, the
traditions, the culture and the etiquette of both races to which
they belonged; but above all, their mother instilled into them from
the very cradle that they were of their father's people, not of
hers. Her marriage had made her an Indian by the laws which govern
Canada, as well as by the sympathies and yearnings and affections
of her own heart. When she married George Mansion she had repeated
to him the centuries-old vow of allegiance, "Thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God." She determined that should she ever be
mother to his children, those children should be reared as Indians
in spirit and patriotism, and in loyalty to their father's race as
well as by heritage of blood. The laws of Canada held these children
as Indians. They were wards of the Government; they were born on
Indian lands, on Indian Reservations. They could own and hold
Indian lands, and their mother, English though she was, made it her
life service to inspire, foster and elaborate within these children
the pride of the race, the value of that copper-tinted skin which
they all displayed. When people spoke of blood and lineage and
nationality, these children would say, "We are Indians," with the
air with which a young Spanish don might say, "I am a Castilian."
She wanted them to grow up nationalists, and they did, every
mother's son and daughter of them. Things could never have been
otherwise, for George Mansion and his wife had so much in common
that their offspring could scarcely evince other than inherited
parental traits. Their tastes and distastes were so synonymous; they
hated hypocrisy, vulgarity, slovenliness, imitations.

After forty years spent on a Canadian Indian Reserve, Lydia
Mansion still wore real lace, real tortoise shell combs, real furs.
If she could not have procured these she would have worn plain
linen collars, no combs, and a woven woolen scarf about her throat;
but the imitation fabrics, as well as the "imitation people," had
no more part in her life than they had in her husband's, who
abhorred all such pinchbeck. Their loves were identical. They loved
nature--the trees, best of all, and the river, and the birds. They
loved the Anglican Church, they loved the British flag, they loved
Queen Victoria, they loved beautiful, dead Elizabeth Evans, they
loved strange, reticent Mr. Evans. They loved music, pictures and
dainty china, with which George Mansion filled his beautiful home.
They loved books and animals, but, most of all, these two loved
the Indian people, loved their legends, their habits, their
customs--loved the people themselves. Small wonder, then, that
their children should be born with pride of race and heritage, and
should face the world with that peculiar, unconquerable courage
that only a fighting ancestry can give.

As the years drifted on, many distinctions came to the little family
of the "Grand Mansions." The chief's ability as an orator, his
fluency of speech, his ceaseless war against the inroads of the
border white men and their lawlessness among his own people--all
gradually but surely brought him, inch by inch, before the notice
of those who sat in the "seats of the mighty" of both church and
state. His presence was frequently demanded at Ottawa, fighting for
the cause of his people before the House of Commons, the Senate,
and the Governor-General himself. At such times he would always
wear his native buckskin costume, and his amazing rhetoric,
augmented by the gorgeous trappings of his office and his
inimitable courtesy of manner, won him friends and followers among
the lawmakers of the land. He never fought for a cause and lost
it, never returned to Lydia and his people except in a triumph
of victory. Social honors came to him as well as political
distinctions. Once, soon after his marriage, a special review of
the British troops quartered at Toronto was called in his honor
and he rode beside the general, making a brilliant picture, clad as
he was in buckskins and scarlet blanket and astride his pet black
pony, as he received the salutes of company after company of
England's picked soldiers as they wheeled past. And when King
Edward of England visited Canada as Prince of Wales, he fastened
with his own royal hands a heavy silver medal to the buckskin
covering George Mansion's breast, and the royal words were very
sincere as they fell from the prince's lips: "This medal is for
recognition of your loyalty in battling for your own people, even
as your ancestors battled for the British Crown." Then in later
years, when Prince Arthur of Connaught accepted the title of
"Chief," conferred upon him with elaborate ceremony by the
chiefs, braves and warriors of the great Iroquois Council, it
was George Mansion who was chosen as special escort to the royal
visitor--George Mansion and his ancient and honored father, who,
hand-in-hand with the young prince, walked to and fro, chanting the
impressive ritual of bestowing the title. Even Bismarck, the "Iron
Chancellor" of Germany, heard of this young Indian warring for the
welfare of his race, and sent a few kindly words, with his own
photograph, from across seas to encourage the one who was fighting,
single-handed, the menace of white man's greed and white man's
firewater.

And Lydia, with her glad and still girlish heart, gloried in her
husband's achievements and in the recognition accorded him by the
great world beyond the Indian Reserve, beyond the wilderness,
beyond the threshold of their own home. In only one thing were
their lives at all separated. She took no part in his public life.
She hated the glare of the fierce light that beat upon prominent
lives, the unrest of fame, the disquiet of public careers.

"No," she would answer, when oftentimes he begged her to accompany
him and share his success and honors, "no, I was homeless so long
that 'home' is now my ambition. My babies need me here, and you
need me here when you return, far more than you need me on platform
or parade. Go forth and fight the enemy, storm the battlements and
win the laurels, but let me keep the garrison--here at home, with
our babies all about me and a welcome to our warrior husband and
father when he returns from war."

Then he would laugh and coax again, but always with the same
result. Every day, whether he went forth to the Indian Council
across the river, or when more urgent duties called him to the
Capital, she always stood at the highest window waving her
handkerchief until he was out of sight, and that dainty flag lent
strength to his purpose and courage to his heart, for he knew the
home citadel was there awaiting his return--knew that she would be
at that selfsame window, their children clustered about her skirts,
her welcoming hands waving a greeting instead of a good-bye, as
soon as he faced the home portals once more, and in his heart of
hearts George Mansion felt that his wife had chosen the wiser,
greater part; that their children would some day arise and call her
blessed because she refused to wing away from the home nest, even
if by so doing she left him to take his flights alone.

But in all their world there was no one prouder of his laurels
and successes than his home-loving, little English wife, and the
mother-heart of her must be forgiven for welcoming each new honor
as a so much greater heritage for their children. Each distinction
won by her husband only established a higher standard for their
children to live up to. She prayed and hoped and prayed again that
they would all be worthy such a father, that they would never fall
short of his excellence. To this end she taught, labored for,
and loved them, and they, in turn, child-wise, responded to her
teaching, imitating her allegiance to their father, reflecting her
fealty, and duplicating her actions. So she molded these little
ones with the mother-hand that they felt through all their after
lives, which were but images of her own in all that concerned their
father.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first great shadow that fell on this united little circle was
when George Mansion's mother quietly folded her "broadcloth" about
her shoulders for the last time, when the little old tobacco pipe
lay unfilled and unlighted, when the finely-beaded moccasins were
empty of the dear feet that had wandered so gently, so silently
into the Happy Hunting Grounds. George Mansion was bowed with woe.
His mother had been to him the queen of all women, and her death
left a desolation in his heart that even his wife could not assuage.
It was a grief he really never overcame. Fortunately his mother had
grown so attached to Lydia that his one disobedience--that of his
marriage--never reproached him. Had the gentle little old Indian
woman died before the episode of the moccasin which brought complete
reconciliation, it is doubtful if her son would ever have been quite
the same again. As it was, with the silence and stoicism of his race
he buried his grief in his own heart, without allowing it to cast a
gloom over his immediate household.

But after that the ancient chief, his father, came more frequently
to George's home, and was always an honored guest. The children
loved him, Lydia had the greatest respect and affection for him,
the greatest sympathy for his loneliness, and she ever made him
welcome and her constant companion when he visited them. He used
to talk to her much of George, and once or twice gave her grave
warnings as to his recklessness and lack of caution in dealing with
the ever-growing menace of the whisky traffic among the Indians.
The white men who supplied and traded this liquor were desperadoes,
a lawless set of ruffians who for some time had determined to rid
their stamping-ground of George Mansion, as he was the chief
opponent to their business, and with the way well cleared of him
and his unceasing resistance, their scoundrelly trade would be an
easy matter.

"Use all your influence, Lydia," the old father would say, "to urge
him never to seize the ill-gotten timber or destroy their whisky,
unless he has other Indian wardens with him. They'll kill him if
they can, those white men. They have been heard to threaten."

For some time this very thing had been crowding its truth about his
wife's daily life. Threatening and anonymous letters had more than
once been received by her husband--letters that said he would be
"put out of the way" unless he stopped interfering in the liquor
trade. There was no ignoring the fact that danger was growing
daily, that the fervent young chief was allowing his zeal to
overcome his caution, was hazarding his life for the protection of
his people against a crying evil. Once a writer of these unsigned
letters threatened to burn his house down in the dead of night,
another to maim his horses and cattle, others to "do away" with
him. His crusade was being waged under the weight of a cross that
was beginning to fall on his loyal wife, and to overshadow his
children. Then one night the blow fell. Blind with blood, crushed
and broken, he staggered and reeled home, unaided, unassisted,
and in excruciating torture. Nine white men had attacked him from
behind in a border village a mile from his home, where he had gone
to intercept a load of whisky that was being hauled into the Indian
Reserve. Eight of those lawbreakers circled about him, while the
ninth struck him from behind with a leaden plumb attached to an
elastic throw-string. The deadly thing crushed in his skull; he
dropped where he stood, as if shot. Then brutal boots kicked his
face, his head, his back, and, with curses, his assailants left
him--for dead.

With a vitality born of generations of warriors, he regained
consciousness, staggered the mile to his own gate, where he met a
friend, who, with extreme concern, began to assist him into his
home. But he refused the helping arm with, "No, I go alone; it
would alarm Lydia if I could not walk alone." These, with the
few words he spoke as he entered the kitchen, where his wife
was overseeing old Milly get the evening meal, were the last
intelligent words he spoke for many a day.

"Lydia, they've hurt me at last," he said, gently.

She turned at the sound of his strained voice. A thousand emotions
overwhelmed her at the terrifying sight before her. Love, fear,
horror, all broke forth from her lips in a sharp, hysterical cry,
but above this cry sounded the gay laughter of the children who
were playing in the next room, their shrill young voices raised in
merriment over some new sport. In a second the mother-heart asserted
itself. Their young eyes must not see this ghastly thing.

"Milly!" she cried to the devoted Indian servant, "help Chief
George." Then dashing into the next room, she half sobbed,
"Children, children! hush, oh, hush! Poor father--"

She never finished the sentence. With a turn of her arm she swept
them all into the drawing-room, closed the door, and flew back to
her patriot husband.

For weeks and weeks he lay fighting death as only a determined
man can--his upper jaw broken on both sides, his lower jaw
splintered on one side, his skull so crushed that to the end
of his days a silver dollar could quite easily be laid flat in
the cavity, a jagged and deep hole in his back, and injuries
about the knees and leg bones. And all these weeks Lydia hovered
above his pillow, night and day, nursing, tending, helping,
cheering. What effort it cost her to be bright and smiling no
tongue can tell, for her woman's heart saw that this was but the
beginning of the end. She saw it when in his delirium he raved to
get better, to be allowed to get up and go on with the fight; saw
that his spirit never rested, for fear that, now he was temporarily
inactive, the whisky dealers would have their way. She knew then
that she must school herself to endure this thing again; that she
must never ask him to give up his life work, never be less
courageous than he, tough that courage would mean never a peaceful
moment to her when he was outside their own home.

Mr. Evans was a great comfort to her during those terrible weeks.
Hour after hour he would sit beside the injured man, never speaking
or moving, only watching quietly, while Lydia barely snatched the
necessary sleep a nurse must have, or attended to the essential
needs of the children, who, however, were jealously cared for by
faithful Milly. During those times the children never spoke except
in whispers, their rigid Indian-English training in self-effacement
and obedience being now of untold value.

But love and nursing and bravery all counted in the end, and one
day George Mansion walked downstairs, the doctor's arm on one side,
Lydia's on the other. He immediately asked for his pistol and his
dagger, cleaned the one, oiled and sharpened the other, and said,
"I'll be ready for them again in a month's time."

But while he lay injured his influential white friends and the
Government at Ottawa had not been idle. The lawless creature who
dealt those unmerited blows was tried, convicted and sent to
Kingston Penitentiary for seven years. So one enemy was out of the
way for the time being. It was at this time that advancing success
lost him another antagonist, who was placed almost in the rank of
an ally.

George Mansion was a guest of the bishop of his diocese, as he was
a lay delegate accompanying Mr. Evans to the Anglican Synod. The
chief's work had reached other ears than those of the Government at
Ottawa, and the bishop was making much of the patriot, when in the
See House itself an old clergyman approached him with outstretched
hand and the words, "I would like you to call bygones just
bygones."

"I don't believe I have the honor of knowing you, sir," replied the
Indian, with a puzzled but gracious look.

"I am your wife's brother-in-law," said the old clergyman, "the man
who would not allow her to be married from my house--that is,
married to _you_."

The Indian bit his lip and instinctively stepped backward. Added
to his ancestral creed of never forgiving such injury, came a rush
of memory--the backward-surging picture of his homeless little
sweetheart and all that she had endured. Then came the memory of
his dead mother's teaching--teaching she had learned from her own
mother, and she in turn from her mother: "Always forget yourself
for _old_ people, always honor the _old_."

Instantly George Mansion arose--arose above the prejudices of his
blood, above the traditions of his race, arose to the highest
plane a man can reach--the memory of his mother's teaching.

"I would hardly be here as a lay delegate of my church were I not
willing to let bygones be bygones," he said, simply, and laid his
hand in that of the old clergyman, about whose eyes there was
moisture, perhaps because this opportunity for peacemaking had
come so tardily.

       *       *       *       *       *

The little family of "Grand Mansions" were now growing to very "big
childhood," and the inevitable day came when Lydia's heart must bear
the wrench of having her firstborn say good-bye to take his college
course. She was not the type of mother who would keep the boy at
home because of the heartache the good-byes must bring, but the
parting was certainly a hard one, and she watched his going with a
sense of loss that was almost greater than her pride in him. He had
given evidence of the most remarkable musical talent. He played
classical airs even before he knew a note, and both his parents
were in determined unison about this talent being cultivated. The
following year the oldest daughter also entered college, having
had a governess at home for a year, as some preparation. But these
changes brought no difference into the home, save that George
Mansion's arm grew stronger daily in combat against the old foe.
Then came the second attack of the enemy, when six white men beset
him from behind, again knocking him insensible, with a heavy blue
beech hand-spike. They broke his hand and three ribs, knocked out
his teeth, injured his side and head; then seizing his pistol, shot
at him, the ball fortunately not reaching a vital spot. As his
senses swam he felt them drag his poor maimed body into the middle
of the road, so it would appear as if horses had trampled him, then
he heard them say, "_This_ time the devil is dead." But hours
afterwards he again arose, again walked home, five interminable
miles, again greeted his ever watchful and anxious wife with,
"Lydia, they've hurt me once more." Then came weeks of renewed
suffering, of renewed care and nursing, of renewed vitality, and
at last of conquered health.

These two terrible illnesses seemed to raise Lydia into a peculiar,
half-protecting attitude towards him. In many ways she "mothered"
him almost as though he were her son--he who had always been the
leader, and so strong and self-reliant. After this, when he went
forth on his crusades, she watched his going with the haunting fear
with which one would watch a child wandering on the edge of a
chasm. She waited on him when he returned, served him with the
tenderness with which one serves a cripple or a baby. Once he caught
her arm, as she carried to him a cup of broth, after he had spent
wearisome hours at the same old battle, and turning towards her,
said softly: "You are like my mother used to be to me." She did not
ask him in what way--she knew--and carried broth to him when next
he came home half exhausted. Gradually he now gathered about him
a little force of zealous Indians who became enthusiastic to take
up arms with him against the whisky dealers. He took greater
precautions in his work, for the growing mist of haunting anxiety
in Lydia's eyes began to call to him that there were other claims
than those of the nation. His splendid zeal had brought her many
a sleepless night, when she knew he was scouring the forests for
hidden supplies of the forbidden merchandise, and that a whole army
of desperadoes would not deter him from fulfilling his duty of
destroying it. He felt, rather than saw, that she never bade him
good-bye but that she was prepared not to see him again alive.
Added to this he began to suffer as she did--to find that in his
good-byes was the fear of never seeing her again. He, who had
always been so fearless, was now afraid of the day when he should
not return and she would be once more alone.

So he let his younger and eager followers do some of the battling,
though he never relaxed his vigilance, never took off his armor, so
to speak. But now he spent long days and quiet nights with Lydia
and his children. They entertained many guests, for the young people
were vigorous and laughter-loving, and George and Lydia never grew
old, never grew weary, never grew commonplace. All the year round
guests came to the hospitable country house--men and women of
culture, of learning, of artistic tastes, of congenial habits.
Scientists, authors, artists, all made their pilgrimages to this
unique household, where refinement and much luxury, and always a
glad welcome from the chief and his English wife, made their visits
long remembered. And in some way or other, as their children grew
up, those two seemed to come closer together once more. They walked
among the trees they had once loved in those first bridal days,
they rested by the river shore, they wandered over the broad meadows
and bypaths of the old estate, they laughed together frequently like
children, and always and ever talked of and acted for the good of
the Indian people who were so unquestionably the greatest interest
in their lives, outside their own children. But one day, when the
beautiful estate he was always so proud of was getting ready to
smile under the suns of spring, he left her just when she needed
him most, for their boys had plunged forward into the world of
business in the large cities, and she wanted a strong arm to lean
on. It was the only time he failed to respond to her devoted
nursing, but now she could not bring him back from the river's
brink, as she had so often done before. Cold had settled in all the
broken places of his poor body, and he slipped away from her, a
sacrifice to his fight against evil on the altar of his nation's
good. In his feverish wanderings he returned to the tongue of his
childhood, the beautiful, dulcet Mohawk. Then recollecting and
commanding himself, he would weakly apologize to Lydia with: "I
forgot; I thought it was my mother," and almost his last words were,
"It must be by my mother's side," meaning his resting-place. So his
valiant spirit went fearlessly forth.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Do you ever think, dear," said Lydia to her youngest child, some
years later, "that you are writing the poetry that always lived in
an unexpressed state here in my breast?"

"No, Marmee," answered the girl, who was beginning to mount the
ladder of literature, "I never knew you wanted to _write_ poetry,
although I knew you loved it."

"Indeed, I did," answered the mother, "but I never could find
expression for it. I was made just to sing, I often think, but I
never had the courage to sing in public. But I did want to write
poetry, and now you, dear, are doing it for me. How proud your
father would have been of you!"

"Oh, he knows! I'm sure he knows all that I have written," answered
the girl, with the sublime faith that youth has in its own
convictions. "And if you like my verses, Marmee, I am sure he does,
for he knows."

"Perhaps," murmured the older woman. "I often feel that he is very
near to us. I never have felt that he is really gone very far away
from me."

"Poor little Marmee!" the girl would say to herself. "She misses him
yet. I believe she will always miss him."

Which was the truth. She saw constantly his likeness in all her
children, bits of his character, shades of his disposition,
reflections of his gifts and talents, hints of his bravery, and she
always spoke of these with a commending air, as though they were
characteristics to be cultivated, to be valued and fostered.

At first her fear of leaving her children, even to join him, was
evident, she so believed in a mother's care and love being a
necessity to a child. She had sadly missed it all out of her own
strange life, and she felt she _must_ live until this youngest
daughter grew to be a woman. Perhaps this desire, this mother-love,
kept her longer beside her children than she would have stayed
without it, for the years rolled on, and her hair whitened, her
once springing step halted a little, the glorious blue of her
English eyes grew very dreamy, and tender, and wistful. Was she
seeing the great Hereafter unfold itself before her as her steps
drew nearer and nearer?

And one night the Great Messenger knocked softly at her door,
and with a sweet, gentle sigh she turned and followed where he
led--joining gladly the father of her children in the land that
holds both whites and Indians as one.

And the daughter who writes the verses her mother always felt, but
found no words to express, never puts a last line to a story, or a
sweet cadence into a poem, but she says to herself as she holds her
mother's memory within her heart:

"She knows--she knows."



Catharine of the "Crow's Nest"


The great transcontinental railway had been in running order for
years before the managers thereof decided to build a second line
across the Rocky Mountains. But "passes" are few and far between
in those gigantic fastnesses, and the fearless explorers, followed
by the equally fearless surveyors, were many a toilsome month
conquering the heights, depths and dangers of the "Crow's Nest
Pass."

Eastward stretched the gloriously fertile plains of southern
"Sunny Alberta," westward lay the limpid blue of the vast and
indescribably beautiful Kootenay Lakes, but between these two
arose a barrier of miles and miles of granite and stone and rock,
over and through which a railway must be constructed. Tunnels,
bridges, grades must be bored, built and blasted out. It was the
work of science, endurance and indomitable courage. The summers
in the canyons were seething hot, the winters in the mountains
perishingly cold, with apparently inexhaustible snow clouds
circling forever about the rugged peaks--snows in which many a
good, honest laborer was lost until the eagles and vultures came
with the April thaws, and wheeled slowly above the pulseless
sleeper, if indeed the wolves and mountain lions had permitted him
to lie thus long unmolested. Those were rough and rugged days,
through which equally rough and rugged men served and suffered to
find foundations whereon to lay those two threads of steel that now
cling like a cobweb to the walls of the wonderful "gap" known as
Crow's Nest Pass.

Work progressed steadily, and before winter set in construction
camps were built far into "the gap," the furthermost one being close
to the base of a majestic mountain, which was also named "The
Crow's Nest." It arose beyond the camp with almost overwhelming
immensity. Dense forests of Douglas fir and bull pines shouldered
their way up one-third of its height, but above the timber line
the shaggy, bald rock reared itself thousands of feet skyward,
desolate, austere and deserted by all living things; not even the
sure-footed mountain goat travelled up those frowning, precipitous
heights; no bird rested its wing in that frozen altitude. The
mountain arose, distinct, alone, isolated, the most imperial
monarch of all that regal Pass.

The construction gang called it "Old Baldy," for after working some
months around its base, it began to grow into their lives. Not so,
however, with the head engineer from Montreal, who regarded it
always with baleful eye, and half laughingly, half seriously,
called it his "Jonah."

"Not a thing has gone right since we worked in sight of that old
monster," he was heard to say frequently; and it did seem as if
there were some truth in it. There had been deaths, accidents and
illness among the men. Once, owing to transportation difficulties,
the rations were short for days, and the men were in rebellious
spirit in consequence. Twice whiskey had been smuggled in, to the
utter demoralization of the camp; and one morning, as a last straw,
"Cookee" had nearly severed his left hand from his arm with a meat
axe. Young Wingate, the head engineer, and Mr. Brown, the foreman,
took counsel together. For the three meals of that day they tried
three different men out of the gang as "cookees." No one could eat
the atrocious food they manufactured. Then Brown bethought himself.
"There's an Indian woman living up the canyon that can cook like
a French chef," he announced, after a day of unspeakable gnawing
beneath his belt. "How about getting her? I've tasted pork and
beans at her shack, and flapjacks, and--"

"Get her! get her!" clamored Wingate. "Even if she poisons us, it's
better than starving. I'll ride over to-night and offer her big
wages."

"How about her staying here?" asked Brown. "The boys are pretty
rough and lawless at times, you know."

"Get the axe men to build her a good, roomy shack--the best logs in
the place. We'll give her a lock and key for it, and you, Brown,
report the very first incivility to her that you hear of," said
Wingate crisply.

That evening Mr. Wingate himself rode over to the canyon; it was a
good mile, and the trail was rough in the extreme. He did not
dismount when he reached the lonely log lodge, but rapping on the
door with the butt of his quirt, he awaited its opening. There was
some slight stirring about inside before this occurred; then the
door slowly opened, and she stood before him--a rather tall woman,
clad in buckskin garments, with a rug made of coyote skins about
her shoulders; she wore the beaded leggings and moccasins of her
race, and her hair, jet black, hung in ragged plaits about her dark
face, from which mournful eyes looked out at the young Montrealer.

Yes, she would go for the wages he offered, she said in halting
English; she would come to-morrow at daybreak; she would cook their
breakfast.

"Better come to-night," he urged. "The men get down the grade to
work very early; breakfast must be on time."

"I be on time," she replied. "I sleep here this night, every night.
I not sleep in camp."

Then he told her of the shack he had ordered and that was even now
being built.

She shook her head. "I sleep here every night," she reiterated.

Wingate had met many Indians in his time, so dropped the subject,
knowing full well that persuasion or argument would be utterly
useless.

"All right," he said; "you must do as you like; only remember, an
early breakfast to-morrow."

"I 'member," she replied.

He had ridden some twenty yards, when he turned to call back: "Oh,
what's your name, please?"

"Catharine," she answered, simply.

"Thank you," he said, and, touching his hat lightly, rode down
towards the canyon. Just as he was dipping over its rim he looked
back. She was still standing in the doorway, and above and about her
were the purple shadows, the awful solitude, of Crow's Nest
Mountain.

       *       *       *       *       *

Catharine had been cooking at the camp for weeks. The meals were
good, the men respected her, and she went her way to and from her
shack at the canyon as regularly as the world went around. The
autumn slipped by, and the nipping frosts of early winter and the
depths of early snows were already daily occurrences. The big group
of solid log shacks that formed the construction camp were all made
weather-tight against the long mountain winter. Trails were
beginning to be blocked, streams to freeze, and "Old Baldy,"
already wore a canopy of snow that reached down to the timber line.

"Catharine," spoke young Wingate, one morning, when the clouds hung
low and a soft snow fell, packing heavily on the selfsame snows of
the previous night, "you had better make up your mind to occupy the
shack here. You won't be able to go to your home much longer now
at night; it gets dark so early, and the snows are too heavy."

"I go home at night," she repeated.

"But you can't all winter," he exclaimed. "If there was one single
horse we could spare from the grade work, I'd see you got it for
your journeys, but there isn't. We're terribly short now; every
animal in the Pass is overworked as it is. You'd better not try
going home any more."

"I go home at night," she repeated.

Wingate frowned impatiently; then in afterthought he smiled. "All
right, Catharine," he said, "but I warn you. You'll have a
search-party out after you some dark morning, and you know it won't
be pleasant to be lost in the snows up that canyon."

"But I go home, night-time," she persisted, and that ended the
controversy.

But the catastrophe he predicted was inevitable. Morning after
morning he would open the door of the shack he occupied with the
other officials, and, looking up the white wastes through the
gray-blue dawn, he would watch the distances with an anxiety that
meant more than a consideration for his breakfast. The woman
interested him. She was so silent, so capable, so stubborn. What
was behind all this strength of character? What had given that
depth of mournfulness to her eyes? Often he had surprised her
watching him, with an odd longing in her face; it was something of
the expression he could remember his mother wore when she looked
at him long, long ago. It was a vague, haunting look that always
brought back the one great tragedy of his life--a tragedy he was
even now working night and day at his chosen profession to obliterate
from his memory, lest he should be forever unmanned--forever a prey
to melancholy.

He was still a young man, but when little more than a boy he had
married, and for two years was transcendently happy. Then came the
cry of "Kootenay Gold" ringing throughout Canada--of the untold
wealth of Kootenay mines. Like thousands of others he followed the
beckoning of that yellow finger, taking his young wife and baby
daughter West with him. The little town of Nelson, crouching on its
beautiful hills, its feet laved by the waters of Kootenay Lake, was
then in its first robust, active infancy. Here he settled, going
out alone on long prospecting expeditions; sometimes he was away a
week, sometimes a month, with the lure of the gold forever in his
veins, but the laughter of his child, the love of his wife, forever
in his heart. Then--the day of that awful home-coming! For three
weeks the fascination of searching for the golden pay-streak had
held him in the mountains. No one could find him when it happened,
and now all they could tell him was the story of an upturned canoe
found drifting on the lake, of a woman's light summer shawl caught
in the thwarts, of a child's little silken bonnet washed ashore.
[Fact.] The great-hearted men of the West had done their utmost
in the search that followed. Miners, missionaries, prospectors,
Indians, settlers, gamblers, outlaws, had one and all turned out,
for they liked young Wingate, and they adored his loving wife and
dainty child. But the search was useless. The wild shores of
Kootenay Lake alone held the secret of their resting-place.

Young Wingate faced the East once more. There was but one thing
to do with his life--work, _work_, WORK; and the harder, the more
difficult, that work, the better. It was this very difficulty that
made the engineering on the Crow's Nest Pass so attractive to him.
So here he was building grades, blasting tunnels, with Catharine's
mournful eyes following him daily, as if she divined something of
that long-ago sorrow that had shadowed his almost boyish life.

He liked the woman, and his liking quickened his eye to her
hardships, his ear to the hint of lagging weariness in her footsteps;
so he was the first to notice it the morning she stumped into the
cook-house, her feet bound up in furs, her face drawn in agony.

"Catharine," he exclaimed, "your feet have been frozen!"

She looked like a culprit, but answered: "Not much; I get lose in
storm las' night."

"I thought this would happen," he said, indignantly. "After this
you sleep here."

"I sleep home." she said, doggedly.

"I won't have it," he declared. "I'll cook for the men myself
first."

"Allight," she replied. "You cookee; I go home--me."

That night there was a terrible storm. The wind howled down the
throat of the Pass, and the snow fell like bales of sheep's wool,
blanketing the trails and drifting into the railroad cuts until
they attained their original level. But after she had cooked supper
Catharine started for home as usual. The only unusual thing about
it was that the next morning she did not return. It was Sunday, the
men's day "off." Wingate ate no breakfast, but after swallowing
some strong tea he turned to the foreman. "Mr. Brown, will you come
with me to try and hunt up Catharine?" he asked.

"Yes, if we can get beyond the door," assented Brown. "But I doubt
if we can make the canyon, sir."

"We'll have a try at it, anyway," said the young engineer. "I
almost doubt myself if she made it last night."

"She's a stubborn woman," commented Brown.

"And has her own reasons for it, I suppose," replied Wingate. "But
that has nothing to do with her being lost or frozen. If something
had not happened I'm sure she would have come to-day, notwithstanding
I scolded her yesterday, and told her I'd rather cook myself than let
her run such risks. How will we go, Mr. Brown; horses or snowshoes?"

"Shoes," said the foreman decidedly. "That snow'll be above the
middle of the biggest horse in the outfit."

So they set forth on their tramp up the slopes, peering right and
left as they went for any indication of the absent woman. Wingate's
old grief was knocking at his heart once more. A woman lost in the
appalling vastness of this great Western land was entering into
his life again. It took them a full hour to go that mile, although
both were experts on the shoes, but as they reached the rim of the
canyon they were rewarded by seeing a thin blue streak of smoke
curling up from her lodge "chimney." Wingate sat down in the snows
weakly. The relief had unmanned him.

"I didn't know how much I cared," he said, "until I knew she was
safe. She looks at me as my mother used to; her eyes are like
mother's, and I loved my mother."

It was a simple, direct speech, but Brown caught its pathos.

"She's a good woman," he blurted out, as they trudged along towards
the shack. They knocked on the door. There was no reply. Then just
as Wingate suggested forcing it in case she were ill and lying
helpless within, a long, low call from the edge of the canyon
startled them. They turned and had not followed the direction from
which the sound came more than a few yards when they met her coming
towards them on snowshoes; in her arms she bore a few faggots, and
her face, though smileless, was very welcoming.

She opened the door, bidding them enter. It was quite warm inside,
and the air of simple comfort derived from crude benches, tables
and shelves, assured them that she had not suffered. Near the fire
was drawn a rough home-built couch, and on it lay in heaped
disorder a pile of gray blankets. As the two men warmed their hands
at the grateful blaze, the blankets stirred. Then a small hand
crept out and a small arm tossed the covers a little aside.

"_Catharine_," exclaimed Wingate, "have you a child here?"

"Yes," she said simply.

"How long is it that you have had it here?" he demanded.

"Since before I work at your camp," she replied.

"Whew!" said the foreman, "I now understand why she came home
nights."

"To think I never guessed it!" murmured Wingate. Then to Catharine:
"Why didn't you bring it into camp and keep it there day and night
with you, instead of taking these dangerous tramps night and
morning?"

"It is a girl child," she answered.

"Well what of it?" he asked impatiently.

"Your camp no place for girl child," she replied, looking directly
at him. "Your men they rough, they get whisky sometimes. They
fight. They speak bad words, what you call _swear_. I not want her
hear that. I not want her see whisky man."

"Oh, Brown!" said Wingate, turning to his companion. "What a
reproach! What a reproach! Here our gang is--the vanguard of the
highest civilization, but unfit for association with a little
Indian child!"

Brown stood speechless, although in his rough, honest mind he was
going over a list of those very "swears" she objected to, but
they were mentally directed at the whole outfit of his ruffianly
construction gang. He was silently swearing at them for their own
shortcomings in that very thing.

The child on the couch stirred again. This time the firelight fell
full across the little arm. Wingate stared at it, then his eyes
widened. He looked at the woman, then back at the bare arm. It was
the arm of a _white_ child.

"Catharine, was your husband _white_?" he asked, in a voice that
betrayed anxiety.

"I got no husban'," she replied, somewhat defiantly.

"Then--" he began, but his voice faltered.

She came and stood between him and the couch.

Something of the look of a she-panther came into her face, her
figure, her attitude. Her eyes lost their mournfulness and blazed a
black-red at him. Her whole body seemed ready to spring.

"You not touch the girl child!" she half snarled. "I not let you
touch her; she _mine_, though I have no husban'!"

"I don't want to touch her, Catharine," he said gently, trying to
pacify her. "Believe me, I don't want to touch her."

The woman's whole being changed. A thousand mother-lights gleamed
from her eyes, a thousand measures of mother-love stormed at her
heart. She stepped close, very close to him and laid her small
brown hand on his, then drawing him nearer to her said: "Yes you
_do_ want to touch her; you not speak truth when you say 'no.' You
_do_ want to touch her!" With a rapid movement she flung back the
blankets, then slipping her bare arm about him she bent his form
until he was looking straight into the child's face--a face the
living miniature of his own! His eyes, his hair, his small kindly
mouth, his fair, perfect skin. He staggered erect.

"Catharine! what does it mean? What does it mean?" he cried
hoarsely.

"_Your child_--" she half questioned, half affirmed.

"Mine? Mine?" he called, without human understanding in his voice.
"Oh, Catharine! Where did you get her?"

"The shores of Kootenay Lake," she answered.

"Was--was--she _alone_?" he cried.

The woman looked away, slowly shaking her head, and her voice was
very gentle as she replied: "No, she alive a little, but _the
other_, whose arms 'round her, she not alive; my people, the
Kootenay Indians, and I--we--we bury that other."

For a moment there was a speaking silence, the young Wingate, with
the blessed realization that half his world had been saved for him,
flung himself on his knees, and, with his arms locked about the
little girl, was calling:

"Margie! Margie! Papa's little Margie girl! Do you remember papa?
Oh, Margie! Do you? Do you?"

Something dawned in the child's eyes--something akin to a far-off
memory. For a moment she looked wonderingly at him, then put her
hand up to his forehead and gently pulled a lock of his fair hair
that always curled there--an old trick of hers. Then she looked
down at his vest pocket, slowly pulled out his watch and held it to
her ear. The next minute her arms slipped round his neck.

"Papa," she said, "papa been away from Margie a long time."

Young Wingate was sobbing. He had not noticed that the big, rough
foreman had gone out of the shack with tear-dimmed eyes, and had
quietly closed the door behind him.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was evening before Wingate got all the story from Catharine, for
she was slow of speech, and found it hard to explain her feelings.
But Brown, who had returned alone to the camp in the morning, now
came back, packing an immense bundle of all the tinned delicacies
he could find, which, truth to tell, were few. He knew some words
in Kootenay, and led Catharine on to reveal the strange history
that sounded like some tale from fairyland. It appeared that the
reason Catharine did not attempt to go to the camp that morning was
that Margie was not well, so she would not leave her, but in her
heart of hearts she knew young Wingate would come searching to her
lodge. She loved the child as only an Indian woman can love an
adopted child. She longed for him to come when she found Margie
was ill, yet dreaded that coming from the depths of her soul. She
dreaded the hour he would see the child and take it away. For the
moment she looked upon his face, the night he rode over to engage
her to cook, months ago, she had known he was Margie's father. The
little thing was the perfect mirror of him, and Catharine's strange
wild heart rejoiced to find him, yet hid the child from him for
very fear of losing it out of her own life.

After finding it almost dead in its dead mother's arms on the
shore, the Indians had given it to Catharine for the reason that
she could speak some English. They were only a passing band of
Kootenays, and as they journeyed on and on, week in and week out,
they finally came to Crow's Nest Mountain. Here the child fell ill,
so they built Catharine a log shack, and left her with plenty of
food, sufficient to last until the railway gang had worked that
far up the Pass, when more food would be available. When she had
finished the strange history, Wingate looked at her long and
lovingly.

"Catharine," he said, "you were almost going to fight me once
to-day. You stood between the couch and me like a panther. What
changed you so that you led me to my baby girl yourself?"

"I make one last fight to keep her," she said, haltingly. "She mine
so long, I want her; I want her till I die. Then I think many
times I see your face at camp. It look like sky when sun does not
shine--all cloud, no smile, no laugh. I know you think of your baby
then. Then I watch you many times. Then after while my heart is
sick for you, like you are my own boy, like I am your own mother. I
hate see no sun in your face. I think I not good mother to you; if
I was good mother I would give you your child; make the sun come in
your face. To-day I make last fight to keep the child. She's mine so
long, I want her till I die. Then somet'ing in my heart say, 'He's
like son to you, as if he your own boy; make him glad--happy. Oh,
ver' glad! Be like his own mother. Find him his baby.'"

"Bless the mother heart of her!" growled the big foreman, frowning
to keep his face from twitching.

It was twilight when they mounted the horses one of the men had
brought up for them to ride home on, Wingate with his treasure-child
hugged tightly in his arms. Words were powerless to thank the woman
who had saved half his world for him. His voice choked when he
tried, but she understood, and her woman's heart was very, very
full.

Just as they reached the rim of the canyon Wingate turned and
looked back. His arms tightened about little Margie as his eyes
rested on Catharine--as once before she was standing in the
doorway, alone; alone, and above and about her were the purple
shadows, the awful solitude of Crow's Nest Mountain.

"Brown!" he called. "Hold on, Brown! I can't do it! I can't leave
her like that!"

He wheeled his horse about and, plunging back through the snow,
rode again to her door. Her eyes radiated as she looked at him.
Years had been wiped from his face since the morning. He was a
laughing boy once more.

"You are right," he said, "I cannot keep my little girl in that
rough camp. You said it was no place for a girl child. You are
right. I will send her into Calgary until my survey is over.
Catharine, will you go with her, take care of her, nurse her,
guard her for me? You said I was as your own son; will you be that
good mother to me that you want to be? Will you do this for your
white boy?"

He had never seen her smile before. A moment ago her heart had been
breaking, but now she knew with a great gladness that she was not
only going to keep and care for Margie, but that this laughing boy
would be as a son to her for all time. No wonder Catharine of the
Crow's Nest smiled!



A Red Girl's Reasoning


"Be pretty good to her, Charlie, my boy, or she'll balk sure as
shooting."

That was what old Jimmy Robinson said to his brand new son-in-law,
while they waited for the bride to reappear.

"Oh! you bet, there's no danger of much else. I'll be good to her,
help me Heaven," replied Charlie McDonald, brightly.

"Yes, of course you will," answered the old man, "but don't you
forget, there's a good big bit of her mother in her, and," closing
his left eye significantly, "you don't understand these Indians as
I do."

"But I'm just as fond of them, Mr. Robinson," Charlie said
assertively, "and I get on with them too, now, don't I?"

"Yes, pretty well for a town boy; but when you have lived forty
years among these people, as I have done; when you have had your
wife as long as I have had mine--for there's no getting over it,
Christine's disposition is as native as her mother's, every bit--and
perhaps when you've owned for eighteen years a daughter as dutiful,
as loving, as fearless, and, alas! as obstinate as that little piece
you are stealing away from me to-day--I tell you, youngster, you'll
know more than you know now. It is kindness for kindness, bullet for
bullet, blood for blood. Remember, what you are, she will be," and
the old Hudson Bay trader scrutinized Charlie McDonald's face like
a detective.

It was a happy, fair face, good to look at, with a certain ripple of
dimples somewhere about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the
very sunniness of their owner's soul. There was not a severe nor yet
a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily
dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson's
Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of
Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of a long
census-taking.

As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth
he had studied Indian archaeology and folk-lore, as a man he
consummated his predilections for Indianology, by loving, winning
and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who
himself had married a native woman twenty years ago. The country was
all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance
of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman's heart had gone
out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of
English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal
that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the
higher tribes of North American Indians.

Like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of
ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in
mental and social habits, she had developed from absolute pagan
indifference into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken
English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored face, were
the joy of old Robinson's declining years.

He had given their daughter Christine all the advantages of his own
learning--which, if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl
had a fair common education, and the native adaptability to
progress.

She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured
Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so
commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the
other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life would find it
difficult to determine her nationality.

She looked very pretty to Charles McDonald's loving eyes, as she
reappeared in the doorway, holding her mother's hand and saying some
happy words of farewell. Personally she looked much the same as her
sisters, all Canada through, who are the offspring of red and white
parentage--olive-complexioned, gray-eyed, black-haired, with figure
slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable expression in her
whole face that turns one so heart-sick as they glance at the young
Indians of to-day--it is the forerunner too frequently of "the white
man's disease," consumption--but McDonald was pathetically in love,
and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his
life.

There had not been much of a wedding ceremony. The priest had
cantered through the service in Latin, pronounced the benediction
in English, and congratulated the "happy couple" in Indian, as a
compliment to the assembled tribe in the little amateur structure
that did service at the post as a sanctuary.

But the knot was tied as firmly and indissolubly as if all Charlie
McDonald's swell city friends had crushed themselves up against the
chancel to congratulate him, and in his heart he was deeply thankful
to escape the flower-pelting, white gloves, rice-throwing, and
ponderous stupidity of a breakfast, and indeed all the regulation
gimcracks of the usual marriage celebrations, and it was with a
hand trembling with absolute happiness that he assisted his little
Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that, hitched to an
underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of
their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy
Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout,
stolid, betraying nothing of visible emotion, and then the pony,
rough-shod and shaggy, trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were
kept up until the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and
the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts deliriously happy,
jogged on over the uneven trail.

       *       *       *       *       *

She was "all the rage" that winter at the provincial capital. The
men called her a "deuced fine little woman." The ladies said she
was "just the sweetest wildflower." Whereas she was really but an
ordinary, pale, dark girl who spoke slowly and with a strong accent,
who danced fairly well, sang acceptably, and never stirred outside
the door without her husband.

Charlie was proud of her; he was proud that she had "taken" so well
among his friend, proud that she bore herself so complacently in
the drawing-rooms of the wives of pompous Government officials, but
doubly proud of her almost abject devotion to him. If ever human
being was worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could
scarcely have been otherwise, for the almost godlike strength of his
passion for that little wife of his would have mastered and melted
a far more invincible citadel than an already affectionate woman's
heart.

Favorites socially, McDonald and his wife went everywhere. In
fashionable circles she was "new"--a potent charm to acquire
popularity, and the little velvet-clad figure was always the centre
of interest among all the women in the room. She always dressed in
velvet. No woman in Canada, has she but the faintest dash of native
blood in her veins, but loves velvets and silks. As beef to the
Englishman, wine to the Frenchman, fads to the Yankee, so are velvet
and silk to the Indian girl, be she wild as prairie grass, be she on
the borders of civilization, or, having stepped within its boundary,
mounted the steps of culture even under its superficial heights.

"Such a dolling little appil blossom," said the wife of a local
M.P., who brushed up her etiquette and English once a year at
Ottawa. "Does she always laugh so sweetly, and gobble you up with
those great big gray eyes of her, when you are togetheah at home,
Mr. McDonald? If so, I should think youah pooah brothah would feel
himself terrible _de trop_."

He laughed lightly. "Yes, Mrs. Stuart, there are not two of
Christie; she is the same at home and abroad, and as for Joe, he
doesn't mind us a bit; he's no end fond of her."

"I'm very glad he is. I always fancied he did not care for her,
d'you know."

If ever a blunt woman existed it was Mrs. Stuart. She really meant
nothing, but her remark bothered Charlie. He was fond of his
brother, and jealous for Christie's popularity. So that night when
he and Joe were having a pipe, he said:

"I've never asked you yet what you thought of her, Joe." A brief
pause, then Joe spoke. "I'm glad she loves you."

"Why?"

"Because that girl has but two possibilities regarding
humanity--love or hate."

"Humph! Does she love or hate _you_?"

"Ask her."

"You talk bosh. If she hated you, you'd get out. If she loved you
I'd _make_ you get out."

Joe McDonald whistled a little, then laughed.

"Now that we are on the subject, I might as well ask--honestly, old
man, wouldn't you and Christie prefer keeping house alone to having
me always around?"

"Nonsense, sheer nonsense. Why, thunder, man, Christie's no end fond
of you, and as for me--you surely don't want assurances from me?"

"No, but I often think a young couple--"

"Young couple be blowed! After a while when they want you and your
old surveying chains, and spindle-legged tripod telescope kickshaws,
farther west, I venture to say the little woman will cry her eyes
out--won't you, Christie?" This last in a higher tone, as through
clouds of tobacco smoke he caught sight of his wife passing the
doorway.

She entered. "Oh, no, I would not cry; I never do cry, but I would
be heart-sore to lose you Joe, and apart from that"--a little
wickedly--"you may come in handy for an exchange some day, as
Charlie does always say when he hoards up duplicate relics."

"Are Charlie and I duplicates?"

"Well--not exactly"--her head a little to one side, and eyeing
them both merrily, while she slipped softly on to the arm of
her husband's chair--"but, in the event of Charlie's failing
me"--everyone laughed then. The "some day" that she spoke of was
nearer than they thought. It came about in this wise.

There was a dance at the Lieutenant-Governor's, and the world and
his wife were there. The nobs were in great feather that night,
particularly the women, who flaunted about in new gowns and much
splendor. Christie McDonald had a new gown also, but wore it with
the utmost unconcern, and if she heard any of the flattering remarks
made about her she at least appeared to disregard them.

"I never dreamed you could wear blue so splendidly," said Captain
Logan, as they sat out a dance together.

"Indeed she can, though," interposed Mrs. Stuart, halting in one of
her gracious sweeps down the room with her husband's private
secretary.

"Don't shout so, captain. I can hear every sentence you uttah--of
course Mrs. McDonald can wear blue--she has a morning gown of cadet
blue that she is a picture in."

"You are both very kind," said Christie. "I like blue; it is the
color of all the Hudson's Bay posts, and the factor's residence is
always decorated in blue."

"Is it really? How interesting--do tell us some more of your old
home, Mrs. McDonald; you so seldom speak of your life at the post,
and we fellows so often wish to hear of it all," said Logan eagerly.

"Why do you not ask me of it, then?"

"Well--er, I'm sure I don't know; I'm fully interested in the
Ind--in your people--your mother's people, I mean, but it always
seems so personal, I suppose; and--a--a--"

"Perhaps you are, like all other white people, afraid to mention my
nationality to me."

The captain winced and Mrs. Stuart laughed uneasily. Joe McDonald
was not far off, and he was listening, and chuckling, and saying to
himself, "That's you, Christie, lay 'em out; it won't hurt 'em to
know how they appear once in a while."

"Well, Captain Logan," she was saying, "what is it you would like to
hear--of my people, or my parents, or myself?"

"All, all, my dear," cried Mrs. Stuart clamorously. "I'll speak for
him--tell us of yourself and your mother--your father is delightful,
I am sure--but then he is only an ordinary Englishman, not half as
interesting as a foreigner, or--or, perhaps I should say, a native."

Christie laughed. "Yes," she said, "my father often teases my mother
now about how _very_ native she was when he married her; then, how
could she have been otherwise? She did not know a word of English,
and there was not another English-speaking person besides my father
and his two companions within sixty miles."

"Two companions, eh? one a Catholic priest and the other a wine
merchant, I suppose, and with your father in the Hudson Bay, they
were good representatives of the pioneers in the New World,"
remarked Logan, waggishly.

"Oh, no, they were all Hudson Bay men. There were no rumsellers and
no missionaries in that part of the country then."

Mrs. Stuart looked puzzled. "No _missionaries_?" she repeated with
an odd intonation.

Christie's insight was quick. There was a peculiar expression of
interrogation in the eyes of her listeners, and the girl's blood
leapt angrily up into her temples as she said hurriedly, "I know
what you mean; I know what you are thinking. You were wondering how
my parents were married--"

"Well--er, my dear, it seems peculiar--if there was no priest, and
no magistrate, why--a--" Mrs. Stuart paused awkwardly.

"The marriage was performed by Indian rites," said Christie.

"Oh, do tell me about it; is the ceremony very interesting and
quaint--are your chieftains anything like Buddhist priests?" It was
Logan who spoke.

"Why, no," said the girl in amazement at that gentleman's ignorance.
"There is no ceremony at all, save a feast. The two people just
agree to live only with and for each other, and the man takes his
wife to his home, just as you do. There is no ritual to bind them;
they need none; an Indian's word was his law in those days, you
know."

Mrs. Stuart stepped backwards. "Ah!" was all she said. Logan removed
his eye-glass and stared blankly at Christie. "And did McDonald
marry you in this singular fashion?" He questioned.

"Oh, no, we were married by Father O'Leary. Why do you ask?"

"Because if he had, I'd have blown his brain out to-morrow."

Mrs. Stuart's partner, who had hitherto been silent, coughed and
began to twirl his cuff stud nervously, but nobody took any notice
of him. Christie had risen, slowly, ominously--risen, with the
dignity and pride of an empress.

"Captain Logan," she said, "what do you dare to say to me? What do
you dare to mean? Do you presume to think it would not have been
lawful for Charlie to marry me according to my people's rites? Do
you for one instant dare to question that my parents were not as
legally--"

"Don't, dear, don't," interrupted Mrs. Stuart hurriedly; "it is bad
enough now, goodness knows; don't make--" Then she broke off blindly.
Christie's eyes glared at the mumbling woman, at her uneasy partner,
at the horrified captain. Then they rested on the McDonald brothers,
who stood within earshot, Joe's face scarlet, her husband's white as
ashes, with something in his eyes she had never seen before. It was
Joe who saved the situation. Stepping quickly across towards his
sister-in-law, he offered her his arm, saying, "The next dance is
ours, I think, Christie."

Then Logan pulled himself together, and attempted to carry Mrs.
Stuart off for the waltz, but for once in her life that lady had
lost her head. "It is shocking!" she said, "outrageously shocking!
I wonder if they told Mr. McDonald before he married her!" Then
looking hurriedly round, she too saw the young husband's face--and
knew that they had not.

"Humph! deuced nice kettle of fish--and poor old Charlie has always
thought so much of honorable birth."

Logan thought he spoke in an undertone, but "poor old Charlie" heard
him. He followed his wife and brother across the room. "Joe," he
said, "will you see that a trap is called?" Then to Christie, "Joe
will see that you get home all right." He wheeled on his heel then
and left the ball-room.

Joe _did_ see.

He tucked a poor, shivering, pallid little woman into a cab, and
wound her bare throat up in the scarlet velvet cloak that was
hanging uselessly over her arm. She crouched down beside him,
saying, "I am so cold, Joe; I am so cold," but she did not seem to
know enough to wrap herself up. Joe felt all through this long drive
that nothing this side of Heaven would be so good as to die, and he
was glad when the little voice at his elbow said, "What is he so
angry at, Joe?"

"I don't know exactly, dear," he said gently, "but I think it was
what you said about this Indian marriage."

"But why should I not have said it? Is there anything wrong about
it?" she asked pitifully.

"Nothing, that I can see--there was no other way; but Charlie is
very angry, and you must be brave and forgiving with him, Christie,
dear."

"But I did never see him like that before, did you?"

"Once."

"When?"

"Oh, at college, one day, a boy tore his prayer book in half, and
threw it into the grate, just to be mean, you know. Our mother had
given it to him at his confirmation."

"And did he look so?"

"About, but it all blew over in a day--Charlie's tempers are short
and brisk. Just don't take any notice of him; run off to bed, and
he'll have forgotten it by the morning."

They reached home at last. Christie said goodnight quietly, going
directly to her room. Joe went to his room also, filled a pipe and
smoked for an hour. Across the passage he could hear her slippered
feet pacing up and down, up and down the length of her apartment.
There was something panther-like in those restless footfalls, a
meaning velvetyness that made him shiver, and again he wished he
were dead--or elsewhere.

After a time the hall door opened, and someone came upstairs, along
the passage, and to the little woman's room. As he entered, she
turned and faced him.

"Christie," he said harshly, "do you know what you have done?"

"Yes," taking a step nearer him, her whole soul springing up into
her eyes, "I have angered you, Charlie, and--"

"Angered me? You have disgraced me; and, moreover, you have
disgraced yourself and both your parents."

"_Disgraced_?"

"Yes, _disgraced_; you have literally declared to the whole city
that your father and mother were never married, and that you are the
child of--what shall we call it--love? certainly not legality."

Across the hallway sat Joe McDonald, his blood freezing; but it
leapt into every vein like fire at the awful anguish in the little
voice that cried simply, "Oh! Charlie!"

"How could you do it, how could you do it, Christie, without shame
either for yourself or for me, let alone your parents?"

The voice was like an angry demon's--not a trace was there in it of
the yellow-haired, blue-eyed, laughing-lipped boy who had driven
away so gaily to the dance five hours before.

"Shame? Why should I be ashamed of the rites of my people any more
than you should be ashamed of the customs of yours--of a marriage
more sacred and holy than half of your white man's mockeries."

It was the voice of another nature in the girl--the love and the
pleading were dead in it.

"Do you mean to tell me, Charlie--you who have studied my race and
their laws for years--do you mean to tell me that, because there was
no priest and no magistrate, my mother was not married? Do you mean
to say that all my forefathers, for hundreds of years back, have been
illegally born? If so, you blacken my ancestry beyond--beyond--beyond
all reason."

"No, Christie, I would not be so brutal as that; but your father
and mother live in more civilized times. Father O'Leary has been at
the post for nearly twenty years. Why was not your father straight
enough to have the ceremony performed when he _did_ get the chance?"

The girl turned upon him with the face of a fury. "Do you suppose,"
she almost hissed, "that my mother would be married according to
your _white_ rites after she had been five years a wife, and I had
been born in the meantime? No, a thousand times I say, _no_. When
the priest came with his notions of Christianizing, and talked
to them of re-marriage by the Church, my mother arose and said,
'Never--never--I have never had but this one husband; he has had
none but me for wife, and to have you re-marry us would be to say as
much to the whole world as that we had never been married before.
[Fact.] You go away; _I_ do not ask that _your_ people be re-married;
talk not so to me. I _am_ married, and you or the Church cannot do
or undo it.'"

"Your father was a fool not to insist upon the law, and so was the
priest."

"Law? _My_ people have _no_ priest, and my nation cringes not to
law. Our priest is purity, and our law is honor. Priest? Was there a
_priest_ at the most holy marriage know to humanity--that stainless
marriage whose offspring is the God you white men told my pagan
mother of?"

"Christie--you are _worse_ than blasphemous; such a profane remark
shows how little you understand the sanctity of the Christian
faith--"

"I know what I _do_ understand; it is that you are hating me because
I told some of the beautiful customs of my people to Mrs. Stuart and
those men."

"Pooh! who cares for them? It is not them; the trouble is they won't
keep their mouths shut. Logan's a cad and will toss the whole tale
about at the club to-morrow night; and as for the Stuart woman, I'd
like to know how I'm going to take you to Ottawa for presentation
and the opening, while she is blabbing the whole miserable scandal
in every drawing-room, and I'll be pointed out as a romantic fool,
and you--as worse; I _can't_ understand why your father didn't tell
me before we were married; I at least might have warned you never to
mention it." Something of recklessness rang up through his voice,
just as the panther-likeness crept up from her footsteps and couched
herself in hers. She spoke in tones quiet, soft, deadly.

"Before we were married! Oh! Charlie, would it have--made--any--
difference?"

"God knows," he said, throwing himself into a chair, his blonde hair
rumpled and wet. It was the only boyish thing about him now.

She walked towards him, then halted in the centre of the room.
"Charlie McDonald," she said, and it was as if a stone had spoken,
"look up." He raised his head, startled by her tone. There was a
threat in her eyes that, had his rage been less courageous, his
pride less bitterly wounded, would have cowed him.

"There was no such time as that before our marriage, for we _are not
married now_. Stop," she said, outstretching her palms against him
as he sprang to his feet, "I tell you we are not married. Why should
I recognize the rites of your nation when you do not acknowledge the
rites of mine? According to your own words, my parents should have
gone through your church ceremony as well as through an Indian
contract; according to _my_ words, _we_ should go through an Indian
contract as well as through a church marriage. If their union is
illegal, so is ours. If you think my father is living in dishonor
with my mother, my people will think I am living in dishonor with
you. How do I know when another nation will come and conquer you as
you white men conquered us? And they will have another marriage rite
to perform, and they will tell us another truth, that you are not my
husband, that you are but disgracing and dishonoring me, that you
are keeping me here, not as your wife, but as your--your--_squaw_."

The terrible word had never passed her lips before, and the blood
stained her face to her very temples. She snatched off her wedding
ring and tossed it across the room, saying scornfully, "That thing
is as empty to me as the Indian rites to you."

He caught her by the wrists; his small white teeth were locked
tightly, his blue eyes blazed into hers.

"Christine, do you dare doubt my honor towards you? _you_, whom I
should have died for; do you _dare_ to think I have kept you here,
not as my wife, but--"

"Oh, God! You are hurting me; you are breaking my arm," she gasped.

The door was flung open, and Joe McDonald's sinewy hands clinched
like vices on his brother's shoulders.

"Charlie, you're mad, mad as the devil. Let go of her this minute."

The girl staggered backwards as the iron fingers loosed her wrists.
"Oh! Joe," she cried, "I am not his wife, and he says I am
born--nameless."

"Here," said Joe, shoving his brother towards the door. "Go
downstairs till you can collect your senses. If ever a being acted
like an infernal fool, you're the man."

The young husband looked from one to the other, dazed by his wife's
insult, abandoned to a fit of ridiculously childish temper. Blind
as he was with passion, he remembered long afterwards seeing
them standing there, his brother's face darkened with a scowl
of anger--his wife, clad in the mockery of her ball dress, her
scarlet velvet cloak half covering her bare brown neck and arms,
her eyes like flames of fire, her face like a piece of sculptured
graystone.

Without a word he flung himself furiously from the room, and
immediately afterwards they heard the heavy hall door bang behind
him.

"Can I do anything for you, Christie?" asked her brother-in-law
calmly.

"No, thank you--unless--I think I would like a drink of water,
please."

He brought her up a goblet filled with wine; her hand did not even
tremble as she took it. As for Joe, a demon arose in his soul as he
noticed she kept her wrists covered.

"Do you think he will come back?" she said.

"Oh, yes, of course; he'll be all right in the morning. Now go to
bed like a good little girl, and--and, I say, Christie, you can call
me if you want anything; I'll be right here, you know."

"Thank you, Joe; you are kind--and good."

He returned then to his apartment. His pipe was out, but he picked
up a newspaper instead, threw himself into an armchair, and in a
half-hour was in the land of dreams.

When Charlie came home in the morning, after a six-mile walk into
the country and back again, his foolish anger was dead and buried.
Logan's "Poor old Charlie" did not ring so distinctly in his ears.
Mrs. Stuart's horrified expression had faded considerably from his
recollection. He thought only of that surprisingly tall, dark girl,
whose eyes looked like coals, whose voice pierced him like a
flint-tipped arrow. Ah, well, they would never quarrel again like
that, he told himself. She loved him so, and would forgive him after
he had talked quietly to her, and told her what an ass he was. She
was simple-minded and awfully ignorant to pitch those old Indian
laws at him in her fury, but he could not blame her; oh, no, he
could not for one moment blame her. He had been terribly severe and
unreasonable, and the horrid McDonald temper had got the better of
him; and he loved her so. Oh! He loved her so! She would surely feel
that, and forgive him, and-- He went straight to his wife's room.
The blue velvet evening dress lay on the chair into which he had
thrown himself when he doomed his life's happiness by those two
words, "God knows." A bunch of dead daffodils and her slippers were
on the floor, everything--but Christie.

He went to his brother's bedroom door.

"Joe," he called, rapping nervously thereon; "Joe, wake up; where's
Christie, d'you know?"

"Good Lord, no," gasped that youth, springing out of his armchair
and opening the door. As he did so a note fell from off the handle.
Charlie's face blanched to his very hair while Joe read aloud, his
voice weakening at every word:--

"DEAR OLD JOE,--I went into your room at daylight to get that
picture of the Post on your bookshelves. I hope you do not mind, but
I kissed your hair while your slept; it was so curly, and yellow,
and soft, just like his. Good-bye, Joe.

"CHRISTIE."

And when Joe looked into his brother's face and saw the anguish
settle in those laughing blue eyes, the despair that drove the
dimples away from that almost girlish mouth; when he realized that
this boy was but four-and-twenty years old, and that all his future
was perhaps darkened and shadowed for ever, a great, deep sorrow
arose in his heart, and he forgot all things, all but the agony that
rang up through the voice of the fair, handsome lad as he staggered
forward, crying, "Oh! Joe--what shall I do--what shall I do!"

       *       *       *       *       *

It was months and months before he found her, but during all that
time he had never known a hopeless moment; discouraged he often
was, but despondent, never. The sunniness of his ever-boyish heart
radiated with warmth that would have flooded a much deeper gloom
than that which settled within his eager young life. Suffer? ah! yes,
he suffered, not with locked teeth and stony stoicism, not with the
masterful self-command, the reserve, the conquered bitterness of the
still-water sort of nature, that is supposed to run to such depths.
He tried to be bright, and his sweet old boyish self. He would laugh
sometimes in a pitiful, pathetic fashion. He took to petting dogs,
looking into their large, solemn eyes with his wistful, questioning
blue ones; he would kiss them, as women sometimes do, and call them
"dear old fellow," in tones that had tears; and once in the course
of his travels while at a little way-station, he discovered a huge
St. Bernard imprisoned by some mischance in an empty freight car;
the animal was nearly dead from starvation, and it seemed to salve
his own sick heart to rescue back the dog's life. Nobody claimed the
big starving creature, the train hands knew nothing of its owner,
and gladly handed it over to its deliverer. "Hudson," he called
it, and afterwards when Joe McDonald would relate the story of his
brother's life he invariably terminated it with, "And I really
believe that big lumbering brute saved him." From what, he was never
to say.

But all things end, and he heard of her at last. She had never
returned to the Post, as he at first thought she would, but had gone
to the little town of B----, in Ontario, where she was making her
living at embroidery and plain sewing.

The September sun had set redly when at last he reached the
outskirts of the town, opened up the wicket gate, and walked up the
weedy, unkept path leading to the cottage where she lodged.

Even through the twilight, he could see her there, leaning on the
rail of the verandah--oddly enough she had about her shoulders the
scarlet velvet cloak she wore when he had flung himself so madly
from the room that night.

The moment the lad saw her his heart swelled with a sudden heat,
burning moisture leapt into his eyes, and clogged his long, boyish
lashes. He bounded up the steps--"Christie," he said, and the word
scorched his lips like audible flame.

She turned to him, and for a second stood magnetized by his
passionately wistful face; her peculiar grayish eyes seemed to
drink the very life of his unquenchable love, though the tears that
suddenly sprang into his seemed to absorb every pulse in his body
through those hungry, pleading eyes of his that had, oh! so often
been blinded by her kisses when once her whole world lay in their
blue depths.

"You will come back to me, Christie, my wife? My wife, you will let
me love you again?"

She gave a singular little gasp, and shook her head. "Don't, oh!
don't," he cried piteously. "You will come to me, dear? it is all
such a bitter mistake--I did not understand. Oh! Christie, I did not
understand, and you'll forgive me, and love me again, won't
you--won't you?"

"No," said the girl with quick, indrawn breath.

He dashed the back of his hand across his wet eyelids. His lips were
growing numb, and he bungled over the monosyllable "Why?"

"I do not like you," she answered quietly.

"God! Oh! God, what is there left?"

She did not appear to hear the heart-break in his voice; she stood
like one wrapped in sombre thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in
her eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth. The wind was
blowing her cloak aside, and the only visible human life in her
whole body was once when he spoke the muscles of her brown arm
seemed to contract.

"But, darling, you are mine--_mine_--we are husband and wife! Oh,
heaven, you _must_ love me, and you _must_ come to me again."

"You cannot _make_ me come," said the icy voice, "neither church,
nor law, nor even"--and the vice softened--"nor even love can make
a slave of a red girl."

"Heaven forbid it," he faltered. "No, Christie, I will never claim
you without your love. What reunion would that be? But oh, Christie,
you are lying to me, you are lying to yourself, you are lying to
heaven."

She did not move. If only he could touch her he felt as sure of her
yielding as he felt sure there was a hereafter. The memory of the
times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most
passionate response from her filled his heart with a torture that
choked all words before they reached his lips; at the thought of
those days he forgot she was unapproachable, forgot how forbidding
were her eyes, how stony her lips. Flinging himself forward, his
knee on the chair at her side, his face pressed hardly in the folds
of the cloak on her shoulder, he clasped his arms about her with a
boyish petulance, saying, "Christie, Christie, my little girl wife,
I love you, I love you, and you are killing me."

She quivered from head to foot as his fair, wavy hair brushed her
neck, his despairing face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire,
rested on the cool, olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture oozed up
through her skin, and as he felt its glow he looked up. Her teeth,
white and cold, were locked over her under lip, and her eyes were
as gray stones.

Not murderers alone know the agony of a death sentence.

"Is it all useless? all useless, dear?" he said, with lips starving
for hers.

"All useless," she repeated. "I have no love for you now. You
forfeited me and my heart months ago, when you said _those two
words_."

His arms fell away from her wearily, he arose mechanically, he
placed his little gray checked cap on the back of his yellow curls,
the old-time laughter was dead in the blue eyes that now looked
scared and haunted, the boyishness and the dimples crept away for
ever from the lips that quivered like a child's; he turned from her,
but she had looked once into his face as the Law Giver must have
looked at the land of Canaan outspread at his feet. She watched
him go down the long path and through the picket gate, she watched
the big yellowish dog that had waited for him lumber up on to its
feet--stretch--then follow him. She was conscious of but two things,
the vengeful lie in her soul, and a little space on her arm that his
wet lashes had brushed.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was hours afterwards when he reached his room. He had said
nothing, done nothing--what use were words or deeds? Old Jimmy
Robinson was right; she had "balked" sure enough.

What a bare, hotelish room it was! He tossed off his coat and sat
for ten minutes looking blankly at the sputtering gas jet. Then
his whole life, desolate as a desert, loomed up before him with
appalling distinctness. Throwing himself on the floor beside
his bed, with clasped hands and arms outstretched on the white
counterpane, he sobbed. "Oh! God, dear God, I thought you loved me;
I thought you'd let me have her again, but you must be tired of me,
tired of loving me too. I've nothing left now, nothing! it doesn't
seem that I even have you to-night."

He lifted his face then, for his dog, big and clumsy and yellow,
was licking at his sleeve.



The Envoy Extraordinary


There had been a great deal of trouble in the Norris family, and
for weeks old Bill Norris had gone about scowling as blackly as a
thunder-cloud, speaking to no one but his wife and daughter, and
oftentimes muttering inaudible things that, however, had the tone
of invective; and accompanied, as these mutterings were, with a
menacing shake of his burley head, old Bill finally grew to be an
acquaintance few desired.

Mrs. Norris showed equal, though not similar, signs of mental
disturbance; for, womanlike, she clothed her worry in placidity and
silence. Her kindly face became drawn and lined; she laughed less
frequently. She never went "neighboring" or "buggy-riding" with
old Bill now. But the trim farmhouse was just as spotless, just as
beautifully kept, the cooking just as wholesome and homelike, the
linen as white, the garden as green, the chickens as fat, the geese
as noisy, as in the days when her eyes were less grave and her lips
unknown to sighs. And what was it all about but the simple matter
of a marriage--Sam's marriage? Sam, the big, genial, curly-headed
only son of the house of Norris, who saw fit to take unto himself as
a life partner tiny, delicate, college-bred Della Kennedy, who
taught school over on the Sixth Concession, and knew more about
making muslin shirtwaists than cooking for the threshers, could
quote from all the mental and moral philosophers, could wrestle with
French and Latin verbs, and had memorized half the things Tennyson
and Emerson had ever written, but could not milk a cow or churn up
a week's supply of butter if the executioner stood ready with his
axe to chop off her pretty yellow mop of a head in case she failed.
How old Billy stormed when Sam started "keeping company" with her!

"Nice young goslin' fer you to be a-goin' with!" he scowled when
Sam would betake himself towards the red gate every evening after
chores were done. "Nice gal fer you to bring home to help yer
mother; all she'll do is to play May Queen and have the hull lot of
us a-trottin' to wait on her. You'll marry a farmer's gal, _I_ say,
one that's brung up like yerself and yer mother and me, or I tell
yer yer shan't have one consarned acre of this place. I'll leave
the hull farm to yer sister Jane's man. _She_ married somethin'
like--decent, stiddy, hard-working man is Sid Simpson, and _he'll_
git what land I have to leave."

"I quite know that, dad," Sam blazed forth, irritably; "so does he.
That's what he married  Janie for--the whole township knows that.
He's never given her a kind word, or a holiday, or a new dress,
since they were married--eight years. She slaves and toils, and he
rich as any man need be; owns three farms already, money in the
bank, cattle, horses--everything. But look at Janie; she looks as
old as mother. I pity _his_ son, if he ever has one. Thank heaven,
Janie has no children!"

"Come, come, father--Sam!" a patient voice would interrupt, and
Mrs. Norris would appear at the door, vainly endeavoring to make
peace. "I'll own up to both of you I'd sooner have a farmer's
daughter for mine-in-law than Della Kennedy. But, father, he ain't
married yet, and--"

"Ain't married, eh?" blurted in old Bill. "But he's a-goin' to
marry her. But I'll tell you both right here, she'll never set foot
in my house, ner I in her'n. Sam ken keep her, but what on, I don't
know. He gits right out of this here farm the day he marries her,
and he don't come back, not while I'm a-livin'."

It was all this that made old Billy Norris morose, and Mrs. Norris
silent and patient and laughless, for Sam married the despised
"gosling" right at harvest time, when hands were so scarce that
farmers wrangled and fought, day in and day out, to get one single
man to go into the field.

This was Sam's golden opportunity. His father's fields stood yellow
with ripening grain to be cut on the morrow, but he deliberately
hired himself out to a neighbor, where he would get good wages
to start a little home with; for, farmer-like, old Billy Norris
never paid his son wages. Sam was supposed to work for nothing but
his clothes and board as reward, and a possible slice of the farm
when the old man died, while a good harvest hand gets board and
high wages, to boot. This then was the hour to strike, and the
morning the grain stood ready for the reaper Sam paused at the
outside kitchen door at sunrise.

"Mother," he said, "I've got to have her. I'm going to marry her
to-day, and to-morrow start working for Mr. Willson, who will pay me
enough to keep a wife. I'm sorry, mother, but--well, I've got to
have her. Some day you'll know her, and you'll love her, I know you
will; and if there's ever any children--"

But Mrs. Norris had clutched him by the arm. "Sammy," she
whispered, "your father will be raging mad at your going, and
harvest hands so scarce. I _know_ he'll never let me go near you,
never. But if there's ever any children, Sammy, you just come for
your mother, and I'll go to you and her _without_ his letting."

Then with one of the all too few kisses that are ever given or
received in a farmhouse life, she let him go. The storm burst at
breakfast time when Sam did not appear, and the poor mother tried
to explain his absence, as only a mother will. Old Billy waxed
suspicious, then jumped at facts. The marriage was bad enough,
but this being left in the lurch at the eleventh hour, his son's
valuable help transferred from the home farm to Mr. Willson's, with
whom he always quarreled in church, road, and political matters, was
too much.

"But, father, you never paid him wages," ventured the mother.

"Wages? Wages to one's own son, that one has raised and fed and
shod from the cradle? Wages, when he knowed he'd come in fer part
of the farm when I'd done with it? Who in consarnation ever gives
their son wages?"

"But, father, you told him if he married her he was never to have
the farm--that you'd leave it to Sid, that he was to get right off
the day he married her."

"An' Sid'll get it--bet yer life he will--fer I ain't got no son
no more. A sneakin' hulk that leaves me with my wheat standin' an'
goes over to help that Methodist of a Willson is no son of mine.
I ain't never had a son, and you ain't, neither; remember that,
Marthy--don't you ever let me ketch you goin' a-near them. We're
done with Sam an' his missus. You jes' make a note of that." And
old Billy flung out to his fields like a general whose forces had
fled.

It was but a tiny, two-room shack, away up in the back lots, that
Sam was able to get for Della, but no wayfarer ever passed up the
side road but they heard her clear, young voice singing like a
thrush; no one ever met Sam but he ceased whistling only to greet
them. He proved invaluable to Mr. Willson, for after the harvest
was in and the threshing over, there was the root crop and the
apple crop, and eventually Mr. Willson hired him for the entire
year. Della, to the surprise of the neighborhood, kept on with her
school until Christmas.

"She's teachin' instid of keepin' Sam's house, jes' to git money
fer finery, you bet!" sneered old Billy. But he never knew that
every copper for the extra term was put carefully away, and was
paid out for a whole year's rent in advance on a gray little
two-room house, and paid by a very proud little yellow-haired bride.
She had insisted upon this before her marriage, for she laughingly
said, "No wife ever gets her way afterwards."

"I'm not good at butter-making, Sam," she said, "but I _can_ make
money teaching, and for this first year _I_ pay the rent." And she
did.

And the sweet, brief year swung on through its seasons, until
one brown September morning the faint cry of a little human lamb
floated through the open window of the small gray house on the
back lots. Sam did not go to Willson's to work that day, but
stayed home, playing the part of a big, joyful, clumsy nurse, his
roughened hands gentle and loving, his big rugged heart bursting
with happiness. It was twilight, and the gray shadows were creeping
into the bare little room, touching with feathery fingers a tangled
mop of yellow curls that aureoled a pillowed head that was not now
filled with thoughts of Tennyson and Emerson and frilly muslin
shirtwaists. That pretty head held but two realities--Sammy,
whistling robin-like as he made tea in the kitchen, and the little
human lamb hugged up on her arm.

But suddenly the whistling ceased, and Sammy's voice, thrilling
with joy, exclaimed:

"Oh, mother!"

"Mrs. Willson sent word to me. Your father's gone to the
village, and I ran away, Sammy boy," whispered Mrs. Norris,
eagerly. "I just ran away. Where's Della and--the baby?"

"In here, mother, and--bless you for coming!" said the big fellow,
stepping softly towards the bedroom. But his mother was there
before him, her arms slipping tenderly about the two small beings
on the bed.

"It wasn't my fault, daughter," she said, tremulously.

"I know it," faintly smiled Della. "Just these last few hours I
know I'd stand by this baby boy of mine here until the Judgement
Day, and so I now know it must have nearly broken your heart not
to stand by Sammy."

"Well, grandmother!" laughed Sam, "what do you think of the new
Norris?"

"Grandmother?" gasped Mrs. Norris. "Why, Sammy, _am I a
grandmother_? Grandmother to this little sweetheart?" And the proud
old arms lifted the wee "new Norris" right up from its mother's
arms, and every tiny toe and finger was kissed and crooned over,
while Sam shyly winked at Della and managed to whisper, "You'll
see, girl, that dad will come around now; but he can just keep out
of _our house_. There are two of us that can be harsh. I'm not
going to come at _his_ first whistle."

Della smiled to herself, but said nothing. Much wisdom had come to
her within the last year, with the last day--wisdom not acquired
within the covers of books, nor yet beneath college roofs, and one
truth she had mastered long ago--that

  "To help and to heal a sorrow
   Love and silence are always best."

But late that night, when Martha Norris returned home, another
storm broke above her hapless head. Old Billy sat on the kitchen
steps waiting for her, frowning, scowling, muttering. "Where have
you been?" he demanded, glaring at her, although some inner
instinct told him what her answer would be.

"I've been to Sammy's," she said, in a peculiarly still voice, "and
I'm going again to-morrow." Then with shoulders more erect and eyes
calmer than they had been for many months, she continued: "And I'm
going again the next day, and the next. Billy, you and I've got a
grandson--a splendid, fair, strong boy, and--"

"What!" snapped old Billy. "A grandson! I got a grandson, an' no
person told me afore? Not even that there sneak Sam, cuss him! He
always was too consarned mean to live. A grandson? I'm a-goin' over
termorrer, sure's I'm alive."

"No use for you to go, Billy," said Mrs. Norris, with marvellous
diplomacy for such a simple, unworldly farmer's wife to suddenly
acquire. "Sammy wouldn't let you set foot on his place. He wouldn't
let you put an eye or a finger on that precious baby--not for the
whole earth."

"What! Not _me_, the little chap's _grandfather_?" blurted old
Billy in a rage. "I'm a-goin' to see that baby, that's all there
is to it. I tell yer, I'm a-goin'."

"No use, father; you'll only make things worse," sighed Sam's
mother, plaintively; but in her heart laughter gurgled like a
spring. To the gift of diplomacy Mrs. Norris was fast adding the
art of being an actress. "If you go there Sam'll set the dog on
you. I _know_ he will, from the way he was talking," she concluded.

"Oh! got a _dog_, have they? Well, I bet they've got no _cow_,"
sneered Billy. Then after a meaning pause: "I say Marthy, _have_
they got a cow?"

"No," replied Mrs. Norris, shortly.

"_No cow_, an' a sick woman and a baby--_my_ grandchild--in the
house? Now ain't that jes' like that sneak Sam? They'll jes' kill
that baby atween them, they're that igner'nt. Hev they got enny
milk fer them two babbling kids, Della an' the baby--my
grandchild?"

"No!" snapped Mrs. Norris, while through her mind echoed some
terrifying lines she had heard as a child:

  "All liars dwell with him in hell,
   And many more who cursed and swore."

"An' there's that young Shorthorn of ours, Marthy. Couldn't we
spare her?" he asked with a pathetic eagerness. "We've got eight
other cows to milk. Can't we spare her? If you think Sam'll set the
dog on _me_, I'll have her driv over in the mornin'. Jim'll take
her."

"I don't think it's any use, Bill; but you can try it," remarked
Mrs. Norris, her soul singing within her like a celestial choir.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Where are you driving that cow to?" yelled Sam from the kitchen
door, at sunrise the following morning. "Take her out of there!
You're driving her into my yard, right over my cabbages."

But Jim, the Norris' hired man, only grinned, and proceeding with
his driving, yelled back:

"Cow's yourn, Sam. Yer old man sent it--a present to yer missus and
the babby."

"You take and drive that cow back again!" roared Sam. "And tell my
dad I won't have hide nor hair of her on my place."

Back went the cow.

"Didn't I tell you?" mourned Mrs. Norris. "Sam's that stubborn and
contrary. It's no use, Billy; he just doesn't care for his poor old
father nor mother any more."

"By the jumping Jiminy Christmas! I'll _make_ him care!" thundered
old Billy. "I'm a-goin' ter see that grandchild of mine." Then
followed a long silence.

"I say, Marthy, how are they fixed in the house?" he questioned,
after many moments of apparently brown study.

"Pretty poor," answered Sam's mother, truthfully this time.

"Got a decent stove, an' bed, an' the like?" he finally asked.

"Stove seems to cook all right, but the bed looks just like straw
tick--not much good, I'd say," responded Mrs. Norris, drearily.

"A straw tick!" fairly yelled old Billy. "A straw tick fer my
grandson ter sleep on? Jim, you fetch that there cow here, right
ter the side door."

"What are you going to do?" asked Martha, anxiously.

"I'll show yer!" blurted old Billy. And going to his own room, he
dragged off all the pretty patchwork quilts above his neatly-made
bed, grabbed up the voluminous feather-bed, staggered with it in
his arms down the hall, through the side door, and flung it on to
the back of the astonished cow.

"Now you, Jim, drive that there cow over to Sam's, and if you dare
bring her back agin, I'll hide yer with the flail till yer can't
stand up."

"Me drive that lookin' circus over to Sam's?" sneered Jim. "I'll
quit yer place first. Yer kin do it yerself;" and the hired man
turned on his lordly heel and slouched over to the barn.

"That'll be the best way, Billy," urged Sam's mother. "Do it
yourself."

"I'll do it too," old Billy growled. "I ain't afraid of no dog on
four legs. Git on there, bossy! Git on, I say!" and the ridiculous
cavalcade started forth.

For a moment Martha Norris watched the receding figure through
blinding tears. "Oh, Sammy, I'm going to have you back again! I'm
going to have my boy once more!" she half sobbed. Then sitting down
on the doorsill, she laughed like a schoolgirl until the cow with
her extraordinary burden, and old Billy in her wake, disappeared up
the road. [This incident actually occurred on an Ontario farm
within the circle of the author's acquaintance.]

From the pillow, pretty Della could just see out of the low window,
and her wide young eyes grew wider with amazement as the gate swung
open and the "circus," as Jim called it, entered.

"Sammy!" she called, "Sammy! For goodness sake, what's that coming
into our yard?"

Instantly Sam was at the door.

"Well, if that don't beat anything I ever saw!" he exclaimed. Then
"like mother, like son," he, too, sat down on the doorsill and
laughed as only youth and health and joy can laugh, for, heading
straight for the door was the fat young Shorthorn, saddled with an
enormous feather-bed, and plodding at her heels was old Billy Norris,
grinning sheepishly.

It took just three seconds for the hands of father and son to meet.
"How's my gal an' my grandson?" asked the old farmer, excitedly.

"Bully, just bully, both of them!" smiled Sam, proudly. Then more
seriously, "Ah, dad, you old tornado, you! Here you fired thunder
at us for a whole year, pretty near broke my mother's heart, and
made my boy's little mother old before she ought to be. But you've
quit storming now, dad. I know it from the look of you."

"Quit forever, Sam," replied old Billy, "fer these mother-wimmen
don't never thrive where there's rough weather, somehow. They're
all fer peace. They're worse than King Edward an' Teddy Roosevelt
fer patchin' up rows, an' if they can't do it no other way, they
jes' hike along with a baby, sort o' treaty of peace like. Yes, I
guess I thundered some; but, Sam, boy, there ain't a deal of harm
in thunder--but _lightnin'_, now that's the worst, but I once heard
a feller say that feathers was non-conductive." Then with a sly
smile, "An' Sam, you'd better hustle an' git the gal an' the baby
on ter this here feather-bed, or they may be in danger of gittin'
struck, fer there's no tellin' but I may jes' start an' storm
thunder an' _lightnin'_ this time."



A Pagan in St. Paul's Cathedral

Iroquois Poetess' Impressions in London's Cathedral


It is a far cry from a wigwam to Westminster, from a prairie trail
to the Tower Bridge, and London looks a strange place to the Red
Indian whose eyes still see the myriad forest trees, even as they
gaze across the Strand, and whose feet still feel the clinging
moccasin even among the scores of clicking heels that hurry along
the thoroughfares of this camping-ground of the paleface.

So this is the place where dwells the Great White Father, ruler of
many lands, lodges, and tribes, in the hollow of whose hands is the
peace that rests between the once hostile red man and white. They
call him the King of England, but to us, the powerful Iroquois
nation of the north, he is always the "Great White Father." For
once he came to us in our far-off Canadian reserves, and with his
own hand fastened decorations and medals on the buckskin coats of
our oldest chiefs, just because they and their fathers used their
tomahawks in battle in the cause of England.

So I, one of his loyal allies, have come to see his camp, known to
the white man as London, his council which the whites call his
Parliament, where his sachems and chiefs make the laws of his
tribes, and to see his wigwam, known to the palefaces as Buckingham
Palace, but to the red man as the "Tepee of the Great White
Father." And this is what I see:--

  What the Indian Sees.

Lifting toward the sky are vast buildings of stone, not the same
kind of stone from which my forefathers fashioned their carven
pipes and corn-pounders, but a grayer, grimier rock that would not
take the polish we give by fingers dipped in sturgeon oil, and long
days of friction with fine sand and deer-hide.

I stand outside the great palace wigwam, the huge council-house by
the river. My seeing eyes may mark them, but my heart's eyes are
looking beyond all this wonderment, back to the land I have left
behind me. I picture the tepees by the far Saskatchewan; there
the tent poles, too, are lifting skyward, and the smoke ascending
through them from the smouldering fires within curls softly on the
summer air. Against the blurred sweep of horizon other camps etch
their outlines, other bands of red men with their herds of wild
cattle have sought the river lands. I hear the untamed hoofs
thundering up the prairie trail.

But the prairie sounds are slipping away, and my ears catch other
voices that rise above the ceaseless throb about me--voices that
are clear, high, and calling; they float across the city like the
music of a thousand birds of passage beating their wings through
the night, crying and murmuring plaintively as they journey
northward. They are the voices of St. Paul's calling, calling
me--St. Paul's where the paleface worships the Great Spirit, and
through whose portals he hopes to reach the happy hunting grounds.

  The Great Spirit.

As I entered its doorways it seemed to me to be the everlasting
abiding-place of the white man's Great Spirit.

The music brooded everywhere. It beat in my ears like the far-off
cadences of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, that rise and leap and
throb--like a storm hurling through the fir forest--like the
distant rising of an Indian war-song; it swept up those mighty
archways until the gray dome above me faded, and in its place
the stars came out to look down, not on these paleface kneeling
worshippers, but on a band of stalwart, sinewy, copper-coloured
devotees, my own people in my own land, who also assembled to do
honour to the Manitou of all nations.

The deep-throated organ and the boy's voices were gone; I heard
instead the melancholy incantations of our own pagan religionists.
The beautiful dignity of our great sacrificial rites seemed to
settle about me, to enwrap me in its garment of solemnity and
primitive stateliness.

  Beat of the Drum.

The atmosphere pulsed with the beat of the Indian drum, the
eerie penetrations of the turtle rattle that set the time of the
dancers' feet. Dance? It is not a dance, that marvellously slow,
serpentine-like figure with the soft swish, swish of moccasined
feet, and the faint jingling of elks'-teeth bracelets, keeping
rhythm with every footfall. It is not a dance, but an invocation
of motion. Why may we not worship with the graceful movement of
our feet? The paleface worships by moving his lips and tongue;
the difference is but slight.

The altar-lights of St. Paul's glowed for me no more. In their
place flared the camp fires of the Onondaga "long-house," and the
resinous scent of the burning pine drifted across the fetid London
air. I saw the tall, copper-skinned fire-keeper of the Iroquois
council enter, the circle of light flung fitfully against the black
surrounding woods. I have seen their white bishops, but none so
regal, so august as he. His garb of fringed buckskin and ermine was
no more grotesque than the vestments worn by the white preachers in
high places; he did not carry a book or a shining golden symbol,
but from his splendid shoulders was suspended a pure white lifeless
dog.

Into the red flame the strong hands gently lowered it, scores of
reverent, blanketed figures stood silent, awed, for it is the
highest, holiest festival of the year. Then the wild, strange chant
arose--the great pagan ritual was being intoned by the fire-keeper,
his weird, monotonous tones voicing this formula:

"The Great Spirit desires no human sacrifice, but we, His children,
must give to Him that which is nearest our hearts and nearest our
lives. Only the spotless and stainless can enter into His presence,
only that which is purified by fire. So--this white dog--a
member of our household, a co-habitant of our wigwam, and on the
smoke that arises from the purging fires will arise also the
thanksgivings of all those who desire that the Great Spirit in His
happy hunting grounds will forever smoke His pipe of peace, for
peace is between Him and His children for all time."

The mournful voice ceases. Again the hollow pulsing of the Indian
drum, the purring, flexible step of cushioned feet. I lift my head,
which has been bowed on the chair before me. It is St. Paul's after
all--and the clear boy-voices rise above the rich echoes of the
organ.



As It Was in the Beginning


They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin, but I am
something else, too--I am a woman.

I remember the first time I saw him. He came up the trail with some
Hudson's Bay trappers, and they stopped at the door of my father's
tepee. He seemed even then, fourteen years ago, an old man; his hair
seemed just as thin and white, his hands just as trembling and
fleshless as they were a month since, when I saw him for what I pray
his God is the last time.

My father sat in the tepee, polishing buffalo horns and smoking; my
mother, wrapped in her blanket, crouched over her quill-work, on the
buffalo-skin at his side; I was lounging at the doorway, idling,
watching, as I always watched, the thin, distant line of sky and
prairie; wondering, as I always wondered, what lay beyond it. Then
he came, this gentle old man with his white hair and thin, pale
face. He wore a long black coat, which I now know was the sign of
his office, and he carried a black leather-covered book, which, in
all the years I have known him, I have never seen him without.

The trappers explained to my father who he was, the Great Teacher,
the heart's Medicine Man, the "Blackcoat" we had heard of, who
brought peace where there was war, and the magic of whose black book
brought greater things than all the Happy Hunting Grounds of our
ancestors.

He told us many things that day, for he could speak the Cree tongue,
and my father listened, and listened, and when at last they left us,
my father said for him to come and sit within the tepee again.

He came, all the time he came, and my father welcomed him, but my
mother always sat in silence at work with the quills; my mother
never liked the Great "Blackcoat."

His stories fascinated me. I used to listen intently to the tale of
the strange new place he called "heaven," of the gold crown, of the
white dress, of the great music; and then he would tell of that
other strange place--hell. My father and I hated it; we feared it,
we dreamt of it, we trembled at it. Oh, if the "Blackcoat" would
only cease to talk of it! Now I know he saw its effect upon us, and
he used it as a whip to lash us into his new religion, but even then
my mother must have known, for each time he left the tepee she would
watch him going slowly away across the prairie; then when he was
disappearing into the far horizon she would laugh scornfully, and
say:

"If the white man made this Blackcoat's hell, let him go to it. It
is for the man who found it first. No hell for Indians, just Happy
Hunting Grounds. Blackcoat can't scare me."

And then, after weeks had passed, one day as he stood at the tepee
door he laid his white, old hand on my head and said to my father:
"Give me this little girl, chief. Let me take her to the mission
school; let me keep her, and teach her of the great God and His
eternal heaven. She will grow to be a noble woman, and return
perhaps to bring her people to the Christ."

My mother's eyes snapped. "No," she said. It was the first word she
ever spoke to the "Blackcoat." My father sat and smoked. At the end
of a half-hour he said:

"I am an old man, Blackcoat. I shall not leave the God of my fathers.
I like not your strange God's ways--all of them. I like not His two
new places for me when I am dead. Take the child, Blackcoat, and
save her from hell."

       *       *       *       *       *

The first grief of my life was when we reached the mission. They
took my buckskin dress off, saying I was now a little Christian girl
and must dress like all the white people at the mission. Oh, how I
hated that stiff new calico dress and those leather shoes. But,
little as I was, I said nothing, only thought of the time when I
should be grown, and do as my mother did, and wear the buckskins
and the blanket.

My next serious grief was when I began to speak the English, that
they forbade me to use any Cree words whatever. The rule of the
school was that any child heard using its native tongue must get
a slight punishment. I never understood it, I cannot understand
it now, why the use of my dear Cree tongue could be a matter for
correction or an action deserving punishment.

She was strict, the matron of the school, but only justly so, for
she had a heart and a face like her brother's, the "Blackcoat."
I had long since ceased to call him that. The trappers at the
post called him "St. Paul," because, they told me, of his
self-sacrificing life, his kindly deeds, his rarely beautiful old
face; so I, too, called him "St. Paul," thought oftener "Father
Paul," though he never liked the latter title, for he was a
Protestant. But as I was his pet, his darling of the whole school,
he let me speak of him as I would, knowing it was but my heart
speaking in love. His sister was a widow, and mother to a laughing
yellow-haired boy of about my own age, who was my constant playmate
and who taught me much of English in his own childish way. I used
to be fond of this child, just as I was fond of his mother and of
his uncle, my "Father Paul," but as my girlhood passed away, as
womanhood came upon me, I got strangely wearied of them all; I
longed, oh, God, how I longed for the old wild life! It came with
my womanhood, with my years.

What mattered it to me now that they had taught me all their
ways?--their tricks of dress, their reading, their writing, their
books. What mattered it that "Father Paul" loved me, that the
traders at the post called me pretty, that I was a pet of all, from
the factor to the poorest trapper in the service? I wanted my own
people, my own old life, my blood called out for it, but they always
said I must not return to my father's tepee. I heard them talk
amongst themselves of keeping me away from pagan influences; they
told each other that if I returned to the prairies, the tepees, I
would degenerate, slip back to paganism, as other girls had done;
marry, perhaps, with a pagan--and all their years of labor and
teaching would be lost.

I said nothing, but I waited. And then one night the feeling
overcame me. I was in the Hudson's Bay store when an Indian came
in from the north with a large pack of buckskin. As they unrolled
it a dash of its insinuating odor filled the store. I went over
and leaned above the skins a second, then buried my face in them,
swallowing, drinking the fragrance of them, that went to my head
like wine. Oh, the wild wonder of that wood-smoked tan, the
subtilty of it, the untamed smell of it! I drank it into my lungs,
my innermost being was saturated with it, till my mind reeled
and my heart seemed twisted with a physical agony. My childhood
recollections rushed upon me, devoured me. I left the store in a
strange, calm frenzy, and going rapidly to the mission house I
confronted my Father Paul and demanded to be allowed to go "home,"
if only for a day. He received the request with the same refusal and
the same gentle sigh that I had so often been greeted with, but this
time the desire, the smoke-tan, the heart-ache, never lessened.

Night after night I would steal away by myself and go to the border
of the village to watch the sun set in the foothills, to gaze at the
far line of sky and prairie, to long and long for my father's lodge.
And Laurence--always Laurence--my fair-haired, laughing, child
playmate, would come calling and calling for me: "Esther, where are
you? We miss you; come in, Esther, come in with me." And if I did
not turn at once to him and follow, he would come and place his
strong hands on my shoulders and laugh into my eyes and say,
"Truant, truant, Esther; can't _we_ make you happy?"

My old childhood playmate had vanished years ago. He was a tall,
slender young man now, handsome as a young chief, but with laughing
blue eyes, and always those yellow curls about his temples. He was
my solace in my half-exile, my comrade, my brother, until one night
it was, "Esther, Esther, can't _I_ make you happy?"

I did not answer him; only looked out across the plains and thought
of the tepees. He came close, close. He locked his arms about me,
and with my face pressed up to his throat he stood silent. I felt
the blood from my heart sweep to my very finger-tips. I loved him.
O God, how I loved him! In a wild, blind instant it all came, just
because he held me so and was whispering brokenly, "Don't leave me,
don't leave me, Esther; _my_ Esther, my child-love, my playmate, my
girl-comrade, my little Cree sweetheart, will you go away to your
people, or stay, stay for me, for my arms, as I have you now?"

No more, no more the tepees; no more the wild stretch of prairie,
the intoxicating fragrance of the smoke-tanned buckskin; no more the
bed of buffalo hide, the soft, silent moccasin; no more the dark
faces of my people, the dulcet cadence of the sweet Cree tongue--only
this man, this fair, proud, tender man who held me in his arms, in
his heart. My soul prayed his great white God, in that moment, that
He would let me have only this. It was twilight when we re-entered
the mission gate. We were both excited, feverish. Father Paul was
reading evening prayers in the large room beyond the hallway; his
soft, saint-like voice stole beyond the doors, like a benediction
upon us. I went noiselessly upstairs to my own room and sat there
undisturbed for hours.

The clock downstairs struck one, startling me from my dreams of
happiness, and at the same moment a flash of light attracted me. My
room was in an angle of the building, and my window looked almost
directly down into those of Father Paul's study, into which at that
instant he was entering, carrying a lamp. "Why, Laurence," I heard
him exclaim, "what are you doing here? I thought, my boy, you were
in bed hours ago."

"No, uncle, not in bed, but in dreamland," replied Laurence, arising
from the window, where evidently he, too, had spent the night hours
as I had done.

Father Paul fumbled about a moment, found his large black book,
which for once he seemed to have got separated from, and was turning
to leave, when the curious circumstance of Laurence being there at
so unusual an hour seemed to strike him anew. "Better go to sleep,
my son," he said simply, then added curiously, "Has anything
occurred to keep you up?"

Then Laurence spoke: "No, uncle, only--only, I'm happy, that's all."

Father Paul stood irresolute. Then: "It is--?"

"Esther," said Laurence quietly, but he was at the old man's side,
his hand was on the bent old shoulder, his eyes proud and appealing.

Father Paul set the lamp on the table, but, as usual, one hand held
that black book, the great text of his life. His face was paler than
I had ever seen it--graver.

"Tell me of it," he requested.

I leaned far out of my window and watched them both. I listened with
my very heart, for Laurence was telling him of me, of his love, of
the new-found joy of that night.

"You have said nothing of marriage to her?" asked Father Paul.

"Well--no; but she surely understands that--"

"Did you speak of _marriage_?" repeated Father Paul, with a harsh
ring in his voice that was new to me.

"No, uncle, but--"

"Very well, then, very well."

There was a brief silence. Laurence stood staring at the old man as
though he were a stranger; he watched him push a large chair up to
the table, slowly seat himself; then mechanically following his
movements, he dropped on to a lounge. The old man's head bent low,
but his eyes were bright and strangely fascinating. He began:

"Laurence, my boy, your future is the dearest thing to me of all
earthly interests. Why you _can't_ marry this girl--no, no, sit, sit
until I have finished," he added, with raised voice, as Laurence
sprang up, remonstrating. "I have long since decided that you marry
well; for instance, the Hudson's Bay factor's daughter."

Laurence broke into a fresh, rollicking laugh. "What, uncle," he
said, "little Ida McIntosh? Marry that little yellow-haired fluff
ball, that kitten, that pretty little dolly?"

"Stop," said Father Paul. Then with a low, soft persuasiveness, "She
is _white_, Laurence."

My lover started. "Why, uncle, what do you mean?" he faltered.

"Only this, my son: poor Esther comes of uncertain blood; would it
do for you--the missionary's nephew, and adopted son, you might
say--to marry the daughter of a pagan Indian? Her mother is
hopelessly uncivilized; her father has a dash of French
somewhere--half-breed, you know, my boy, half-breed." Then, with
still lower tone and half-shut, crafty eyes, he added: "The blood is
a bad, bad mixture, _you_ know that; you know, too, that I am very
fond of the girl, poor dear Esther. I have tried to separate her
from evil pagan influences; she is the daughter of the Church; I
want her to have no other parent; but you never can tell what lurks
in a caged animal that has once been wild. My whole heart is with
the Indian people, my son; my whole heart, my whole life, has been
devoted to bringing them to Christ, _but it is a different thing to
marry with one of them_."

His small old eyes were riveted on Laurence like a hawk's on a rat.
My heart lay like ice in my bosom.

Laurence, speechless and white, stared at him breathlessly.

"Go away somewhere," the old man was urging; "to Winnipeg, Toronto,
Montreal; forget her, then come back to Ida McIntosh. A union of the
Church and Hudson's Bay will mean great things, and may ultimately
result in my life's ambition, the civilization of this entire tribe,
that we have worked so long to bring to God."

I listened, sitting like one frozen. Could those words have been
uttered by my venerable teacher, by him whom I revered as I would
one of the saints in his own black book? Ah, there was no mistaking
it. My white father, my life-long friend who pretended to love me,
to care for my happiness, was urging the man I worshipped to forget
me, to marry with the factor's daughter--because of what? Of my red
skin; my good, old, honest pagan mother; my confiding French-Indian
father. In a second all the care, the hollow love he had given me
since my childhood, were as things that never existed. I hated that
old mission priest as I hated his white man's hell. I hated his
long, white hair; I hated his thin, white hands; I hated his body,
his soul, his voice, his black book--oh, how I hated the very
atmosphere of him.

Laurence sat motionless, his face buried in his hands, but the old
man continued, "No, no; not the child of that pagan mother; you
can't trust her, my son. What would you do with a wife who might any
day break from you to return to her prairies and her buckskins? _You
can't trust her_." His eyes grew smaller, more glittering, more
fascinating then, and leaning with an odd, secret sort of movement
towards Laurence, he almost whispered, "Think of her silent ways,
her noiseless step; the girl glides about like an apparition; her
quick fingers, her wild longings--I don't know why, but with all my
fondness for her, she reminds me sometimes of a strange--_snake_."

Laurence shuddered, lifted his face, and said hoarsely: "You're
right, uncle; perhaps I'd better not; I'll go away, I'll forget her,
and then--well, then--yes, you are right, it _is_ a different thing
to marry one of them." The old man arose. His feeble fingers still
clasped his black book; his soft white hair clung about his forehead
like that of an Apostle; his eyes lost their peering, crafty
expression; his bent shoulders resumed the dignity of a minister
of the living God; he was the picture of what the trader called
him--"St. Paul."

"Good-night, son," he said.

"Good-night, uncle, and thank you for bringing me to myself."

They were the last words I ever heard uttered by either that old
arch-fiend or his weak, miserable kinsman. Father Paul turned and
left the room. I watched his withered hand--the hand I had so often
felt resting on my head in holy benedictions--clasp the door-knob,
turn it slowly, then, with bowed head and his pale face wrapped in
thought, he left the room--left it with the mad venom of my hate
pursuing him like the very Evil One he taught me of.

What were his years of kindness and care now? What did I care for
his God, his heaven, his hell? He had robbed me of my native faith,
of my parents, of my people, of this last, this life of love that
would have made a great, good woman of me. God! how I hated him!

I crept to the closet in my dark little room. I felt for the bundle
I had not looked at for years--yes, it was there, the buckskin dress
I had worn as a little child when they brought me to the mission. I
tucked it under my arm and descended the stairs noiselessly. I would
look into the study and speak good-bye to Laurence; then I would--

I pushed open the door. He was lying on the couch where a short time
previously he had sat, white and speechless, listening to Father
Paul. I moved towards him softly. God in heaven, he was already
asleep. As I bent over him the fullness of his perfect beauty
impressed me for the first time; his slender form, his curving mouth
that almost laughed even in sleep, his fair, tossed hair, his
smooth, strong-pulsing throat. God! how I loved him!

Then there arose the picture of the factor's daughter. I hated her.
I hated her baby face, her yellow hair, her whitish skin. "She shall
not marry him," my soul said. "I will kill him first--kill his
beautiful body, his lying, false heart." Something in my heart
seemed to speak; it said over and over again, "Kill him, kill him;
she will never have him then. Kill him. It will break Father Paul's
heart and blight his life. He has killed the best of you, of your
womanhood; kill _his_ best, his pride, his hope--his sister's son,
his nephew Laurence." But how? how?

What had that terrible old man said I was like? A _strange snake_.
A snake? The idea wound itself about me like the very coils of a
serpent. What was this in the beaded bag of my buckskin dress? This
little thing rolled in tan that my mother had given me at parting
with the words, "Don't touch much, but some time maybe you want it!"
Oh! I knew well enough what it was--a small flint arrow-head dipped
in the venom of some _strange snake_.

I knelt beside him and laid my hot lips on his hand. I worshipped
him, oh, how, how I worshipped him! Then again the vision of _her_
baby face, _her_ yellow-hair--I scratched his wrist twice with the
arrow-tip. A single drop of red blood oozed up; he stirred. I turned
the lamp down and slipped out of the room--out of the house.

       *       *       *       *       *

I dream nightly of the horrors of the white man's hell. Why did they
teach me of it, only to fling me into it?

Last night as I crouched beside my mother on the buffalo-hide, Dan
Henderson, the trapper, came in to smoke with my father. He said old
Father Paul was bowed with grief, that with my disappearance I was
suspected, but that there was no proof. Was it not merely a snake
bite?

They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin.

They seem to have forgotten I am a woman.



The Legend of Lillooet Falls


No one could possibly mistake the quiet little tap at the door. It
could be given by no other hand west of the Rockies save that of my
old friend The Klootchman. I dropped a lap full of work and sprang
to open the door; for the slanting rains were chill outside, albeit
the December grass was green and the great masses of English ivy
clung wet and fresh as in summer about the low stone wall that ran
between my verandah and the street.

"Kla-how-ya, Tillicum," I greeted, dragging her into the warmth and
comfort of my "den," and relieving her of her inseparable basket,
and removing her rain-soaked shawl. Before she spoke she gave that
peculiar gesture common to the Indian woman from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. She lifted both hands and with each forefinger
smoothed gently along her forehead from the parting of her hair to
the temples. It is the universal habit of the red woman, and simply
means a desire for neatness in her front locks.

I busied myself immediately with the teakettle, for, like all her
kind, The Klootchman dearly loves her tea.

The old woman's eyes sparkled as she watched the welcome brewing,
while she chatted away in half English, half Chinook, telling me
of her doings in all these weeks that I had not seen her. But it
was when I handed her a huge old-fashioned breakfast cup fairly
brimming with tea as strong as lye that she really described her
journeyings.

She had been north to the Skeena River, south to the great "Fair"
at Seattle, but, best of all seemingly to her, was her trip into
the interior. She had been up the trail to Lillooet in the great
"Cariboo" country. It was my turn then to have sparkling eyes, for
I traversed that inexpressibly beautiful trail five years ago, and
the delight of that journey will remain with me for all time.

"And, oh! Tillicum," I cried, "have your good brown ears actually
listened to the call of the falls across the canyon--the Falls of
Lillooet?"

"My ears have heard them whisper, laugh, weep," she replied in
Chinook.

"Yes," I answered, "they do all those things. They have magic
voices--those dear, far-off falls!"

At the word "magic" her keen eyes snapped, she set her empty cup
aside and looked at me solemnly.

"Then you know the story--the strange tale?" she asked almost
whisperingly.

I shook my head. This was always the crucial moment with my
Klootchman, when her voice lowers, and she asks if you know things.
You must be diplomatic, and never question her in turn. If you do
her lips will close in unbreakable silence.

"I have heard no story, but I have heard the Falls 'whisper, laugh
and weep.' That is enough for me," I said, with seeming
indifference.

"What do you see when you look at them from across the canyon?" she
asked. "Do they look to you like anything else but falling water?"

I thought for a moment before replying. Memory seemed to hold up
against an indistinct photograph of towering fir-crested heights,
where through a broken ridge of rock a shower of silvery threads
cascaded musically down, down, down, until they lost themselves in
the mighty Fraser, that hurled itself through the yawning canyon
stretched at my feet. I have never seen such slender threads of
glowing tissue save on early morning cobwebs at sun-up.

"The Falls look like cobwebs," I said, as the memory touched me.
"Millions of fine misty cobwebs woven together."

"Then the legend must be true," she uttered, half to herself. I
slipped down on my treasured wolf-skin rug near her chair, and with
hands locked about my knees, sat in silence, knowing it was the one
and only way to lure her to speech. She arose, helped herself to
more tea, and with the toe of her beaded moccasin idly stroked one
of the wolf-skin paws. "Yes," she said, with some decision, "the
Indian men of magic say that the falls are cobwebs twisted and
braided together."

I nodded, but made no comment; then her voice droned into the
broken English, that, much as I love it, I must leave to the
reader's imagination. "Indian mothers are strange," she began.
I nodded again.

"Yes, they are strange, and there is a strange tie between them
and their children. The men of magic say they can _see_ that tie,
though you and I cannot. It is thin, fine silvery as a cobweb, but
strong as the ropes of wild vine that swing down the great canyons.
No storm ever breaks those vines; the tempests that drag the giant
firs and cedars up by their roots, snap their branches and break
their boles, never break the creeping vines. They may be torn from
their strongholds, but in the young months of the summer the vine
will climb up, and cling again. _Nothing_ breaks it. So is the
cobweb tie the Men of Magic see between the Indian mother and her
child.

"There was a time when no falls leapt and sang down the heights at
Lillooet, and in those days our men were very wild and warlike; but
the women were gentle and very beautiful, and they loved and lived
and bore children as women have done before, and since.

"But there was one, more gentle, more beautiful than all others of
the tribe. 'Be-be,' our people call her; it is the Chinook word for
'a kiss.' None of our people knew her real name; but it was a kiss
of hers that made this legend, so as 'Be-be' we speak of her.

"She was a mother-woman, but save for one beautiful girl-child, her
family of six were all boys, splendid, brave boys, too, but this
one treasured girl-child they called 'Morning-mist.' She was little
and frail and beautiful, like the clouds one sees at daybreak
circling about the mountain peaks. Her father and her brothers
loved her, but the heart of Be-be, her mother, seemed wrapped round
and about that misty-eyed child.

"'I love you,' the mother would say many times a day, as she caught
the girl-child in her arms. 'And I love you,' the girl-child would
answer, resting for a moment against the warm shoulder. 'Little
Flower,' the woman would murmur, 'thou art morning to me, thou art
golden mid-day, thou art slumbrous nightfall to my heart.'

"So these two loved and lived, mother and daughter, made for each
other, shaped into each other's lives as the moccasin is shaped to
the foot.

"Then came that long, shadowed, sunless day, when Be-be, returning
from many hours of ollallie picking, her basket filled to the brim
with rich fruit, her heart reaching forth to her home even before
her swift feet could traverse the trail, found her husband and
her boys stunned with a dreadful fear, searching with wild eyes,
hurrying feet, and grief-wrung hearts for her little 'Morning-child,'
who had wandered into the forest while her brothers played--the
forest which was deep and dark and dangerous,--and had not returned."

The Klootchman's voice ceased. For a long moment she gazed straight
before her, then looking at me said:

"You have heard the Falls of Lillooet weep?" I nodded.

"It is the weeping of that Indian mother, sobbing through the
centuries, that you hear." She uttered the words with a cadence
of grief in her voice.

"Hours, nights, days, they searched for the morning-child," she
continued. "And each moment of that unending agony to the
mother-woman is repeated to-day in the call, the wail, the
everlasting sobbing of the falls. At night the wolves howled up
the canyon. 'God of my fathers, keep safe my Morning-child' the
mother would implore. In the glare of day eagles poised, and
vultures wheeled above the forest, their hungry claws, their
unblinking eyes, their beaks of greed shining in the sunlight.
'God of my fathers, keep safe my Morning-child' was again wrung
from the mother's lips. For one long moon, that dawned, and
shone and darkened, that mother's heart lived out its torture.
Then one pale daybreak a great fleet of canoes came down the
Frazer River. Those that paddled were of a strange tribe, they
spoke in a strange tongue, but their hearts were human, and their
skins were of the rich copper-color of the Upper Lillooet country.
As they steered downstream, running the rapids, braving the
whirlpools, they chanted, in monotone:

  "'We have a lost child
    A beautiful lost child.
    We love this lost child,
    But the heart of the child
    Calls the mother of the child.
    Come and claim this lost child.'

"The music of the chant was most beautiful, but no music in the
world of the white man's Tyee could equal that which rang through
the heart of Be-be, the Indian mother-woman.

"Heart upon heart, lips upon lips, the Morning-child and the
mother caught each other in embrace. The strange tribe told of how
they had found the girl-child wandering fearfully in the forest,
crouching from the claws of eagles, shrinking from the horror of
wolves, but the mother with her regained treasure in her arms
begged them to cease their tales. 'I have gone through agonies
enough, oh, my friends,' she cried aloud. 'Let me rest from torture
now.' Then her people came and made a great feast and potlatch for
this strange Upper Lillooet tribe, and at the feast Be-be arose,
and, lifting the girl-child to her shoulder, she commanded silence
and spoke:

"'O Sagalie Tyee (God of all the earth), You have given back to me
my treasure; take my tears, my sobs, my happy laughter, my joy--take
the cobweb chains that bind my Morning-child and me--make them
sing to others, that they may know my gratitude. O Sagalie Tyee,
make them sing.' As she spoke, she kissed the child. At that moment
the Falls of Lillooet came like a million strands, dashing and
gleaming down the canyon, sobbing, laughing, weeping, calling,
singing. You have listened to them."

The Klootchman's voice was still. Outside, the rains still slanted
gently, like a whispering echo of the far-away falls. "Thank you,
Tillicum of mine; it is a beautiful legend," I said. She did not
reply until, wrapped about in her shawl, she had clasped my hand
in good-bye. At the door she paused. "Yes," she said--"and it is
true." I smiled to myself. I love my Klootchman. She is so _very_
Indian.



Her Majesty's Guest

[Author's Note.--The "Onondaga Jam" occurred late in the seventies,
and this tale is founded upon actual incidents in the life of the
author's father, who was Forest Warden on the Indian Reserve.]


I have never been a good man, but then I have never pretended to be
one, and perhaps that at least will count in my favor in the day
when the great dividends are declared.

I have been what is called "well brought up" and I would give some
years of my life to possess now the money spent on my education;
how I came to drop from what I should have been to what I am would
scarcely interest anyone--if indeed I were capable of detailing the
process, which I am not. I suppose I just rolled leisurely down
hill like many another fellow.

My friends, however, still credit me with one virtue; that is an
absolute respect for my neighbor's wife, a feeling which, however,
does not extend to his dollars. His money is mine if I can get it,
and to do myself justice I prefer getting it from him honestly, at
least without sufficient dishonesty to place me behind prison bars.

Some experience has taught me that when a man is reduced to getting
his living, as I do, by side issues and small deals, there is no
better locality for him to operate than around the borders of some
Indian Reserve.

The pagan Indian is an unsuspicious fool. You can do him up right
and left. The Christian Indian is as sharp as a fox, and with a
little gloved handling he will always go in with you on a few lumber
and illicit whiskey deals, which means that you have the confidence
of his brethren and their dollars at the same time.

I had outwitted the law for six years. I had smuggled more liquor
into the Indian Bush on the Grand River Reserve and drawn more
timber out of it to the Hamilton and Brantford markets than any
forty dealers put together. Gradually, the law thinned the whole
lot out--all but me; but I was slippery as an eel and my bottles of
whiskey went on, and my loads of ties and timber came off, until
every officer and preacher in the place got up and demanded an
inspection.

The Government at Ottawa awoke, stretched, yawned, then printed
some flaring posters and stuck them around the border villages. The
posters were headed by a big print of the British Coat of Arms,
and some large type beneath announced terrible fines and heavy
imprisonments for anyone caught hauling Indian timber off the
Reserve, or hauling whiskey on to it. Then the Government rubbed
its fat palms together, settled itself in its easy chair, and
snored again.

I? Oh, I went on with my operations.

And at Christmas time Tom Barrett arrived on the scene. Not much of
an event, you'd say if you saw him, still less if you heard him.
According to himself, he knew everything and could do everything in
the known world; he was just twenty-two and as obnoxiously fresh a
thing as ever boasted itself before older men.

He was the old missionary's son and had come up from college at
Montreal to help his father preach salvation to the Indians on
Sundays, and to swagger around week-days in his brand new
clerical-cut coat and white tie.

He enjoyed what is called, I believe, "deacon's orders." They tell
me he was recently "priested," to use their straight English Church
term, and is now parson of a swell city church. Well! they can have
him. I'll never split on him, but I could tell them some things
about Tom Barrett that would soil his surplice--at least in my
opinion, but you never can be sure when even religious people will
make a hero out of a rogue.

The first time I ever saw him he came into "Jake's" one night,
quite late. We were knocked clean dumb. "Jake's" isn't the place
you would count on seeing a clerical-cut coat in.

It's not a thoroughly disreputable place, for Jake has a decent
enough Indian wife; but he happens also to have a cellar which has
a hard name for illicit-whiskey supplies, though never once has the
law, in its numerous and unannounced visits to the shanty, ever
succeeded in discovering barrel or bottle. I consider myself a
pretty smart man, but Jake is cleverer than I am.

When young Barrett came in that night, there was a clatter of hiding
cups. "Hello, boys," he said, and sat down wearily opposite me,
leaning his arms on the table between us like one utterly done out.

Jake, it seemed, had the distinction of knowing him; so he said
kind of friendly-like,

"Hello, parson--sick?"

"Sick? Sick nothing," said Barrett, "except sick to death of this
place. And don't 'parson' me! I'm 'parson' on Sundays; the rest of
the six days I'm Tom Barrett--Tom, if you like."

We were dead silent. For myself, I thought the fellow clean
crazy; but the next moment he had turned half around, and with a
quick, soft, coaxing movement, for all the world like a woman, he
slipped his arm around Jake's shoulders, and said, "Say, Jake,
don't let the fellows mind me," Then in a lower tone--"What have
you got to drink?"

Jake went white-looking and began to talk of some cider he'd got in
the cellar; but Barrett interrupted with, "Look here, Jake, just
drop that rot; I know all about _you_." He tipped a half wink at
the rest of us, but laid his fingers across his lips. "Come, old
man," he wheedled like a girl, "you don't know what it is to be
dragged away from college and buried alive in this Indian bush. The
governor's good enough, you know--treats me white and all that--but
you know what he is on whiskey. I tell you I've got a throat as
long and dry as a fence rail--"

No one spoke.

"You'll save my life if you do," he added, crushing a bank note
into Jake's hand.

Jake looked at me. The same thought flashed on us both; if we could
get this church student on our side--Well! Things would be easy
enough and public suspicion never touch us. Jake turned,
resurrected the hidden cups, and went down cellar.

"You're Dan McLeod, aren't you?" suggested Barrett, leaning across
the table and looking sharply at me.

"That's me," I said in turn, and sized him up. I didn't like his
face; it was the undeniable face of a liar--small, uncertain eyes,
set together close like those of a fox, a thin nose, a narrow,
womanish chin that accorded with his girlish actions of coaxing,
and a mouth I didn't quite understand.

Jake had come up with the bottle, but before he could put it on the
table Barrett snatched it like a starving dog would a hunk of meat.

He peered at the label, squinting his foxy eyes, then laughed up at
Jake.

"I hope you don't sell the Indians _this_," he said, tapping the
capsule.

No, Jake never sold a drop of whiskey to Indians,--the law, you
know, was very strict and--

"Oh, I don't care whatever else you sell them," said Barrett, "but
their red throats would never appreciate fine twelve-year-old like
this. Come, boys."

We came.

"So you're Dan McLeod," he continued after the first long pull,
"I've heard about you, too. You've got a deck of cards in your
pocket--haven't you? Let's have a game."

I looked at him, and though, as I said in the beginning, I'm not a
good man, I felt honestly sorry for the old missionary and his wife
at that moment.

"It's no use," said the boy, reading my hesitation. "I've broken
loose. I must have a slice of the old college life, just for
to-night."

I decided the half-cut of Indian blood on his mother's side was
showing itself; it was just enough to give Tom a good red flavoring
and a rare taste for gaming and liquor.

We played until daylight, when Barrett said he must make his sneak
home, and reaching for his wide-brimmed, soft felt preacher's hat,
left--having pocketed twenty-six of our good dollars, swallowed
unnumbered cups of twelve-year-old and won the combined respect of
everyone at Jake's.

The next Sunday Jake went to church out of curiosity. He said Tom
Barrett "officiated" in a surplice as white as snow and with a face
as sinless as your mother's. He preached most eloquently against
the terrible evil of the illicit liquor trade, and implored his
Indian flock to resist this greatest of all pitfalls. Jake even
seemed impressed as he told us.

But Tom Barrett's "breaking loose for once" was like any other
man's. Night after night saw him at Jake's, though he never
played to win after that first game. As the weeks went on, he got
anxious-looking; his clerical coat began to grow seedy, his white
ties uncared for; he lost his fresh, cheeky talk, and the climax
came late in March when one night I found him at Jake's sitting
alone, his face bowed down on the table above his folded arms, and
something so disheartened in his attitude that I felt sorry for
the boy. Perhaps it was that I was in trouble myself that day; my
biggest "deal" of the season had been scented by the officers and
the chances were they would come on and seize the five barrels
of whiskey I had been as many weeks smuggling into the Reserve.
However it was, I put my hand on his shoulder, and told him to
brace up, asking at the same time what was wrong.

"Money," he answered, looking up with kind of haggard eyes. "Dan, I
must have money. City bills, college debts--everything has rolled
up against me. I daren't tell the governor, and he couldn't help me
anyway, and I can't go back for another term owing every man in my
class." He looked suicidal. And then I made the plunge I'd been
thinking on all day.

"Would a hundred dollars be any good to you?" I eyed him hard as I
said it, and sat down in my usual place, opposite him.

"Good?" he exclaimed, half rising. "It would be an eternal
godsend." His foxy eyes glittered. I thought I detected greed in
them; perhaps it was only relief.

I told him it was his if he would only help me, and making sure we
were quite alone, I ran off a hurried account of my "deal," then
proposed that he should "accidentally" meet the officers near the
border, ring in with them as a parson would be likely to do, tell
them he suspicioned the whiskey was directly at the opposite side
of the Reserve to where I really had stored it, get them wild-goose
chasing miles away, and give me a chance to clear the stuff and
myself as well; in addition to the hundred I would give him twenty
per cent. on the entire deal. He changed color and the sweat stood
out on his forehead.

"One hundred dollars this time to-morrow night," I said. He didn't
move. "And twenty per cent. One hundred dollars this time to-morrow
night," I repeated.

He began to weaken. I lit my pipe and looked indifferent, though
I knew I was a lost man if he refused--and informed. Suddenly he
stretched his hand across the table, impulsively, and closed it
over mine. I knew I had him solid then.

"Dan," he choked up, "it's a terrible thing for a divinity student
to do; but--" his fingers tightened nervously. "I'm with you!" Then
in a moment, "Find some whiskey, Dan. I'm done up."

He soon got braced enough to ask me who was in the deal, and what
timber we expected to trade for. When I told him Lige Smith and
Jack Jackson were going to help me, he looked scared and asked me
if I thought they would split on him. He was so excited I thought
him cowardly, but the poor devil had reason enough, I supposed, to
want to keep the transaction from the ears of his father, or worse
still--the bishop. He seemed easier when I assured him the boys
were square, and immensely gratified at the news that I had already
traded six quarts of the stuff for over a hundred dollars' worth of
cordwood.

"We'll never get it across the river to the markets," he said
dolefully. "I came over this morning in a canoe. Ice is all out."

"What about the Onondaga Jam?" I said. He winked.

"That'll do. I'd forgotten it," he answered, and chirped up right
away like a kid.

But I hadn't forgotten the Jam. It had been a regular gold-mine to
me all that open winter, when the ice froze and thawed every week
and finally jammed itself clean to the river bottom in the throat
of the bend up at Onondaga, and the next day the thermometer fell
to eleven degrees below zero, freezing it into a solid block that
bridged the river for traffic, and saved my falling fortunes.

"And where's the whiskey hidden?" he asked after awhile.

"No you don't," I laughed. "Parson or pal, no man living knows or
will know where it is till he helps me haul it away. I'll trust
none of you."

"I'm not a thief," he pouted.

"No," I said, "but you're blasted hard up, and I don't intend to
place temptation in your way."

He laughed good-naturedly and turned the subject aside just as Lige
Smith and Jack Jackson came in with an unusual companion that put
a stop to all further talk. Women were never seen at night time
around Jake's; even his wife was invisible, and I got a sort of
shock when I saw old Cayuga Joe's girl, Elizabeth, following at the
boys' heels. It had been raining and the girl, a full blood Cayuga,
shivered in the damp and crouched beside the stove.

Tom Barrett started when he saw her. His color rose and he began to
mark up the table with his thumb nail. I could see he felt his fix.
The girl--Indian right through--showed no surprise at seeing him
there, but that did not mean she would keep her mouth shut about it
next day, Tom was undoubtedly _discovered_.

Notwithstanding her unwelcome presence, however, Jackson managed to
whisper to me that the Forest Warden and his officers were alive
and bound for the Reserve the following day. But it didn't worry me
worth a cent; I knew we were safe as a church with Tom Barrett's
clerical coat in our midst. He was coming over to our corner now.

"That hundred's right on the dead square, Dan?" he asked anxiously,
taking my arm and moving to the window.

I took a roll of bank notes from my trousers' pocket and with my
back to the gang counted out ten tens. I always carry a good wad
with me with a view to convenience if I have to make a hurried exit
from the scene of my operations.

He shook his head and stood away. "Not till I've earned it, McLeod."

What fools very young men make of themselves sometimes. The girl
arose, folding her damp shawl over her head, and made towards the
door; but he intercepted her, saying it was late and as their ways
lay in the same direction, he would take her home. She shot a quick
glance at him and went out. Some little uneasy action of his caught
my notice. In a second my suspicions were aroused; the meeting had
been arranged, and I knew from what I had seen him to be that the
girl was doomed.

It was all very well for me to do up Cayuga Joe--he was the Indian
whose hundred dollars' worth of cordwood I owned in lieu of
six quarts of bad whiskey--but his women-folks were entitled to be
respected at least while I was around. I looked at my watch; it was
past midnight. I suddenly got boiling hot clean through.

"Look here, Tom Barrett," I said, "I ain't a saint, as everybody
knows; but if you don't treat that girl right, you'll have to
square it up with me, d'you understand?"

He threw me a nasty look. "Keep your gallantry for some occasion
when it's needed, Dan McLeod," he sneered, and with a laugh I
didn't like, he followed the girl out into the rain.

I walked some distance behind them for two miles. When they reached
her father's house and went in, I watched her through the small
uncurtained window put something on the fire to cook, then arouse
her mother, who even at that late hour sat beside the stove smoking
a clay pipe. The old woman had apparently met with some accident;
her head and shoulders were bound up, and she seemed in pain.
Barrett talked with her considerably and once when I caught sight
of his face, it was devilish with some black passion I did not
recognize. Although I felt sure the girl was now all right for the
night, there was something about this meeting I didn't like; so I
lay around until just daylight when Jackson and Lige Smith came
through the bush as pre-arranged should I not return to Jake's.

It was not long before Elizabeth and Tom came out again and entered
a thick little bush behind the shanty. Lige lifted the axe off the
woodpile with a knowing look, and we all three followed silently.
I was surprised to find it a well beaten and equally well concealed
trail. All my suspicions returned. I knew now that Barrett was a
bad lot all round, and as soon as I had quit using him and his
coat, I made up my mind to rid my quarters of him; fortunately I
knew enough about him to use that knowledge as a whip-lash.

We followed them for something over a mile, when--heaven and hell!
The trail opened abruptly on the clearing where lay my recently
acquired cordwood with my five barrels of whiskey concealed in its
midst.

The girl strode forward, and with the strength of a man, pitched
down a dozen sticks with lightning speed.

"There!" she cried, turning to Tom. "There you find him--you find
him whiskey. You say you spill. No more my father he's drunk all
day, he beat my mother."

I stepped out.

"So, Tom Barrett," I said, "you've played the d----d sneak and
hunted it out!"

He fairly jumped at the sound of my voice; then he got white as
paper, and then--something came into his face that I never saw
before. It was a look like his father's, the old missionary.

"Yes, McLeod," he answered. "And I've hunted _you_ out. It's cost
me the loss of a whole term at college and a considerable amount of
self-respect, but I've got my finger on you now!"

The whole infernal trick burst right in on my intelligence. If I
had had a revolver, he would have been a dead man; but border
traders nowadays are not desperadoes with bowie knives and hip
pockets--

"You surely don't mean to split on me?" I asked.

"I surely don't mean to do anything else," he cheeked back.

"Then, Tom Barrett," I sputtered, raging, "you're the dirtiest cad
and the foulest liar that ever drew the breath of life."

"I dare say I am," he said smoothly. Then with rising anger he
advanced, peering into my face with his foxy eyes. "And I'll tell
you right here, Dan McLeod, I'd be a hundred times a cad, and a
thousand times a liar to save the souls and bodies of our Indians
from going to hell, through your cursed whiskey."

I have always been a brave man, but I confess I felt childishly
scared before the wild, mesmeric power of his eyes. I was unable to
move a finger, but I blurted out boastfully: "If it wasn't for your
preacher's hat and coat I'd send your sneaking soul to Kingdom
Come, right here!"

Instantly he hauled off his coat and tie and stood with clenched
fists while his strange eyes fairly spat green fire.

"Now," he fumed, "I've discarded my cloth, Dan McLeod. You've got
to deal with a man now, not with a minister."

To save my immortal soul I can't tell why I couldn't stir. I only
know that everything seemed to drop out of sight except his two
little blazing eyes. I stood like a fool, queered, dead queered
right through.

He turned politely to the girl. "You may go, Elizabeth," he said,
"and thank you for your assistance." The girl turned and went up
the trail without a word.

With the agility of a cat he sprang on to the wood-pile, pitched
off enough cordwood to expose my entire "cellar;" then going across
to Lige, he coolly took the axe out of his hand. His face was
white and set, but his voice was natural enough as he said:

"Now, gentlemen, whoever cares to interrupt me will get the blade
of this axe buried in his brain, as heaven is my witness."

I didn't even curse as he split the five barrels into slivers and
my well-fought-for whiskey soaked into the slush. Once he lifted
his head and looked at me, and the mouth I didn't understand
revealed itself; there was something about it like a young
Napoleon's.

I never hated a man in my life as I hated Tom Barrett then. That
I daren't resist him made it worse. I watched him finish his caddish
job, throw down the axe, take his coat over his arm, and leave the
clearing without a word.

But no sooner was he out of sight than my devilish temper broke
out, and I cursed and blasphemed for half an hour. I'd have his
blood if it cost my neck a rope, and that too before he could inform
on us. The boys were with me, of course, poor sort of dogs with no
grit of their own, and with the axe as my only weapon we left the
bush and ran towards the river.

I fairly yelled at my good luck as I reached the high bank. There,
a few rods down shore, beside the open water sat Tom Barrett,
calling something out to his folks across the river, and from
upstream came the deafening thunder of the Onondaga Jam that,
loosened by the rain, was shouldering its terrific force downwards
with the strength of a million drunken demons.

We had him like a rat in a trap, but his foxy eyes had seen us. He
sprang to his feet, hesitated for a fraction of a moment, saw the
murder in our faces, then did what any man but a fool would have
done--ran.

We were hot on his heels. Fifty yards distant an old dug-out lay
hauled up. He ran it down into the water, stared wildly at the
oncoming jam, then at us, sprang into the canoe and grabbed the
paddle.

I was murderously mad. I wheeled the axe above my shoulder and let
fly at him. It missed his head by three inches.

He was paddling for dear life now, and, our last chance gone, we
stood riveted to the spot, watching him. On the bluff across the
river stood his half-blood mother, the raw March wind whipping her
skirts about her knees; but her strained, ashen face showed she
never felt its chill. Below with his feet almost in the rapidly
rising water, stood the old missionary, his scant grey hair blowing
across his eyes that seemed to look out into eternity--amid stream
Tom, paddling with the desperation of death, his head turning every
second with the alertness of an animal to gauge the approaching
ice-shove.

Even I wished him life then. Twice I thought him caught in the
crush, but he was out of it like an arrow, and in another moment he
had leapt ashore while above the roar of the grinding jam I heard
him cry out with a strange exultation:

"Father, I've succeeded. I have had to be a scoundrel and a cad,
but I've trapped them at last!"

He staggered forward then, sobbing like a child, and the old man's
arms closed round him, just as two heavy jaws of ice snatched the
dug-out, hurled it off shore and splintered it to atoms.

Well! I had made a bad blunder, which I attempted to rectify by
reaching Buffalo that night; but Tom Barrett had won the game. I
was arrested at Fort Erie, handcuffed, jailed, tried, convicted
of attempted assault and illicit whiskey-trading on the Grand
River Indian Reserve--and spent the next five years in Kingston
Penitentiary, the guest of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen
Victoria.



Mother o' the Men

A Story of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police


The commander's wife stood on the deck of the "North Star" looking
at the receding city of Vancouver as if to photograph within her
eyes and heart every detail of its wonderful beauty--its
clustering, sisterly houses, its holly hedges, its ivied walls, its
emerald lawns, its teeming streets and towering spires. She seemed
to realize that this was the end of the civilized trail; that
henceforth, for many years, her sight would know only the unbroken
line of icy ridge and sky of the northernmost outposts of the great
Dominion. To her hand clung a little boy of ten, and about her
hovered some twenty young fellows, gay in the scarlet tunics, the
flashing buffalo-head buttons, that bespoke the soldierly uniform
of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police. They were the first
detachment bound for the Yukon, and were under her husband's
command.

She was the only woman in the "company." The major had purposely
selected unmarried men for his staff, for in the early nineties the
Arctic was no place for a woman. But when the Government at Ottawa
saw fit to commission Major Lysle to face the frozen North, and
with a handful of men build and garrison a fort at the rim of the
Polar Seas, Mrs. Lysle quietly remarked, "I shall accompany you, so
shall the boy," and the major blessed her in his heart, for had she
not so decided, it would mean absolute separation from wife and
child for from three to five years, as in those days no railways,
no telegraph lines, stretched their pulsing fingers into the
Klondyke. One mail went in, one mail came out, each year--that was
all.

"It's good-bye, Graham lad," said one of the scarlet-coated
soldiers, tossing the little boy to his back. "Look your longest
at those paved streets, and the green, green things. There'll be
months of just snow away up there," and he nodded towards the
north.

"Oh, but father says it won't be lonely at all up there," asserted
the child. "He says I'll grow _terribly_ big in a few years; that
people always grow in the North, and maybe I'll soon be able to
wear buffalo buttons and have stripes on my sleeve like you;" and
the childish fingers traced the outline of the sergeant's chevrons.

"I hope, dear, that you shall do all that, soon," said Mrs. Lysle;
"but first you must _win_ those stripes, my boy, and if you win them
as the sergeant did, mother shall be very proud of you."

At which, the said sergeant hastily set the boy down, and, with
confusion written all over his strong young face, made some excuse
to disappear, for no man in the world is as shy or modest about his
deeds of valor as is a North-West "Mounted."

"Won't you tell me, mother, how Sergeant Black got those stripes on
his sleeve?" begged the boy.

"Perhaps to-night, son, when you are in bed--just before mother
says good-night--we'll see. But look! there is the city, fading,
fading." Then after a short silence: "There, Graham, it has gone."

"But isn't that it 'way over there, mother?" persisted the boy. "I
see the sun shining on the roofs."

Mrs. Lysle shook her head. "No, dearie; that is the snow on the
mountain peaks. The city has--gone."

But far into the twilight she yet stood watching the purple sea,
the dove-gray coast. Her world was with her--the man she had chosen
for her life partner, and the little boy that belonged to them
both--but there are times even in the life of a wife and mother
when her soul rebels at cutting herself off from her womenkind, and
all that environment of social life among women means, even if the
act itself is voluntary on her part. It was a relief, then, from
her rather sombre musing at the ship's rail, when the major lightly
placed both hands on her shoulders and said, "Grahamie has toddled
off to the stateroom. The sea air is weighting down his eyelids."

"Sea air?" laughed Mrs. Lysle. "Don't you believe it, Horace. The
young monkey had been just scampering about the deck with the men
until his little legs are tired out. I'm half afraid our 'Mounted'
boys bid fair to spoil him. I'll go to him, for I promised him a
story to-night."

"Which you would rather perish than not tell him, if you promised,"
smiled the major. "You govern that boy the same way I do my men,
eh, dear?"

"It's the only way to govern boys or soldiers," she laughed back
from the head of the companionway. "Then both boy and soldier will
keep their promises to you."

The Major watched her go below, then said to himself, "She's
right--she's always right. She was right to come north, and bring
him, too. But I am a coward, for I daren't tell her she'll have to
part from him, or from me, some day. He will have to be sent to the
front again; he can't grow up unlearned, untaught, and there are no
schools in our Arctic world, and she must go with him, or stay with
me; but I can't tell her. Yes, I'm a coward." But Major Lysle was
the only person in all the world who would have thought or said so.

"And will you tell me how Sergeant Black won his stripes, mother,
before I go to sleep?" begged Graham.

"Yes, little 'North-West,'" she replied, using the pet name the men
in barracks frequently called the child. "It's just a wee story of
one man fighting it out alone--just alone, single-handed--with no
reinforcements but his own courage, his own self-reliance."

"That's just what father says, isn't it, mother, to just do things
yourself?" asked the boy.

"That's it, dear, and that is what Sergeant Black did. He was only
corporal then, and he was dispatched from headquarters to arrest
some desperate horse thieves who were trying to drive a magnificent
bunch of animals across the boundary line into the United States,
and then sell them. These men were breaking two laws. They had not
only stolen the horses, but were trying to evade the American
Customs. Your father always called them 'The Rapparees,' for they
were Irish, and fighters, and known from the Red River to the
Rockies as plunderers and desperadoes. There was some trouble to
the north at the same time; barracks was pretty well thinned; not
a man could be spared to help him. But when Corporal Black got his
instructions and listened to the commanding officer say, 'If that
detachment returns from the Qu'Appelle Valley within twenty-four
hours, I'll order them out to assist you, corporal,' the plucky
little soldier just stood erect, clicked his heels together,
saluted, and replied, 'I can do it alone, sir.'

"'I notice you don't say you _think_ you can do it alone,' remarked
the officer dryly. He was a lenient man and often conversed with
his men.

"'It is not my place to _think_, sir. I've just got to _do_,'
replied the corporal, and saluting again he was gone.

"All that night he galloped up the prairie trail on the track of
the thieves, and just before daybreak he sighted them, entrenched
in a coulee, where their campfires made no glow, and the neighing
horses could not be heard. There were six men all told, busying
themselves getting breakfast and staking the animals preparatory to
hiding through the day hours, and getting across the boundary line
the next night. Both men and beasts were wearied with the long
journey, but Corporal Black is the sort of man that _never_ wearies
in either brain or body. He never hesitated a second. Jerking his
rat-skin cap down, covering his face as much as possible, he rode
silently around to the south of the encampment, clutched a revolver
in each hand, and rode within earshot, then said four words:

"'Stand, or I fire!' If a cyclone had swooped down on them, the
thieves could not have been more astounded. But they stood, and
stood yards away from their own guns. Then they demanded to know
who he was, for of course they thought him a thief like themselves,
probably following them to capture their spoil. Then Corporal Black
unbuttoned his great-coat and flung it wide open, displaying the
brilliant scarlet tunic of our own dear Mounted Police. They needed
no other reply. At the point of his revolver he ordered them to
unstake the horses. Then not one man was allowed to mount, but,
breakfastless and frenzied, they were compelled to walk before him,
driving the stolen animals ahead, mile upon mile, league after
league.

"Father says it was a strange-looking procession that trudged into
barracks. Twenty beautiful, spirited horses, six hangdog-looking
thieves, with a single exhausted horse in the rear, on which was
mounted an alert, keen-eyed and very hungry young soldier who wore
a scarlet tunic and buffalo-head buttons. The next day Corporal
Black had another stripe on his sleeve." [The foregoing story is an
actual occurrence. The author had the honor of knowing personally
the North-West Mounted Policeman who achieved his rank through this
action.]

Her voice ceased, and she looked down at her son. The child lay for
a moment, wide-eyed and tense. Then some indescribable quality
seemed to make him momentarily too large, too tall, for the narrow
ship's berth. Then:

"And he fought it out _alone_, mother, just alone--single-handed?"

"Yes, Grahamie," she said, softly.

"Fought alone!" he said almost to himself. Then aloud: "Thank you,
mother, for telling me that story. Perhaps some day I'll have to
fight it out alone, and when I do, I'll try to remember Sergeant
Black. Good-night, mother."

"Good-night, my boy."

       *       *       *       *       *

The long, long winter was doing its worst, and that was unspeakable
in its dreariness and its misery. The "Fort" was just about
completed before things froze up--narrow, small quarters
constructed of rough logs, surrounded by a stockade--but above its
roof the Union Jack floated, and beneath it flashed the scarlet
tunics, the buffalo-head buttons, the clanking spurs of as brave
a band of men, "queened over" by as courageous a woman, as ever
Gibraltar or the Throne Room knew.

As time went on the major's wife began to find herself "Mother o'
the Men" (as an old Klondyker named her), as well as of her own
boy. Those blizzard-blown, snow-hardened, ice-toughened soldiers
went to her for everything--sympathy, assistance, advice--for in
that lonely outpost military lines were less strictly drawn, and
she could oftentimes do for the men what would be considered
amazingly unofficial, were those little humane kindnesses done in
barracks at Regina or Macleod or Calgary. She nursed the men
through every illness, preparing the food herself for the invalids.
She attended to many a frozen face and foot and finger. She
smoothed out their differences, inspirited them when they grew
discouraged, talked to them of their own people, so that their
home ties should not be entirely severed because they could write
letters or receive them but once a year. But there were days when
the sight of a woman's face would have been a glimpse of paradise
to her, days when she almost wildly regretted her boy had not been
a girl--just a little sweet-voiced girl, a thing of her own sex and
kind. But it always seemed at these moments that Grahamie would
providentially rush in to her with some glad story of sport or
adventure, and she would snatch him tightly in her arms and say,
"No, no, boy of mine, I don't want even a girlie, if I may only
keep you." And once when her thoughts had been more than usually
traitorous in wishing he had been a girl, the child seemed to
divine some idea of her struggle; for a moment his firm little
fingers caught her hand encouragingly, and he said in a whisper,
"Are you fighting it out alone, mother--just single-handed?"

"Just single-handed, dearest," she replied.

Then he scampered away, but paused to call back gravely, "Remember
Sergeant Black, mother."

"Yes, Grahamie, I'll try to," she replied brightly. At that moment
he was the lesser child of the two.

And so the winter crept slowly on, and the brief, brilliant summer
flitted in, then out, like a golden dream. The second snows were
upon the little fort, the second Christmas, the second long, long
weeks and months of the new year. An unspoken horror was staring
them all in the face: navigation did not open when expected, and
supplies were running low, pitifully low. The smoked and dried
meats, the canned things, flour, sealed lard, oatmeal, hard-tack,
dried fruits--_everything_ was slowly but inevitably giving out day
upon day. Before and behind them stretched hummocks of trailless
snow. Not an Indian, not a dog train, not even a wild animal, had
set foot in that waste for weeks. In early March the major's wife
had hidden a single package of gelatine, a single tin of dried
beef, and a single half pound of cornstarch. "If sickness comes
to my boys" (she did not say boy), "I shall at least have saved
these," she told herself, in justification of her act. "A sick man
cannot live on beans." But now they were down to beans--just beans
and lard boiled together. Then a day dawned when there was not even
a spoonful of lard left. "Beans straight!"--it was the death knell,
for beans straight--beans without grease--kill the strongest man in
a brief span of days. Oh, that the ice bridges would melt, the seas
open, the ships come!

But that night the men at mess had beans with unlimited grease, its
peculiar flavor peppered and spiced out of it. Life, life was to be
theirs even yet! What had renewed it?

But one of the men had caught something on his fork and extracted
it from the food on his plate. It was an overlooked _wick_. The
major's wife had begun to boil up the tallow candles. [Fact.] But
the cheer that shook that rough log roof came right from hearts
that blessed her, and brought her to the door of the men's
mess-room. The men were on their feet instantly. "A light has
broken upon us, or rather _within_ us, Mrs. Lysle!" cried a
self-selected spokesman.

"Illuminating, isn't it, boys?" She laughed, then turned away, for
the cheers and tears were very close together.

Then one day when even starving stomachs almost revolted at the
continued coarse mixture, a ribbon of blue proclaimed the open sea,
and into those waters swept the longed-for ship. Yet, strangely
enough, that night the "Mother o' the Men" wept a storm of tears,
the only tears she had yielded to in those long five years. For
with its blessing of food the ship had her hold bursting with
liquors and wines, the hideous commerce that invades the pioneer
places of the earth. Should the already weakened, ill-fed and
scurvy-threatened garrison break into those supplies, all the labor
and patience and mothering of this courageous woman would be
useless, for after a bean diet in the Northern latitudes, whiskey
is deadly to brain and body, and the victim maddens or dies.

"You are crying, mother, and the ship here at last!" said Grahamie's
voice at her shoulder. "Crying when we are all so happy."

"Mother is a little upset, dear. You must try to forget you ever
saw her eyes wet."

"I'll forget," said the boy with a finality she could not question.
"The ship is so full of good things, mother. We'll think of that,
and--forget, won't we?" he added.

"_All_ the things in the ship are not good, Grahamie, boy. If they
were, mother would not cry," she said.

"I see," he said, but stole from her side with a strained, puzzled
look in his young eyes.

Outside he was met by a laughing, joyous dozen of men. One swung
the child to his shoulder, shouting, "Hurrah, little 'North-West'!
Hurrah! we are all coming to pay tribute to your mother. Look at
the dainties we have got for her from the ship!"

"I'm afraid you can't see mother just now," said the boy. "Mother
is a little upset. You see, the ship is so full of good things--but
then, _all_ the things in the ship are not good. If they were,
mother would not cry." In the last words he unconsciously imitated
his mother's voice.

A profound silence enveloped the men. Then one spoke. "She'll never
have cause to cry about anything _I_ do, boys."

"Nor I!" "Nor I!" "Nor I!" rang out voice after voice.

"Run back, you blessed little 'North-West,' and tell mother not to
be scared for the boys. We'll stand by her to a man. She'll never
regret that ship's coming in," said the gallant soldier, slipping
the boy to the ground. And to the credit of the men who wore
buffalo-head buttons, she never did.

And in all her Yukon years the major's wife had but one more
heartache. That agonizing winter had taught her many things, but
the bitterest knowledge to come to her was the fact that her boy
must be sent "to the front." To be sure, he was growing up the pet
of all the police; he was becoming manlier, sturdier, more
self-reliant every day. But education he _must_ have, and another
winter of such deprivation and horror he was too young, too tender,
to endure. It was then that the battle arose in her heart. The boy
was to be sent to college. Was it her place to accompany him to the
distant South-east, to live by herself alone in the college town,
just to be near him and watch over his young life, or was it here
with her pioneer soldier husband, and his little isolated garrison
of "boys" whom she had mothered for two years?

The inevitable day came when she had to shut her teeth and watch
Grahamie go aboard the southward-bound vessel alone, in the care of
a policeman who was returning on sick leave--to watch him stand at
the rail, his little face growing dimmer and more shadowy as the
sea widened between them--watch him through tearless, courageous
eyes, then turn away with the hopelessness of knowing that for one
entire endless year she must wait for word of his arrival. [Fact.]
But his last brave good-bye words rang through her ears every day
of that eternal year: "We'll remember Sergeant Black, won't we,
mother? And we'll each fight it out alone, single-handed, and maybe
they'll give us a chevron for our sleeves when it's over."

But that night when the barracks was wrapped in gloom over the
loss of its boy chum, the surgeon appeared in the men's quarters.
"Hello, boys!" he said, none too cheerfully. "Dull doings, I say.
I'm busy enough, though, keeping an eye on Madam, the major's lady.
She's so deadly quiet, so self-controlled, I'm just a little afraid.
I wish something would happen to--well, make her less calm."

"_I'll_ 'happen,' doctor," chirped up a genial-looking young chap
named O'Keefe. "I'll get sick and threaten to die. You say it's
serious; she'll be all interest and medicine spoons, and making me
jelly inside an hour."

The surgeon eyed him sternly, then: "O'Keefe," he said, "you're the
cleverest man I ever came across in the force, and I've been in it
eleven years. But, man alive! what have you been doing to yourself?
Overwork, no food--why, man, you're sick; look as if you had fever
and a touch of pneumonia. You're a very sick man. Go to bed at
once--at once, I say!"

O'Keefe looked the surgeon in the eye, winked meaningly, and
O'Keefe turned in, although it was but early afternoon. At six
o'clock an orderly stood at the door of the major's quarters. Mrs.
Lysle was standing on the steps, her eyes fixed on the far horizon
across which a ship had melted away.

"Beg pardon, madam," said the orderly, saluting, "but young O'Keefe
is very ill. We have had the surgeon, but the--the--pain's getting
worse. He's just yelling with agony."

"I'll go at once, orderly. I should have been told before," she
replied; and burying her own heartache, she hurried to the men's
quarters. Her anxious eyes sought the surgeon's. "Oh, doctor!" she
said, "this poor fellow must be looked after. What can I do to
help?"

"Everything, Mrs. Lysle," gruffed the surgeon with a professional
air. "He is very ill. He must be kept wrapped in hot linseed
poultices and--"

"Oh, I say, doctor," remonstrated poor O'Keefe, "I'm not that bad."

"You're a very sick man," scowled the surgeon. "Now, Mrs. Lysle has
graciously offered to help nurse you. She'll see that you have hot
fomentations every half hour. I'll drop in twice a day to see how
you are getting along." And with that miserable prospect before
him, poor O'Keefe watched the surgeon disappear.

"I simply _had_ to order those half-hour fomentations, old man,"
apologized the surgeon that night. "You see, she must be kept
busy--just kept at it every minute we can make her do so. Do you
think you can stand it?"

"Of course I can," fumed the victim. "But for goodness' sake, don't
put me on sick rations! I'll die, sure, if you do."

"I've ordered you the best the commissariat boasts--heaps of meat,
butter, even eggs, my boy. Think of it--_eggs_--you lucky young
Turk!" laughed the surgeon.

Then followed nights and days of torture. The "boys" would line up
to the "sick-room" four times daily, and blandly ask how he was.

"How _am_ I?" young O'Keefe would bellow. "How _am_ I? I'm well and
strong enough to brain every one of you fellows, surgeon included,
when I get out of this!"

"But when _are_ you going to get out? When will you be out danger?"
they would chuckle.

"Just when I see that haunted look go out of her eyes, and not till
then!" he would roar.

And he kept his word. He was really weak when he got up, and
pretended to be weaker, but the lines of acute self-control had
left Mrs. Lysle's face, the suffering had gone from her eyes, the
day the noble O'Keefe took his first solid meal in her presence.

Even the major never discovered that worthy bit of deception. But
a year later, when the mail went out, the surgeon sent the entire
story to Graham, who, in writing to his mother the following year,
perplexed her by saying:

"....But there are three men in the force I love better than
anyone in the world except you, mother. The first, of course, is
father, the others, Sergeant Black and Private O'Keefe."

"Why O'Keefe?" she asked herself.

But loyal little "North-West" never told her.



The Nest Builder


"Well! if some women aren't born just to laugh!" remarked the
station agent's wife. "Have you seen that round-faced woman in the
waiting-room?"

"No," replied the agent. "I've been too busy; I've had to help
unload freight. I heard some children in there, though; they were
playing and laughing to beat the band."

"_Nine_ of them, John! _Nine_ of them, and the oldest just twelve!"
gasped his wife. "Why, I'd be crazy if I were in her place.
She's come all the way from Grey or Bruce in Ontario--I forget
which--with not a soul to help her with that flock. Three of them
are almost babies. The smallest one is a darling--just sits on the
bench in there and dimples and gurgles and grins all the time."

"Hasn't she got a husband?" asked John.

"Of course," asserted his wife. "But that's just the problem now,
or rather he's the problem. He came to Manitoba a year ago, and
was working right here in this town. He doesn't seem to have had
much luck, and left last week for some ranch away back of Brandon,
she now finds out; she must have crossed his letter as she came
out. She expected to find him here, and now she is in that
waiting-room with nine children, no money to go further, or to
go to a hotel even, and she's--well, she's just good-natured and
smiling, and not a bit worried. As I say, some women are born just
to laugh."

"Have they anything to eat?" asked the agent, anxiously.

"Stacks of it--a huge hamper. But I took the children what milk we
had, and made her take a cup of good hot tea. She _would_ pay me,
however, I couldn't stop her. But I noticed she has mighty little
change in her purse, and she said she had no money, and said it
with a round, untroubled, smiling face." The agent's wife spoke
the last words almost with envy.

"I'll try and locate the husband," said the agent.

"Yes, she'll get his address to-night, she says," explained the
wife; "but no one knows when he will get here. Most likely he's
twenty miles away from Brandon, and they will have to send out
for him."

Which eventually proved to be the case; and three days elapsed
before the husband and father was able to reach the little border
town where his wife and ample family had been installed as
residents of the general waiting-room of a small, scantily-equipped
station. No beds, no washing conveniences, no table, no chairs;
just the wall seats, with a roof above them and the pump water
at the end of the platform to drink from and dabble in. The
distressed man arrived, harrassed and anxious, only to be met by a
round-faced, laughing wife and nine round-faced, laughing children,
who all made sport of their "camping" experience, and assured him
they could have "stood it" a little longer, if need be.

But they slept in beds that night--glorious, feathery beds,
that were in reality but solid hemp mattresses--in the cheapest
lodging-house in town.

Then began the home-building. Henderson had secured a quarter
section of land and made two payments on it when his wife and
children arrived, with all their "settlers' effects" in a freight
car, which, truth to tell, were meagre enough. They had never
really owned a home in the East, and when, with saving and selling,
she managed to follow her husband into the promising world of
Manitoba, she determined to possess a home, no matter how crude,
how small, how remote. So Henderson hired horses and "teamed" out
sufficient lumber and tar-paper to erect a shack which measured
exactly eighteen by twelve feet, then sodded the roof in true
Manitoba style, and into this cramped abode Mrs. Henderson stowed
her household goods and nine small children. With the stove, table,
chairs, tubs and trunks, there was room for but one bed to be
put up. Poor, unresourceful Henderson surveyed the crowded shack
helplessly, but that round-faced, smiling wife of his was not a
particle discouraged. "We'll just build in two sets of bunks, on
each end of the house," she laughed. "The children won't mind
sleeping on 'shelves,' for the bread-winners must have the bed."

So they economized space with a dozen such little plans, and all
through the unpacking and settling and arranging, she would say
every hour or two, "Oh, it's a little crowded and stuffy, but it's
_ours_--it's _home_," until Henderson and the children caught
something of her inspiration, and the sod-roof shack became "home"
in the sweetest sense of the word.

There are some people who "make" time for everything, and this
remarkable mother was one. That winter she baked bread for every
English bachelor ranchman within ten miles. She did their washing
and ironing, and never neglected her own, either. She knitted socks
for them, and made and sold quantities of Saskatoon berry jam. When
spring came she had over fifty dollars of her own, with which she
promptly bought a cow. Then late in March they made a small first
payment of a team of horses, and "broke land" for the first time,
plowing and seeding a few acres of virgin prairie and getting a
start.

But her quaintest invention to utilize every resource possible was
a novel scheme for chicken-raising. One morning the children came
in greatly excited over finding a wild duck's nest in the nearby
"slough." Mrs. Henderson told them to be very careful not to
frighten the bird, but to go back and search every foot of the
grassy edges and try to discover other nests. They succeeded in
finding three. That day a neighboring English rancher, driving past
on his way to Brandon, twenty miles distant, called out, "Want
anything from town, Mrs. Henderson?"

"Eggs, just eggs, if you will bring them, like a good boy," she
answered, running out to the trail to meet him.

"Why, you _are_ luxurious to-day, and eggs at fifty cents a dozen,"
he exclaimed.

"Never mind," she replied, "they're not nearly so luxurious as
chickens. You just bring me a dozen and a half. Pay _any_ price,
but be sure they are fresh, new laid, right off the nest. Now just
insist on that, or we shall quarrel." And with a menacing shake of
a forefinger and a customary laugh, she handed him a precious bank
note to pay for the treasures.

The next day Mrs. Henderson adroitly substituted hen's eggs for the
wild ducks' own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from
their morning's swim, never discovered the fraud. [Fact.]

"Six eggs under three sitters--eighteen chicks, if we're lucky
enough to have secured fertile eggs," mused Mrs. Henderson. "Oh,
well, we'll see." And they _did_ see. They saw exactly eighteen
fluffy, peeping chicks, whose timid little mothers could not
understand why their broods disappeared one by one from the long,
wet grasses surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel
lined basket near the Henderson's stove the young arrivals chirped
and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched in a coop by a
commonplace barnyard "Biddy." And every one of those chicks lived
and grew and fattened into a splendid flock, and the following
spring they began sitting on their own eggs. But the good-hearted
woman, in relating the story, would always say that she felt like
a thief and a robber whenever she thought of that shy, harmless
little wild duck who never had the satisfaction of seeing her brood
swim in the "slough."

All this happened more than twenty years ago, yet when I met Mrs.
Henderson last autumn, as she was journeying to Prince Albert to
visit a married daughter, her wonderfully youthful face was as
round and smiling as if she had never battled through the years
in a hand-to-hand fight to secure a home in the pioneer days
of Manitoba. She is well off now, and lives no more in the
twelve-by-eighteen-foot bunk-house, but when I asked her how she
accomplished so much, she replied, "I just jollied things along,
and laughed over the hard places. It makes them easier then."

So perhaps the station agent's wife was really right, after all,
when she remarked that "some women were just born to laugh."



The Tenas Klootchman

[In Chinook language "Tenas Klootchman" means "girl baby."]


This story came to me from the lips of Maarda herself. It was hard
to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda
had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded
heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a
receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater
than beauty, something more like lovableness, than any other
quality.

We sat together on the deck of the little steamer throughout the
long violet twilight, that seems loath to leave the channels and
rocky of the Upper Pacific in June time. We had dropped easily
into conversation, for nothing so readily helps one to an
introduction as does the friendly atmosphere of the extreme West,
and I had paved the way by greeting her in the Chinook, to which
she responded with a sincere and friendly handclasp.

Dinner on the small coast-wise steamers is almost a function. It is
the turning-point of the day, and is served English fashion, in
the evening. The passengers "dress" a little for it, eat the meal
leisurely and with relish. People who perhaps have exchanged no
conversation during the day, now relax, and fraternize with their
fellow men and women.

I purposely secured a seat at the dining-table beside Maarda.
Even she had gone through a simple "dressing" for dinner, having
smoothed her satiny black hair, knotted a brilliant silk
handkerchief about her throat, and laid aside her large, heavy
plaid shawl, revealing a fine delaine gown of green, bordered with
two flat rows of black silk velvet ribbon. That silk velvet ribbon,
and the fashion in which it was applied, would have bespoken her
nationality, even had her dark copper-colored face failed to do so.

The average Indian woman adores silk and velvet, and will have none
of cotton, and these decorations must be in symmetrical rows, not
designs. She holds that the fabric is in itself excellent enough.
Why twist it and cut it into figures that would only make it less
lovely?

We chatted a little during dinner. Maarda told me that she and her
husband lived at the Squamish River, some thirty-five miles north
of Vancouver City, but when I asked if they had any children, she
did not reply, but almost instantly called my attention to a
passing vessel seen through the porthole. I took the hint, and
said no more of family matters, but talked of the fishing and the
prospects of a good sockeye run this season.

Afterwards, however, while I stood alone on deck watching the sun
set over the rim of the Pacific, I felt a feathery touch on my arm.
I turned to see Maarda, once more enveloped in her shawl, and
holding two deck stools. She beckoned with a quick uplift of her
chin, and said, "We'll sit together here, with no one about us, and
I'll tell you of the child." And this was her story:

She was the most beautiful little Tenas Klootchman a mother could
wish for, bright, laughing, pretty as a spring flower, but--just as
frail. Such tiny hands, such buds of feet! One felt that they must
never take her out of her cradle basket for fear that, like a
flower stem, she would snap asunder and her little head droop like
a blossom.

But Maarda's skilful fingers had woven and plaited and colored the
daintiest cradle basket in the entire river district for his little
woodland daughter. She had fished long and late with her husband,
so that the canner's money would purchase silk "blankets" to enwrap
her treasure; she had beaded cradle bands to strap the wee body
securely in its cosy resting-nest. Ah, it was such a basket, fit
for an English princess to sleep in! Everything about it was fine,
soft, delicate, and everything born of her mother-love.

So, for weeks, for even months, the little Tenas Klootchman laughed
and smiled, waked and slept, dreamed and dimpled in her pretty
playhouse. Then one day, in the hot, dry summer, there was no
smile. The dimples did not play. The little flower paled, the small
face grew smaller, the tiny hands tinier; and one morning, when the
birds awoke in the forests of the Squamish, the eyes of the little
Tenas Klootchman remained closed.

They put her to sleep under the giant cedars, the lulling, singing
firs, the whispering pines that must now be her lullaby, instead of
her mother's voice crooning the child-songs of the Pacific, that
tell of baby foxes and gamboling baby wolves and bright-eyed baby
birds. Nothing remained to Maarda but an empty little cradle
basket, but smoothly-folded silken "blankets," but disused beaded
bands. Often at nightfall she would stand alone, and watch the sun
dip into the far waters, leaving the world as gray and colorless
as her own life; she would outstretch her arms--pitifully empty
arms--towards the west, and beneath her voice again croon the
lullabies of the Pacific, telling of the baby foxes, the soft,
furry baby wolves, and the little downy fledglings in the nests.
Once in an agony of loneliness she sang these things aloud, but her
husband heard her, and his face turned gray and drawn, and her soul
told her she must not be heard again singing these things aloud.

And one evening a little steamer came into harbor. Many Indians
came ashore from it, as the fishing season had begun. Among others
was a young woman over whose face the finger of illness had traced
shadows and lines of suffering. In her arms she held a baby, a
beautiful, chubby, round-faced, healthy child that seemed too heavy
for her wasted form to support. She looked about her wistfully,
evidently seeking a face that was not there, and as the steamer
pulled out of the harbor, she sat down weakly on the wharf, laid
the child across her lap, and buried her face in her hands. Maarda
touched her shoulder.

"Who do you look for?" she asked.

"For my brother Luke 'Alaska,'" replied the woman. "I am ill, my
husband is dead, my brother will take care of me; he's a good man."

"Luke 'Alaska,'" said Maarda. What had she heard of Luke "Alaska?"
Why, of course, he was one of the men her own husband had taken a
hundred miles up the coast as axeman on a surveying party, but she
dared not tell this sick woman. She only said: "You had better come
with me. My husband is away, but in a day of two he will be able to
get news to your brother. I'll take care of you till they come."

The woman arose gratefully, then swayed unsteadily under the weight
of the child. Maarda's arms were flung out, yearningly, longingly,
towards the baby.

"Where is your cradle basket to carry him in?" she asked, looking
about among the boxes and bales of merchandise the steamer had left
on the wharf.

"I have no cradle basket. I was too weak to make one, too poor to
buy one. I have _nothing_," said the woman.

"Then let me carry him," said Maarda. "It's quite a walk to my
place; he's too heavy for you."

The woman yielded the child gratefully, saying, "It's not a boy,
but a Tenas Klootchman."

Maarda could hardly believe her senses. That splendid, sturdy,
plump, big baby a Tenas Klootchman! For a moment her heart surged
with bitterness. Why had her own little girl been so frail, so
flower-like? But with the touch of that warm baby body, the
bitterness faded. She walked slowly, fitting her steps to those of
the sick woman, and jealously lengthening the time wherein she
could hold and hug the baby in her yearning arms.

The woman was almost exhausted when they reached Maarda's home, but
strong tea and hot, wholesome food revived her; but fever burned
brightly in her cheeks and eyes. The woman was very ill, extremely
ill. Maarda said, "You must go to bed, and as soon as you are
there, I will take the canoe and go for a doctor. It is two or
three miles, but you stay resting, and I'll bring him. We will put
the Tenas Klootchman beside you in--" she hesitated. Her glance
travelled up to the wall above, where a beautiful empty cradle
basket hung, with folded silken "blankets" and disused beaded
bands.

The woman's gaze followed hers, a light of beautiful understanding
pierced the fever glare of her eyes, she stretched out her hot hand
protestingly, and said, "Don't put her in--that. Keep that, it is
yours. She is used to being rolled only in my shawl."

But Maarda had already lifted the basket down, and was tenderly
arranging the wrappings. Suddenly her hands halted, she seemed to
see a wee flower face looking up to her like the blossom of a
russet-brown pansy. She turned abruptly, and, going to the door,
looked out speechlessly on the stretch of sea and sky glimmering
through the tree trunks.

For a time she stood. Then across the silence broke the little
murmuring sound of the baby half crooning, half crying, indoors,
the little cradleless baby that, homeless, had entered her home.
Maarda returned, and, lifting the basket, again arranged the
wrappings. "The Tenas Klootchman shall have this cradle," she said,
gently. The sick woman turned her face to the wall and sobbed.

It was growing dark when Maarda left her guests, and entered her
canoe on the quest for a doctor. The clouds hung low, and a fine,
slanting rain fell, from which she protected herself as best she
could with a shawl about her shoulders, crossed in front, with each
end tucked into her belt beneath her arms--Indian-fashion. Around
rocks and boulders, headlands and crags, she paddled, her little
craft riding the waves like a cork, but pitching and plunging with
every stroke. By and by the wind veered, and blew head on, and now
and again she shipped water; her skirts began dragging heavily
about her wet ankles, and her moccasins were drenched. The wind
increased, and she discarded her shawl to afford greater freedom to
her arm-play. The rain drove and slanted across her shoulders and
head, and her thick hair was dripping with sea moisture and the
downpour.

Sometimes she thought of beaching the canoe and seeking shelter
until daylight. Then she again saw those fever-haunted eyes of the
stranger who was within her gates, again heard the half wail of the
Tenas Klootchman in her own baby's cradle basket, and at the sound
she turned her back on the possible safety of shelter, and forged
ahead.

It was a wearied woman who finally knocked at the doctor's door and
bade him hasten. But his strong man's arm found the return journey
comparatively easy paddling. The wind helped him, and Maarda also
plied her bow paddle, frequently urging him to hasten.

It was dawn when they entered her home. The sick woman moaned, and
the child fretted for food. The doctor bent above his patient,
shaking his head ruefully as Maarda built the fire, and attended to
the child's needs before she gave thought to changing her drenched
garments. All day she attended her charges, cooked, toiled,
watched, forgetting her night of storm and sleeplessness in the
greater anxieties of ministering to others. The doctor came and
went between her home and the village, but always with that solemn
headshake, that spoke so much more forcibly than words.

"She shall not die!" declared Maarda. "The Tenas Klootchman needs
her, she shall not die!" But the woman grew feebler daily, her eyes
grew brighter, her cheeks burned with deeper scarlet.

"We must fight for it now," said the doctor. And Maarda and he
fought the dread enemy hour after hour, day after day.

Bereft of its mother's care, the Tenas Klootchman turned to Maarda,
laughed to her, crowed to her, until her lonely heart embraced the
child as a still evening embraces a tempestuous day. Once she had a
long, terrible fight with herself. She had begun to feel her
ownership in the little thing, had begun to regard it as her right
to tend and pet it. Her heart called out for it; and she wanted it
for her very own. She began to feel a savage, tigerish joy in
thinking--aye, _knowing_ that it really would belong to her and to
her alone soon--very soon.

When this sensation first revealed itself to her, the doctor was
there--had even told her the woman could not recover. Maarda's
gloriously womanly soul was horrified at itself. She left the
doctor in charge, and went to the shore, fighting out this
outrageous gladness, strangling it--killing it.

She returned, a sanctified being, with every faculty in her body,
every sympathy of her heart, every energy of her mind devoted to
bringing this woman back from the jaws of death. She greeted the
end of it all with a sorrowing, half-breaking heart, for she had
learned to love the woman she had envied, and to weep for the
little child who lay so helplessly against her unselfish heart.

A beautifully lucid half-hour came to the fever-stricken one just
before the Call to the Great Beyond!

"Maarda," she said, "you have been a good Tillicum to me, and I
can give you nothing for all your care, your kindness--unless--"
Her eyes wandered to her child peacefully sleeping in the
delicately-woven basket. Maarda saw the look, her heart leaped with
a great joy. Did the woman wish to give the child to her? She dared
not ask for it. Suppose Luke "Alaska" wanted it. His wife loved
children, though she had four of her own in their home far inland.
Then the sick woman spoke:

"Your cradle basket and your heart were empty before I came. Will
you keep my Tenas Klootchman as your own?--to fill them both
again?"

Maarda promised. "Mine was a Tenas Klootchman, too," she said.

"Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is, in the
Spirit Islands they tell us of," said the woman. "We will be but
exchanging our babies, after all."

When morning dawned, the woman did not awake.

       *       *       *       *       *

Maarda had finished her story, but the recollections had saddened
her eyes, and for a time we both sat on the deck in the violet
twilight without exchanging a word.

"Then the little Tenas Klootchman is yours now?" I asked.

A sudden radiance suffused her face, all trace of melancholy
vanished. She fairly scintillated happiness.

"Mine!" she said. "All mine! Luke 'Alaska' and his wife said she
was more mine than theirs, that I must keep her as my own. My
husband rejoiced to see the cradle basket filled, and to hear me
laugh as I used to."

"How I should like to see the baby!" I began.

"You shall," she interrupted. Then with a proud, half-roguish
expression, she added:

"She is so strong, so well, so heavy; she sleeps a great deal, and
wakes laughing and hungry."

As night fell, an ancient Indian woman came up the companion-way.
In her arms she carried a beautifully-woven basket cradle, within
which nestled a round-cheeked, smiling-eyes baby. Across its little
forehead hung locks of black, straight hair, and its sturdy limbs
were vainly endeavoring to free themselves from the lacing of the
"blankets." Maarda took the basket, with an expression on her face
that was transfiguring.

"Yes, this is my little Tenas Klootchman," she said, as she unlaced
the bands, then lifted the plump little creature out on to her lap.

Soon afterwards the steamer touched an obscure little harbor, and
Maarda, who was to join her husband there, left me, with a happy
good-night. As she was going below, she faltered, and turned back
to me. "I think sometimes," she said, quietly, "the Great Spirit
thought my baby would feel motherless in the far Spirit Islands, so
He gave her the woman I nursed for a mother; and He knew I was
childless, and He gave me this child for my daughter. Do you think
I am right? Do you understand?"

"Yes," I said, "I think you are right, and I understand."

Once more she smiled radiantly, and turning, descended the
companionway. I caught a last glimpse of her on the wharf. She was
greeting her husband, her face a mirror of happiness. About the
delicately-woven basket cradle she had half pulled her heavy plaid
shawl, beneath which the two rows of black velvet ribbon bordering
her skirt proclaimed once more her nationality.



The Derelict


Cragstone had committed what his world called a crime--an
inexcusable offence that caused him to be shunned by society and
estranged from his father's house. He had proved a failure.

Not one of his whole family connections could say unto the others,
"I told you so," when he turned out badly.

They had all predicted that he was born for great things, then to
discover that they had over-estimated him was irritating, it told
against their discernment, it was unflattering, and they thought
him inconsiderate.

So, in addition to his failure, Cragstone had to face the fact that
he had made himself unpopular among his kin.

As a boy he had been the pride of his family, as a youth, its hope
of fame and fortune; he was clever, handsome, inventive, original,
everything that society and his kind admired, but he criminally
fooled them and their expectation, and they never forgave him for
it.

He had dabbled in music, literature, law, everything--always with
semi-success and brilliant promise; he had even tried the stage,
playing the Provinces for an entire season; then, ultimately
sinking into mediocrity in all these occupations, he returned to
London, a hopelessly useless, a pitiably gifted man. His chilly
little aristocratic mother always spoke of him as "poor, dear
Charles." His brothers, clubmen all, graciously alluded to him
with, "deuced hard luck, poor Charlie." His father never mentioned
his name.

Then he went into "The Church," sailed for Canada, idled about for
a few weeks, when one of the great colonial bishops, not knowing
what else to do with him, packed him off north as a missionary to
the Indians.

And, after four years of disheartening labor amongst a
semi-civilized people, came this girl Lydia into his life. This
girl of the mixed parentage, the English father, who had been swept
northward with the rush of lumber trading, the Chippewa mother, who
had been tossed to his arms by the tide of circumstances. The girl
was a strange composition of both, a type of mixed blood, pale,
dark, slender, with the slim hands, the marvellously beautiful
teeth of her mother's people, the ambition, the small tender
mouth, the utter fearlessness of the English race. But the
strange, laughless eyes, the silent step, the hard sense of honor,
proclaimed her far more the daughter of red blood than of white.

And, with the perversity of his kind, Cragstone loved her; he
meant to marry her because he knew that he should not. What a
monstrous thing it would be if he did! He, the shepherd of this
half-civilized flock, the modern John Baptist; he, the voice of the
great Anglican Church crying in this wilderness, how could he wed
with this Indian girl who had been a common serving-maid in a house
in Penetanguishene, and been dismissed therefrom with an accusation
of theft that she could never prove untrue? How could he bring
this reproach upon the Church? Why, the marriage would have no
precedent; and yet he loved her, loved her sweet, silent ways,
her listening attitudes, her clear, brown, consumptive-suggesting
skin. She was the only thing in all the irksome mission life that
had responded to him, had encouraged him to struggle anew for
the spiritual welfare of this poor red race. Of course, in
Penetanguishene they had told him she was irreclaimable, a thief,
with ready lies to cover her crimes; for that very reason he felt
tender towards her, she was so sinful, so pathetically human.

He could have mastered himself, perhaps, had she not responded, had
he not seen the laughless eyes laugh alone for him, had she not once
when a momentary insanity possessed them both confessed in words
her love for him as he had done to her. But now? Well, now only
this horrible tale of theft and untruth hung between them like a
veil; now even with his arms locked about her, his eyes drowned in
hers, his ears caught the whispers of calumny, his thoughts were
perforated with the horror of his Bishop's censure, and these
things rushed between his soul and hers, like some bridgeless deep
he might not cross, and so his lonely life went on.

And then one night his sweet humanity, his grand, strong love rose
up, battled with him, and conquered. He cast his pharisaical ideas,
and the Church's "I am better than thou," aside forever; he would
go now, to-night, he would ask her to be his wife, to have and to
hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for--

A shadow fell across the doorway of his simple home; it was August
Beaver, the trapper, with the urgent request that he would come
across to French Island at once, for old "Medicine" Joe was there,
dying, and wished to see the minister. At another time Cragstone
would have felt sympathetic, now he was only irritated; he wanted
to find Lydia, to look in her laughless eyes, to feel her fingers
in his hair, to tell her he did not care if she were a hundred
times a thief, that he loved her, loved her, loved her, and he
would marry her despite the Church, despite--

"Joe, he's near dead, you come now?" broke in August's voice.
Cragstone turned impatiently, got his prayer-book, followed the
trapper, took his place in the canoe, and paddled in silence up
the bay.

The moon arose, large, limpid, flooding the cabin with a wondrous
light, and making more wan the features of a dying man, whose
fever-wasted form lay on some lynx skins on the floor.

Cragstone was reading from the Book of Common Prayer the exquisite
service of the Visitation of the Sick. Outside, the loons clanged
up the waterways, the herons called across the islands, but no
human things ventured up the wilds. Inside, the sick man lay,
beside him August Beaver holding a rude lantern, while Cragstone's
matchless voice repeated the Anglican formula. A spasm, an uplifted
hand, and Cragstone paused. Was the end coming even before a
benediction? But the dying man was addressing Beaver in Chippewa,
whispering and choking out the words in his death struggle.

"He says he's bad man," spoke Beaver. A horrible, humorous
sensation swept over Cragstone; he hated himself for it, but at
college he had always ridiculed death-bed confessions; but in a
second that feeling had vanished, he bent his handsome, fair face
above the copper-colored countenance of the dying man. "Joe," he
said, with that ineffable tenderness that had always drawn human
hearts to him; "Joe, tell me before I pronounce the Absolution,
how you have been 'bad'?"

"I steal three times," came the answer. "Oncet horses, two of them
from farmer near Barrie. Oncet twenty fox-skins at North Bay;
station man he in jail for those fox-skins now. Oncet gold watch
from doctor at Penetanguishene."

The prayer-book rattled from Cragstone's hands and fell to the
floor.

"Tell me about this watch," he mumbled. "How did you come to
do it?"

"I liffe at the doctor's; I take care his horse, long time; old
River's girl, Lydia, she work there too; they say she steal it;
I sell to trader, the doctor he nefer know, he think Lydia."

Cragstone was white to the lips. "Joe,"  he faltered, "you are
dying; do you regret this sin, are you sorry?"

An indistinct "yes" was all; death was claiming him rapidly.

But a great, white, purified love had swept over the young
clergyman. The girl he worshipped could never now be a reproach to
his calling, she was proved blameless as a baby, and out of his
great human love arose the divine calling, the Christ-like sense
of forgiveness, the God-like forgetfulness of injury and suffering
done to his and to him, and once more his soft, rich voice broke
the stillness of the Northern night, as the Anglican absolution of
the dying fell from his lips in merciful tenderness:

"O Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to His Church to absolve
all sinners who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy
forgive thee thine offences, and by His authority committed to me
I absolve thee from all thy sins in the name of the Father, and of
the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."

Beaver was holding the lantern close to the penitent's face;
Cragstone, kneeling beside him, saw that the end had come already,
and, after making the sign of the Cross on the dead Indian's
forehead, the young priest arose and went silently out into the
night.

       *       *       *       *       *

The sun was slipping down into the far horizon, fretted by the
inimitable wonder of islands that throng the Georgian Bay; the
blood-colored skies, the purpling clouds, the extravagant beauty
of a Northern sunset hung in the west like the trailing robes of
royalty, soundless in their flaring, their fading; soundless as the
unbroken wilds which lay bathed in the loneliness of a dying day.

But on the color-flooded shore stood two, blind to the purple, the
scarlet, the gold, blind to all else save the tense straining of
the other's eyes; deaf to nature's unsung anthem, hearing only the
other's voice. Cragstone stood transfixed with consternation. The
memory of the past week of unutterable joy lay blasted with the
awfulness of this moment, the memory of even that first day--when
he had stood with his arms about her, had told her how he had
declared her reclaimed name far and wide, how even Penetanguishene
knew now that she had suffered blamelessly, how his own heart
throbbed suffocatingly with the honor, the delight of being the
poor means through which she had been righted in the accusing eyes
of their little world, and that now she would be his wife, his
sweet, helping wife, and she had been great enough not to remind
him that he had not asked her to be his wife until her name was
proved blameless, and he was great enough not to make excuse of the
resolve he had set out upon just when August Beaver came to turn
the current of his life.

But he had other eyes to face to-night, eyes that blurred the past,
that burned themselves into his being--the condemning, justly and
righteously indignant eyes of his Bishop--while his numb heart,
rather than his ears, listened to the words that fell from the
prelate's lips like curses on his soul, like the door that would
shut him forever outside the holy place.

"What have you done, you pretended servant of the living God?
What use is this you have made of your Holy Orders? You hear the
confessions of a dying man, you absolve and you bless him, and come
away from the poor dead thief to shout his crimes in the ears of
the world, to dishonor him, to be a discredit to your calling. Who
could trust again such a man as you have proved to be--faithless to
himself, faithless to his Church, faithless to his God?"

But Cragstone was on the sands at his accuser's feet. "Oh! my
Lord," he cried, "I meant only to save the name of a poor,
mistrusted girl, selfishly, perhaps, but I would have done the
same thing just for humanity's sake had it been another to whom
injustice was done."

"Your plea of justice is worse than weak; to save the good name
of the living is it just to rob the dead?"

The Bishop's voice was like iron.

"I did not realize I was a priest, I only knew I was a _man_," and
with these words Cragstone arose and looked fearlessly, even
proudly, at the one who stood his judge.

"Is it not better, my Lord, to serve the living than the dead?"

"And bring reproach upon your Church?" said the Bishop, sternly.

It was the first thought Cragstone ever had of his official crime;
he staggered under the horror of it, and the little, dark, silent
figure, that had followed them unseen, realized in her hiding amid
the shadows that the man who had lifted her into the light was
himself being thrust down into irremediable darkness. But Cragstone
only saw the Bishop looking at him as from a supreme height, he
only felt the final stinging lash in the words: "When a man
disregards the most sacred offices of his God, he will hardly
reverence the claims of justice of a simple woman who knows not his
world, and if he so easily flings his God away for a woman, just so
easily will he fling her away for other gods."

And Lydia, with eyes that blazed like flame, watched the Bishop
turn and walk frigidly up the sands, his indignation against this
outrager of the Church declaring itself in every footfall.

Cragstone flung himself down, burying his face in his hands. What a
wreck he had made of life! He saw his future, loveless, for no woman
would trust him now; even the one whose name he had saved would
probably be more unforgiving than the Church; it was the way
with women when a man abandoned God and honor for them; and this
nameless but blackest of sins, this falsity to one poor dying
sinner, would stand between him and heaven forever, though through
that very crime he had saved a fellow being. Where was the justice
of it?

The purple had died from out the western sky, the waters of the
Georgian Bay lay colorless at his feet, night was covering the
world and stealing with inky blackness into his soul.

She crept out of her hiding-place, and, coming, gently touched his
tumbled fair hair; but he shrank from her, crying: "Lydia, my girl,
my girl, I am not for a good woman now! I, who thought you an
outcast, a thief, not worthy to be my wife, to-night I am not an
outcast of man alone, but of God."

But what cared she for his official crimes? She was a woman. Her
arms were about him, her lips on his; and he who had, until now,
been a portless derelict, who had vainly sought a haven in art,
an anchorage in the service of God, had drifted at last into the
world's most sheltered harbor--a woman's love.

But, of course, the Bishop took away his gown.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Moccasin Maker" ***

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