Chapter 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She knows--she knows."

Catharine of the "Crow's Nest"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I 'member," she replied.

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

"Catharine," she answered, simply.

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

* * * * *

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

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

"I go home at night," she repeated.

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

"I go home at night," she repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I sleep home." she said, doggedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," she said simply.

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

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

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

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

"It is a girl child," she answered.

"Well what of it?" he asked impatiently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She came and stood between him and the couch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The shores of Kootenay Lake," she answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Red Girl's Reasoning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?"

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

"Humph! Does she love or hate _you_?"

"Ask her."

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

Joe McDonald whistled a little, then laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

"Are Charlie and I duplicates?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe _did_ see.

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

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

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

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

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

"Once."

"When?"

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

"And did he look so?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Disgraced_?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He went to his brother's bedroom door.

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

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

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

"CHRISTIE."

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not murderers alone know the agony of a death sentence.

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

The Envoy Extraordinary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, mother!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," replied Mrs. Norris, shortly.

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

Back went the cow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instantly Sam was at the door.

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

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

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

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

A Pagan in St. Paul's Cathedral

Iroquois Poetess' Impressions in London's Cathedral

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

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

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

What the Indian Sees.

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

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

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

The Great Spirit.

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

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

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

Beat of the Drum.

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

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

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

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

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

As It Was in the Beginning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tell me of it," he requested.

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

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

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

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

"No, uncle, but--"

"Very well, then, very well."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurence, speechless and white, stared at him breathlessly.

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

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

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

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

"Good-night, son," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

They seem to have forgotten I am a woman.

The Legend of Lillooet Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her Majesty's Guest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I? Oh, I went on with my operations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello, parson--sick?"

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

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

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

No one spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We came.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I stepped out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mother o' the Men

A Story of the Canadian North-West Mounted Police

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, Grahamie," she said, softly.

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

"Good-night, my boy."

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Beg pardon, madam," said the orderly, saluting, "but young O'Keefe is very ill. We have had the surgeon, but the--the--pain's getting worse. He's just yelling with agony."

"I'll go at once, orderly. I should have been told before," she replied; and burying her own heartache, she hurried to the men's quarters. Her anxious eyes sought the surgeon's. "Oh, doctor!" she said, "this poor fellow must be looked after. What can I do to help?"

"Everything, Mrs. Lysle," gruffed the surgeon with a professional air. "He is very ill. He must be kept wrapped in hot linseed poultices and--"

"Oh, I say, doctor," remonstrated poor O'Keefe, "I'm not that bad."

"You're a very sick man," scowled the surgeon. "Now, Mrs. Lysle has graciously offered to help nurse you. She'll see that you have hot fomentations every half hour. I'll drop in twice a day to see how you are getting along." And with that miserable prospect before him, poor O'Keefe watched the surgeon disappear.

"I simply _had_ to order those half-hour fomentations, old man," apologized the surgeon that night. "You see, she must be kept busy--just kept at it every minute we can make her do so. Do you think you can stand it?"

"Of course I can," fumed the victim. "But for goodness' sake, don't put me on sick rations! I'll die, sure, if you do."

"I've ordered you the best the commissariat boasts--heaps of meat, butter, even eggs, my boy. Think of it--_eggs_--you lucky young Turk!" laughed the surgeon.

Then followed nights and days of torture. The "boys" would line up to the "sick-room" four times daily, and blandly ask how he was.

"How _am_ I?" young O'Keefe would bellow. "How _am_ I? I'm well and strong enough to brain every one of you fellows, surgeon included, when I get out of this!"

"But when _are_ you going to get out? When will you be out danger?" they would chuckle.

"Just when I see that haunted look go out of her eyes, and not till then!" he would roar.

And he kept his word. He was really weak when he got up, and pretended to be weaker, but the lines of acute self-control had left Mrs. Lysle's face, the suffering had gone from her eyes, the day the noble O'Keefe took his first solid meal in her presence.

Even the major never discovered that worthy bit of deception. But a year later, when the mail went out, the surgeon sent the entire story to Graham, who, in writing to his mother the following year, perplexed her by saying:

"....But there are three men in the force I love better than anyone in the world except you, mother. The first, of course, is father, the others, Sergeant Black and Private O'Keefe."

"Why O'Keefe?" she asked herself.

But loyal little "North-West" never told her.

The Nest Builder

"Well! if some women aren't born just to laugh!" remarked the station agent's wife. "Have you seen that round-faced woman in the waiting-room?"

"No," replied the agent. "I've been too busy; I've had to help unload freight. I heard some children in there, though; they were playing and laughing to beat the band."

"_Nine_ of them, John! _Nine_ of them, and the oldest just twelve!" gasped his wife. "Why, I'd be crazy if I were in her place. She's come all the way from Grey or Bruce in Ontario--I forget which--with not a soul to help her with that flock. Three of them are almost babies. The smallest one is a darling--just sits on the bench in there and dimples and gurgles and grins all the time."

"Hasn't she got a husband?" asked John.

"Of course," asserted his wife. "But that's just the problem now, or rather he's the problem. He came to Manitoba a year ago, and was working right here in this town. He doesn't seem to have had much luck, and left last week for some ranch away back of Brandon, she now finds out; she must have crossed his letter as she came out. She expected to find him here, and now she is in that waiting-room with nine children, no money to go further, or to go to a hotel even, and she's--well, she's just good-natured and smiling, and not a bit worried. As I say, some women are born just to laugh."

"Have they anything to eat?" asked the agent, anxiously.

"Stacks of it--a huge hamper. But I took the children what milk we had, and made her take a cup of good hot tea. She _would_ pay me, however, I couldn't stop her. But I noticed she has mighty little change in her purse, and she said she had no money, and said it with a round, untroubled, smiling face." The agent's wife spoke the last words almost with envy.

"I'll try and locate the husband," said the agent.

"Yes, she'll get his address to-night, she says," explained the wife; "but no one knows when he will get here. Most likely he's twenty miles away from Brandon, and they will have to send out for him."

Which eventually proved to be the case; and three days elapsed before the husband and father was able to reach the little border town where his wife and ample family had been installed as residents of the general waiting-room of a small, scantily-equipped station. No beds, no washing conveniences, no table, no chairs; just the wall seats, with a roof above them and the pump water at the end of the platform to drink from and dabble in. The distressed man arrived, harrassed and anxious, only to be met by a round-faced, laughing wife and nine round-faced, laughing children, who all made sport of their "camping" experience, and assured him they could have "stood it" a little longer, if need be.

But they slept in beds that night--glorious, feathery beds, that were in reality but solid hemp mattresses--in the cheapest lodging-house in town.

Then began the home-building. Henderson had secured a quarter section of land and made two payments on it when his wife and children arrived, with all their "settlers' effects" in a freight car, which, truth to tell, were meagre enough. They had never really owned a home in the East, and when, with saving and selling, she managed to follow her husband into the promising world of Manitoba, she determined to possess a home, no matter how crude, how small, how remote. So Henderson hired horses and "teamed" out sufficient lumber and tar-paper to erect a shack which measured exactly eighteen by twelve feet, then sodded the roof in true Manitoba style, and into this cramped abode Mrs. Henderson stowed her household goods and nine small children. With the stove, table, chairs, tubs and trunks, there was room for but one bed to be put up. Poor, unresourceful Henderson surveyed the crowded shack helplessly, but that round-faced, smiling wife of his was not a particle discouraged. "We'll just build in two sets of bunks, on each end of the house," she laughed. "The children won't mind sleeping on 'shelves,' for the bread-winners must have the bed."

So they economized space with a dozen such little plans, and all through the unpacking and settling and arranging, she would say every hour or two, "Oh, it's a little crowded and stuffy, but it's _ours_--it's _home_," until Henderson and the children caught something of her inspiration, and the sod-roof shack became "home" in the sweetest sense of the word.

There are some people who "make" time for everything, and this remarkable mother was one. That winter she baked bread for every English bachelor ranchman within ten miles. She did their washing and ironing, and never neglected her own, either. She knitted socks for them, and made and sold quantities of Saskatoon berry jam. When spring came she had over fifty dollars of her own, with which she promptly bought a cow. Then late in March they made a small first payment of a team of horses, and "broke land" for the first time, plowing and seeding a few acres of virgin prairie and getting a start.

But her quaintest invention to utilize every resource possible was a novel scheme for chicken-raising. One morning the children came in greatly excited over finding a wild duck's nest in the nearby "slough." Mrs. Henderson told them to be very careful not to frighten the bird, but to go back and search every foot of the grassy edges and try to discover other nests. They succeeded in finding three. That day a neighboring English rancher, driving past on his way to Brandon, twenty miles distant, called out, "Want anything from town, Mrs. Henderson?"

"Eggs, just eggs, if you will bring them, like a good boy," she answered, running out to the trail to meet him.

"Why, you _are_ luxurious to-day, and eggs at fifty cents a dozen," he exclaimed.

"Never mind," she replied, "they're not nearly so luxurious as chickens. You just bring me a dozen and a half. Pay _any_ price, but be sure they are fresh, new laid, right off the nest. Now just insist on that, or we shall quarrel." And with a menacing shake of a forefinger and a customary laugh, she handed him a precious bank note to pay for the treasures.

The next day Mrs. Henderson adroitly substituted hen's eggs for the wild ducks' own, and the shy, pretty water fowls, returning from their morning's swim, never discovered the fraud. [Fact.]

"Six eggs under three sitters--eighteen chicks, if we're lucky enough to have secured fertile eggs," mused Mrs. Henderson. "Oh, well, we'll see." And they _did_ see. They saw exactly eighteen fluffy, peeping chicks, whose timid little mothers could not understand why their broods disappeared one by one from the long, wet grasses surrounding the nest. But in a warm canton flannel lined basket near the Henderson's stove the young arrivals chirped and picked at warm meal as sturdily as if hatched in a coop by a commonplace barnyard "Biddy." And every one of those chicks lived and grew and fattened into a splendid flock, and the following spring they began sitting on their own eggs. But the good-hearted woman, in relating the story, would always say that she felt like a thief and a robber whenever she thought of that shy, harmless little wild duck who never had the satisfaction of seeing her brood swim in the "slough."

All this happened more than twenty years ago, yet when I met Mrs. Henderson last autumn, as she was journeying to Prince Albert to visit a married daughter, her wonderfully youthful face was as round and smiling as if she had never battled through the years in a hand-to-hand fight to secure a home in the pioneer days of Manitoba. She is well off now, and lives no more in the twelve-by-eighteen-foot bunk-house, but when I asked her how she accomplished so much, she replied, "I just jollied things along, and laughed over the hard places. It makes them easier then."

So perhaps the station agent's wife was really right, after all, when she remarked that "some women were just born to laugh."

The Tenas Klootchman

[In Chinook language "Tenas Klootchman" means "girl baby."]

This story came to me from the lips of Maarda herself. It was hard to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater than beauty, something more like lovableness, than any other quality.

We sat together on the deck of the little steamer throughout the long violet twilight, that seems loath to leave the channels and rocky of the Upper Pacific in June time. We had dropped easily into conversation, for nothing so readily helps one to an introduction as does the friendly atmosphere of the extreme West, and I had paved the way by greeting her in the Chinook, to which she responded with a sincere and friendly handclasp.

Dinner on the small coast-wise steamers is almost a function. It is the turning-point of the day, and is served English fashion, in the evening. The passengers "dress" a little for it, eat the meal leisurely and with relish. People who perhaps have exchanged no conversation during the day, now relax, and fraternize with their fellow men and women.

I purposely secured a seat at the dining-table beside Maarda. Even she had gone through a simple "dressing" for dinner, having smoothed her satiny black hair, knotted a brilliant silk handkerchief about her throat, and laid aside her large, heavy plaid shawl, revealing a fine delaine gown of green, bordered with two flat rows of black silk velvet ribbon. That silk velvet ribbon, and the fashion in which it was applied, would have bespoken her nationality, even had her dark copper-colored face failed to do so.

The average Indian woman adores silk and velvet, and will have none of cotton, and these decorations must be in symmetrical rows, not designs. She holds that the fabric is in itself excellent enough. Why twist it and cut it into figures that would only make it less lovely?

We chatted a little during dinner. Maarda told me that she and her husband lived at the Squamish River, some thirty-five miles north of Vancouver City, but when I asked if they had any children, she did not reply, but almost instantly called my attention to a passing vessel seen through the porthole. I took the hint, and said no more of family matters, but talked of the fishing and the prospects of a good sockeye run this season.

Afterwards, however, while I stood alone on deck watching the sun set over the rim of the Pacific, I felt a feathery touch on my arm. I turned to see Maarda, once more enveloped in her shawl, and holding two deck stools. She beckoned with a quick uplift of her chin, and said, "We'll sit together here, with no one about us, and I'll tell you of the child." And this was her story:

She was the most beautiful little Tenas Klootchman a mother could wish for, bright, laughing, pretty as a spring flower, but--just as frail. Such tiny hands, such buds of feet! One felt that they must never take her out of her cradle basket for fear that, like a flower stem, she would snap asunder and her little head droop like a blossom.

But Maarda's skilful fingers had woven and plaited and colored the daintiest cradle basket in the entire river district for his little woodland daughter. She had fished long and late with her husband, so that the canner's money would purchase silk "blankets" to enwrap her treasure; she had beaded cradle bands to strap the wee body securely in its cosy resting-nest. Ah, it was such a basket, fit for an English princess to sleep in! Everything about it was fine, soft, delicate, and everything born of her mother-love.

So, for weeks, for even months, the little Tenas Klootchman laughed and smiled, waked and slept, dreamed and dimpled in her pretty playhouse. Then one day, in the hot, dry summer, there was no smile. The dimples did not play. The little flower paled, the small face grew smaller, the tiny hands tinier; and one morning, when the birds awoke in the forests of the Squamish, the eyes of the little Tenas Klootchman remained closed.

They put her to sleep under the giant cedars, the lulling, singing firs, the whispering pines that must now be her lullaby, instead of her mother's voice crooning the child-songs of the Pacific, that tell of baby foxes and gamboling baby wolves and bright-eyed baby birds. Nothing remained to Maarda but an empty little cradle basket, but smoothly-folded silken "blankets," but disused beaded bands. Often at nightfall she would stand alone, and watch the sun dip into the far waters, leaving the world as gray and colorless as her own life; she would outstretch her arms--pitifully empty arms--towards the west, and beneath her voice again croon the lullabies of the Pacific, telling of the baby foxes, the soft, furry baby wolves, and the little downy fledglings in the nests. Once in an agony of loneliness she sang these things aloud, but her husband heard her, and his face turned gray and drawn, and her soul told her she must not be heard again singing these things aloud.

And one evening a little steamer came into harbor. Many Indians came ashore from it, as the fishing season had begun. Among others was a young woman over whose face the finger of illness had traced shadows and lines of suffering. In her arms she held a baby, a beautiful, chubby, round-faced, healthy child that seemed too heavy for her wasted form to support. She looked about her wistfully, evidently seeking a face that was not there, and as the steamer pulled out of the harbor, she sat down weakly on the wharf, laid the child across her lap, and buried her face in her hands. Maarda touched her shoulder.

"Who do you look for?" she asked.

"For my brother Luke 'Alaska,'" replied the woman. "I am ill, my husband is dead, my brother will take care of me; he's a good man."

"Luke 'Alaska,'" said Maarda. What had she heard of Luke "Alaska?" Why, of course, he was one of the men her own husband had taken a hundred miles up the coast as axeman on a surveying party, but she dared not tell this sick woman. She only said: "You had better come with me. My husband is away, but in a day of two he will be able to get news to your brother. I'll take care of you till they come."

The woman arose gratefully, then swayed unsteadily under the weight of the child. Maarda's arms were flung out, yearningly, longingly, towards the baby.

"Where is your cradle basket to carry him in?" she asked, looking about among the boxes and bales of merchandise the steamer had left on the wharf.

"I have no cradle basket. I was too weak to make one, too poor to buy one. I have _nothing_," said the woman.

"Then let me carry him," said Maarda. "It's quite a walk to my place; he's too heavy for you."

The woman yielded the child gratefully, saying, "It's not a boy, but a Tenas Klootchman."

Maarda could hardly believe her senses. That splendid, sturdy, plump, big baby a Tenas Klootchman! For a moment her heart surged with bitterness. Why had her own little girl been so frail, so flower-like? But with the touch of that warm baby body, the bitterness faded. She walked slowly, fitting her steps to those of the sick woman, and jealously lengthening the time wherein she could hold and hug the baby in her yearning arms.

The woman was almost exhausted when they reached Maarda's home, but strong tea and hot, wholesome food revived her; but fever burned brightly in her cheeks and eyes. The woman was very ill, extremely