The Moccasin Maker by E. Pauline Johnson (page 2)

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?”

“Catherine,” 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.

* * * * *

Catherine 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.

“Catherine,” 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, Catherine,” 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 Catherine’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.

“Catherine,” 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 Catherine 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 Catherine?” 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.

“_Catherine_,” 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 Catherine: “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.

“Catherine, 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, Catherine,” 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.

“Catherine! 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, Catherine! 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 Catherine, 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 Catherine on to reveal the strange history that sounded like some tale from fairyland. It appeared that the reason Catherine 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 Catherine’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 Catherine 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 Catherine 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.

“Catherine,” 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 Catherine–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. Catherine, 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 Catherine 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 voice 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-bad, 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