“Hai--Yai, so bright a day, so clear!” said Mitiahwe as she entered the
big lodge and laid upon a wide, low couch, covered with soft skins, the
fur of a grizzly which had fallen to her man’s rifle. “Hai-yai, I
wish it would last for ever--so sweet!” she added, smoothing the fur
lingeringly, and showing her teeth in a smile.
“There will come a great storm, Mitiahwe. See, the birds go south so
soon,” responded a deep voice from a corner by the doorway.
The young Indian wife turned quickly, and, in a defiant fantastic
mood--or was it the inward cry against an impending fate, the tragic
future of those who will not see, because to see is to suffer?--she
made some quaint, odd motions of the body which belonged to a mysterious
dance of her tribe, and, with flashing eyes, challenged the comely old
woman seated on a pile of deer-skins.
“It is morning, and the day will last for ever,” she said nonchalantly,
but her eyes suddenly took on a faraway look, half apprehensive, half
wondering. The birds were indeed going south very soon, yet had there
ever been so exquisite an autumn as this, had her man ever had so
wonderful a trade--her man with the brown hair, blue eyes, and fair,
strong face?
“The birds go south, but the hunters and buffalo still go north,”
Mitiahwe urged searchingly, looking hard at her mother--Oanita, the
Swift Wing.
“My dream said that the winter will be dark and lonely, that the ice
will be thick, the snow deep, and that many hearts will be sick because
of the black days and the hunger that sickens the heart,” answered Swift
Wing.
Mitiahwe looked into Swift Wing’s dark eyes, and an anger came upon her.
“The hearts of cowards will freeze,” she rejoined, “and to those that
will not see the sun the world will be dark,” she added. Then suddenly
she remembered to whom she was speaking, and a flood of feeling ran
through her; for Swift Wing had cherished her like a fledgeling in the
nest till her young white man came from “down East.” Her heart had leapt
up at sight of him, and she had turned to him from all the young men of
her tribe, waiting in a kind of mist till he, at last, had spoken to
her mother, and then one evening, her shawl over her head, she had come
along to his lodge.
A thousand times as the four years passed by she had thought how good
it was that she had become his wife--the young white man’s wife, rather
than the wife of Breaking Rock, son of White Buffalo, the chief, who
had four hundred horses, and a face that would have made winter and
sour days for her. Now and then Breaking Rock came and stood before the
lodge, a distance off, and stayed there hour after hour, and once or
twice he came when her man was with her; but nothing could be done,
for earth and air and space were common to them all, and there was no
offence in Breaking Rock gazing at the lodge where Mitiahwe lived. Yet
it seemed as though Breaking Rock was waiting--waiting and hoping.
That was the impression made upon all who saw him, and even old White
Buffalo, the chief, shook his head gloomily when he saw Breaking Rock,
his son, staring at the big lodge which was so full of happiness, and
so full also of many luxuries never before seen at a trading post on
the Koonce River. The father of Mitiahwe had been chief, but because his
three sons had been killed in battle the chieftainship had come to White
Buffalo, who was of the same blood and family. There were those who said
that Mitiahwe should have been chieftainess; but neither she nor her
mother would ever listen to this, and so White Buffalo, and the tribe
loved Mitiahwe because of her modesty and goodness. She was even more to
White Buffalo than Breaking Rock, and he had been glad that Dingan the
white man--Long Hand he was called--had taken Mitiahwe for his woman.
Yet behind this gladness of White Buffalo, and that of Swift Wing, and
behind the silent watchfulness of Breaking Rock, there was a thought
which must ever come when a white man mates with an Indian maid, without
priest or preacher, or writing, or book, or bond.
Yet four years had gone; and all the tribe, and all who came and went,
half-breeds, traders, and other tribes, remarked how happy was the white
man with his Indian wife. They never saw anything but light in the eyes
of Mitiahwe, nor did the old women of the tribe who scanned her face as
she came and went, and watched and waited too for what never came--not
even after four years.
Mitiahwe had been so happy that she had not really missed what never
came; though the desire to have something in her arms which was part of
them both had flushed up in her veins at times, and made her restless
till her man had come home again. Then she had forgotten the unseen for
the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together--that was the
joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with
them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter’s life, standing
afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife’s
mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter’s
husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted
that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home,
as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe had been singing
to the Sun, to which she prayed for her man and for everlasting days
with him.
She had spoken angrily but now, because her soul sharply resented the
challenge to her happiness which her mother had been making. It was
her own eyes that refused to see the cloud, which the sage and bereaved
woman had seen and conveyed in images and figures of speech natural to
the Indian mind.
“Hai-yai,” she said now, with a strange touching sigh breathing in the
words, “you are right, my mother, and a dream is a dream; also, if it be
dreamt three times, then is it to be followed, and it is true. You have
lived long, and your dreams are of the Sun and the Spirit.” She shook a
little as she laid her hand on a buckskin coat of her man hanging by the
lodge-door; then she steadied herself again, and gazed earnestly into
her mother’s eyes. “Have all your dreams come true, my mother?” she
asked with a hungering heart. “There was the dream that came out of
the dark five times, when your father went against the Crees, and
was wounded, and crawled away into the hills, and all our warriors
fled--they were but a handful, and the Crees like a young forest in
number! I went with my dream, and found him after many days, and it was
after that you were born, my youngest and my last. There was also”--her
eyes almost closed, and the needle and thread she held lay still in her
lap--“when two of your brothers were killed in the drive of the buffalo.
Did I not see it all in my dream, and follow after them to take them
to my heart? And when your sister was carried off, was it not my dream
which saw the trail, so that we brought her back again to die in peace,
her eyes seeing the Lodge whither she was going, open to her, and the
Sun, the Father, giving her light and promise--for she had wounded
herself to die that the thief who stole her should leave her to herself.
Behold, my daughter, these dreams have I had, and others; and I have
lived long and have seen the bright day break into storm, and the herds
flee into the far hills where none could follow, and hunger come, and--”
“Hai-yo, see, the birds flying south,” said the girl with a gesture
towards the cloudless sky. “Never since I lived have they gone south so
soon.” Again she shuddered slightly, then she spoke slowly: “I also have
dreamed, and I will follow my dream. I dreamed”--she knelt down beside
her mother, and rested her hands in her mother’s lap--“I dreamed that
there was a wall of hills dark and heavy and far away, and that whenever
my eyes looked at them they burned with tears; and yet I looked and
looked, till my heart was like lead in my breast; and I turned from them
to the rivers and the plains that I loved. But a voice kept calling to
me, ‘Come, come! Beyond the hills is a happy land. The trail is hard,
and your feet will bleed, but beyond is the happy land.’ And I would
not go for the voice that spoke, and at last there came an old man in my
dream and spoke to me kindly, and said, ‘Come with me, and I will show
thee the way over the hills to the Lodge where thou shalt find what thou
hast lost.’ And I said to him, ‘I have lost nothing;’ and I would not
go. Twice I dreamed this dream, and twice the old man came, and three
times I dreamed it; and then I spoke angrily to him, as but now I did
to thee; and behold he changed before my eyes, and I saw that he was
now become--” she stopped short, and buried her face in her hands for a
moment, then recovered herself--“Breaking Rock it was, I saw before me,
and I cried out and fled. Then I waked with a cry, but my man was beside
me, and his arm was round my neck; and this dream, is it not a foolish
dream, my mother?”
The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly,
and looking out of the wide doorway towards the trees that fringed the
river; and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched
all at once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face
towards the river also.
“Breaking Rock!” she said in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking towards the lodge, then came
slowly forward to them. Never in all the four years had he approached
this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief, should have
married himself, the son of a chief! Slowly but with long slouching
stride Breaking Rock came nearer. The two women watched him without
speaking. Instinctively they knew that he brought news, that something
had happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no Indian
girl would be without; and this one was a gift from her man, on the
anniversary of the day she first came to his lodge.
Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on Mitiahwe’s,
his figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even then, two
inches less than Long Hand. He spoke in a loud voice:
“The last boat this year goes down the river tomorrow. Long Hand, your
man, is going to his people. He will not come back. He has had enough of
the Blackfoot woman. You will see him no more.” He waved a hand to the
sky. “The birds are going south. A hard winter is coming quick. You will
be alone. Breaking Rock is rich. He has five hundred horses. Your man is
going to his own people. Let him go. He is no man. It is four years, and
still there are but two in your lodge. How!”
He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men. His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge door, something flashing from her belt. But now
the mother’s arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking
Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.
“That is good,” he muttered. “She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
to him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard.”
As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from her
mother’s arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on the
great couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man beside
her.
Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a thing
had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She assumed
that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the voices of his
people calling far away, even as the red man who went East into the
great cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the rivers and
his own people calling, and came back, and put off the clothes of
civilisation, and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the Medicine
Man’s tent, and heard the spirits speak to him through the mist and
smoke of the sacred fire. When Swift Wing first gave her daughter to the
white man she foresaw the danger now at hand, but this was the tribute
of the lower race to the higher, and--who could tell! White men had left
their Indian wives, but had come back again, and for ever renounced
the life of their own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching
useful things to their adopted people, bringing up their children as
tribesmen--bringing up their children! There it was, the thing which
called them back, the bright-eyed children with the colour of the brown
prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp and strong. But here
was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face
of Mitiahwe.... If he went! Would he go? Was he going? And now that
Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do? In her belt
was--but, no, that would be worse than all, and she would lose Mitiahwe,
her last child, as she had lost so many others. What would she herself
do if she were in Mitiahwe’s place? Ah, she would make him stay
somehow--by truth or by falsehood; by the whispered story in the long
night, by her head upon his knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes
fixed on his, luring him, as the Dream lures the dreamer into the far
trail, to find the Sun’s hunting-ground where the plains are filled
with the deer and the buffalo and the wild horse; by the smell of the
cooking-pot and the favourite spiced drink in the morning; by the child
that ran to him with his bow and arrows and the cry of the hunter--but
there was no child; she had forgotten. She was always recalling her own
happy early life with her man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded
round his knee--one wife and many children, and the old Harvester of the
Years reaping them so fast, till the children stood up as tall as
their father and chief. That was long ago, and she had had her
share--twenty-five years of happiness; but Mitiahwe had had only four.
She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still for a moment like one rapt, then
suddenly she gave a little cry. Something had come into her mind, some
solution of the problem, and she ran and stooped over the girl and put
both hands on her head.
“Mitiahwe, heart’s blood of mine,” she said, “the birds go south, but
they return. What matter if they go so soon, if they return soon. If the
Sun wills that the winter be dark, and he sends the Coldmaker to close
the rivers and drive the wild ones far from the arrow and the gun,
yet he may be sorry, and send a second summer--has it not been so, and
Coldmaker has hurried away--away! The birds go south, but they will
return, Mitiahwe.”
“I heard a cry in the night while my man slept,” Mitiahwe answered,
looking straight before her, “and it was like the cry of a bird-calling,
calling, calling.”
“But he did not hear--he was asleep beside Mitiahwe. If he did not wake,
surely it was good luck. Thy breath upon his face kept him sleeping.
Surely it was good luck to Mitiahwe that he did not hear.”
She was smiling a little now, for she had thought of a thing which
would, perhaps, keep the man here in this lodge in the wilderness; but
the time to speak of it was not yet. She must wait and see.
Suddenly Mitiahwe got to her feet with a spring, and a light in her
eyes. “Hai-yai!” she said with plaintive smiling, ran to a corner of the
lodge, and from a leather bag drew forth a horse-shoe and looked at it,
murmuring to herself.
The old woman gazed at her wonderingly. “What is it, Mitiahwe?” she
asked.
“It is good-luck. So my man has said. It is the way of his people. It is
put over the door, and if a dream come it is a good dream; and if a bad
thing come, it will not enter; and if the heart prays for a thing hid
from all the world, then it brings good-luck. Hai-yai! I will put it
over the door, and then--” All at once her hand dropped to her side, as
though some terrible thought had come to her, and, sinking to the
floor, she rocked her body backward and forward for a time, sobbing.
But presently she got to her feet again, and, going to the door of the
lodge, fastened the horseshoe above it with a great needle and a string
of buckskin.
“Oh great Sun,” she prayed, “have pity on me and save me! I cannot live
alone. I am only a Blackfoot wife; I am not blood of his blood. Give, O
great one, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, soul of his soul, that
he will say, This is mine, body of my body, and he will hear the cry and
will stay. O great Sun, pity me!” The old woman’s heart beat faster as
she listened. The same thought was in the mind of both. If there were
but a child, bone of his bone, then perhaps he would not go; or, if he
went, then surely he would return, when he heard his papoose calling in
the lodge in the wilderness.
As Mitiahwe turned to her, a strange burning light in her eyes, Swift
Wing said: “It is good. The white man’s Medicine for a white man’s wife.
But if there were the red man’s Medicine too--”
“What is the red man’s Medicine?” asked the young wife, as she smoothed
her hair, put a string of bright beads around her neck, and wound a red
sash round her waist.
The old woman shook her head, a curious half-mystic light in her eyes,
her body drawn up to its full height, as though waiting for something.
“It is an old Medicine. It is of winters ago as many as the hairs of the
head. I have forgotten almost, but it was a great Medicine when there
were no white men in the land. And so it was that to every woman’s
breast there hung a papoose, and every woman had her man, and the red
men were like leaves in the forest--but it was a winter of winters ago,
and the Medicine Men have forgotten; and thou hast no child! When Long
Hand comes, what will Mitiahwe say to him?”
Mitiahwe’s eyes were determined, her face was set, she flushed deeply,
then the colour fled. “What my mother would say, I will say. Shall the
white man’s Medicine fail? If I wish it, then it will be so: and I will
say so.”
“But if the white man’s Medicine fail?”--Swift Wing made a gesture
toward the door where the horse-shoe hung. “It is Medicine for a white
man, will it be Medicine for an Indian?”
“Am I not a white man’s wife?”
“But if there were the Sun Medicine also, the Medicine of the days long
ago?”
“Tell me. If you remember--Kai! but you do remember--I see it in your
face. Tell me, and I will make that Medicine also, my mother.”
“To-morrow, if I remember it--I will think, and if I remember it,
to-morrow I will tell you, my heart’s blood. Maybe my dream will come to
me and tell me. Then, even after all these years, a papoose--”
“But the boat will go at dawn to-morrow, and if he go also--”
“Mitiahwe is young, her body is warm, her eyes are bright, the songs she
sings, her tongue--if these keep him not, and the Voice calls him still
to go, then still Mitiahwe shall whisper, and tell him--”
“Hai-yo-hush,” said the girl, and trembled a little, and put both hands
on her mother’s mouth.
For a moment she stood so, then with an exclamation suddenly turned and
ran through the doorway, and sped toward the river, and into the path
which would take her to the post, where her man traded with the Indians
and had made much money during the past six years, so that he could have
had a thousand horses and ten lodges like that she had just left. The
distance between the lodge and the post was no more than a mile, but
Mitiahwe made a detour, and approached it from behind, where she could
not be seen. Darkness was gathering now, and she could see the glimmer
of the light of lamps through the windows, and as the doors opened and
shut. No one had seen her approach, and she stole through a door which
was open at the rear of the warehousing room, and went quickly to
another door leading into the shop. There was a crack through which she
could see, and she could hear all that was said. As she came she had
seen Indians gliding through the woods with their purchases, and now
the shop was clearing fast, in response to the urging of Dingan and his
partner, a Scotch half-breed. It was evident that Dingan was at once
abstracted and excited.
Presently only two visitors were left, a French halfbreed call Lablache,
a swaggering, vicious fellow, and the captain of the steamer, Ste. Anne,
which was to make its last trip south in the morning--even now it would
have to break its way through the young ice. Dingan’s partner dropped
a bar across the door of the shop, and the four men gathered about the
fire. For a time no one spoke. At last the captain of the Ste. Anne
said: “It’s a great chance, Dingan. You’ll be in civilisation again, and
in a rising town of white people--Groise ‘ll be a city in five years,
and you can grow up and grow rich with the place. The Company asked me
to lay it all before you, and Lablache here will buy out your share of
the business, at whatever your partner and you prove its worth. You’re
young; you’ve got everything before you. You’ve made a name out here for
being the best trader west of the Great Lakes, and now’s your time. It’s
none of my affair, of course, but I like to carry through what I’m set
to do, and the Company said, ‘You bring Dingan back with you. The place
is waiting for him, and it can’t wait longer than the last boat down.’
You’re ready to step in when he steps out, ain’t you, Lablache?”
Lablache shook back his long hair, and rolled about in his pride. “I
give him cash for his share to-night someone is behin’ me, share, yes!
It is worth so much, I pay and step in--I take the place over. I take
half the business here, and I work with Dingan’s partner. I take your
horses, Dingan, I take you lodge, I take all in your lodge--everyt’ing.”
His eyes glistened, and a red spot came to each cheek as he leaned
forward. At his last word Dingan, who had been standing abstractedly
listening, as it were, swung round on him with a muttered oath, and the
skin of his face appeared to tighten. Watching through the crack of
the door, Mitiahwe saw the look she knew well, though it had never been
turned on her, and her heart beat faster. It was a look that came into
Dingan’s face whenever Breaking Rock crossed his path, or when one or
two other names were mentioned in his presence, for they were names of
men who had spoken of Mitiahwe lightly, and had attempted to be jocular
about her.
As Mitiahwe looked at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious
of what that last word of Lablache’s meant. Everyt’ing meant herself.
Lablache--who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the
Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtilty of the other,
and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he
looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gaily decorated
buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his
lips! Everyt’ing!--Her blood ran cold at the thought of dropping the
lodge-curtain upon this man and herself alone. For no other man than
Dingan had her blood run faster, and he had made her life blossom. She
had seen in many a half-breed’s and in many an Indian’s face the look
which was now in that of Lablache, and her fingers gripped softly the
thing in her belt that had flashed out on Breaking Rock such a short
while ago. As she looked, it seemed for a moment as though Dingan would
open the door and throw Lablache out, for in quick reflection his eyes
ran from the man to the wooden bar across the door.
“You’ll talk of the shop, and the shop only, Lablache,” Dingan said
grimly. “I’m not huckstering my home, and I’d choose the buyer if I was
selling. My lodge ain’t to be bought, nor anything in it--not even
the broom to keep it clean of any half-breeds that’d enter it without
leave.”
There was malice in the words, but there was greater malice in the tone,
and Lablache, who was bent on getting the business, swallowed his ugly
wrath, and determined that, if he got the business, he would get the
lodge also in due time; for Dingan, if he went, would not take the
lodge-or the woman with him; and Dingan was not fool enough to stay when
he could go to Groise to a sure fortune.
The captain of the Ste. Anne again spoke. “There’s another thing the
Company said, Dingan. You needn’t go to Groise, not at once. You can
take a month and visit your folks down East, and lay in a stock of
home-feelings before you settle down at Groise for good. They was
fair when I put it to them that you’d mebbe want to do that. ‘You tell
Dingan,’ they said, ‘that he can have the month glad and grateful, and a
free ticket on the railway back and forth. He can have it at once,’ they
said.”
Watching, Mitiahwe could see her man’s face brighten, and take on a look
of longing at this suggestion; and it seemed to her that the bird she
heard in the night was calling in his ears now. Her eyes went blind a
moment.
“The game is with you, Dingan. All the cards are in your hands; you’ll
never get such another chance again; and you’re only thirty,” said the
captain.
“I wish they’d ask me,” said Dingan’s partner with a sigh, as he looked
at Lablache. “I want my chance bad, though we’ve done well here--good
gosh, yes, all through Dingan.”
“The winters, they go queeck in Groise,” said Lablache. “It is life all
the time, trade all the time, plenty to do and see--and a bon fortune to
make, bagosh!”
“Your old home was in Nove Scotia, wasn’t it, Dingan?” asked the captain
in a low voice. “I kem from Connecticut, and I was East to my village
las’ year. It was good seein’ all my old friends again; but I kem back
content, I kem back full of home-feelin’s and content. You’ll like the
trip, Dingan. It’ll do you good.” Dingan drew himself up with a start.
“All right. I guess I’ll do it. Let’s figure up again,” he said to his
partner with a reckless air.
With a smothered cry Mitiahwe turned and fled into the darkness, and
back to the lodge. The lodge was empty. She threw herself upon the great
couch in an agony of despair.
A half-hour went by. Then she rose, and began to prepare supper. Her
face was aflame, her manner was determined, and once or twice her hand
went to her belt, as though to assure herself of something.
Never had the lodge looked so bright and cheerful; never had she
prepared so appetising a supper; never had the great couch seemed so
soft and rich with furs, so homelike and so inviting after a long day’s
work. Never had Mitiahwe seemed so good to look at, so graceful and
alert and refined--suffering does its work even in the wild woods, with
“wild people.” Never had the lodge such an air of welcome and peace
and home as to-night; and so Dingan thought as he drew aside the wide
curtains of deerskin and entered.
Mitiahwe was bending over the fire and appeared not to hear him.
“Mitiahwe,” he said gently.
She was singing to herself to an Indian air the words of a song Dingan
had taught her:
“Open the door: cold is the night, and my feet are heavy,
Heap up the fire, scatter upon it the cones and the scented leaves;
Spread the soft robe on the couch for the chief that returns,
Bring forth the cup of remembrance--”
It was like a low recitative, and it had a plaintive cadence, as of a
dove that mourned.
“Mitiahwe,” he said in a louder voice, but with a break in it too; for
it all rushed upon him, all that she had been to him--all that had made
the great West glow with life, made the air sweeter, the grass greener,
the trees more companionable and human: who it was that had given the
waste places a voice. Yet--yet, there were his own people in the East,
there was another life waiting for him, there was the life of ambition
and wealth, and, and home--and children.
His eyes were misty as she turned to him with a little cry of surprise,
how much natural and how much assumed--for she had heard him enter--it
would have been hard to say. She was a woman, and therefore the daughter
of pretence even when most real. He caught her by both arms as she shyly
but eagerly came to him. “Good girl, good little girl,” he said. He
looked round him. “Well, I’ve never seen our lodge look nicer than it
does to-night; and the fire, and the pot on the fire, and the smell of
the pine-cones, and the cedar-boughs, and the skins, and--”
“And everything,” she said, with a queer little laugh, as she moved
away again to turn the steaks on the fire. Everything! He started at the
word. It was so strange that she should use it by accident, when but a
little while ago he had been ready to choke the wind out of a man’s body
for using it concerning herself.
It stunned him for a moment, for the West, and the life apart from the
world of cities, had given him superstition, like that of the Indians,
whose life he had made his own.
Herself--to leave her here, who had been so much to him? As true as the
sun she worshipped, her eyes had never lingered on another man since she
came to his lodge; and, to her mind, she was as truly sacredly married
to him as though a thousand priests had spoken, or a thousand Medicine
Men had made their incantations. She was his woman and he was her man.
As he chatted to her, telling her of much that he had done that day,
and wondering how he could tell her of all he had done, he kept looking
round the lodge, his eye resting on this or that; and everything had its
own personal history, had become part of their lodge-life, because it
had a use as between him and her, and not a conventional domestic place.
Every skin, every utensil, every pitcher and bowl and pot and curtain,
had been with them at one time or another, when it became of importance
and renowned in the story of their days and deeds.
How could he break it to her--that he was going to visit his own people,
and that she must be alone with her mother all winter, to await his
return in the spring? His return? As he watched her sitting beside him,
helping him to his favourite dish, the close, companionable trust and
gentleness of her, her exquisite cleanness and grace in his eyes, he
asked himself if, after all, it was not true that he would return in
the spring. The years had passed without his seriously thinking of this
inevitable day. He had put it off and off, content to live each hour as
it came and take no real thought for the future; and yet, behind all was
the warning fact that he must go one day, and that Mitiahwe could not go
with him. Her mother must have known that when she let Mitiahwe come to
him. Of course; and, after all, she would find another mate, a better
mate, one of her own people.
But her hand was in his now, and it was small and very warm, and
suddenly he shook with anger at the thought of one like Breaking Rock
taking her to his wigwam; or Lablache--this roused him to an inward
fury; and Mitiahwe saw and guessed the struggle that was going on in
him, and she leaned her head against his shoulder, and once she raised
his hand to her lips, and said, “My chief!”
Then his face cleared again, and she got him his pipe and filled it, and
held a coal to light it; and, as the smoke curled up, and he leaned
back contentedly for the moment, she went to the door, drew open the
curtains, and, stepping outside, raised her eyes to the horseshoe. Then
she said softly to the sky: “O Sun, great Father, have pity on me, for
I love him, and would keep him. And give me bone of his bone, and one
to nurse at my breast that is of him. O Sun, pity me this night, and be
near me when I speak to him, and hear what I say!”
“What are you doing out there, Mitiahwe?” Dingan cried; and when she
entered again he beckoned her to him. “What was it you were saying? Who
were you speaking to?” he asked. “I heard your voice.”
“I was thanking the Sun for his goodness to me. I was speaking for the
thing that is in my heart, that is life of my life,” she added vaguely.
“Well, I have something to say to you, little girl,” he said, with an
effort.
She remained erect before him waiting for the blow--outwardly calm,
inwardly crying out in pain. “Do you think you could stand a little
parting?” he asked, reaching out and touching her shoulder.
“I have been alone before--for five days,” she answered quietly.
“But it must be longer this time.”
“How long?” she asked, with eyes fixed on his. “If it is more than a
week I will go too.”
“It is longer than a month,” he said. “Then I will go.”
“I am going to see my people,” he faltered.
“By the Ste. Anne?”
He nodded. “It is the last chance this year; but I will come back--in
the spring.”
As he said it he saw her shrink, and his heart smote him. Four years
such as few men ever spent, and all the luck had been with him, and the
West had got into his bones! The quiet, starry nights, the wonderful
days, the hunt, the long journeys, the life free of care, and the warm
lodge; and, here, the great couch--ah, the cheek pressed to his, the
lips that whispered at his ear, the smooth arm round his neck. It
all rushed upon him now. His people? His people in the East, who had
thwarted his youth, vexed and cramped him, saw only evil in his widening
desires, and threw him over when he came out West--the scallywag,
they called him, who had never wronged a man or-or a woman!
Never--wronged-a-woman? The question sprang to his lips now. Suddenly
he saw it all in a new light. White or brown or red, this heart and soul
and body before him were all his, sacred to him; he was in very truth
her “Chief.”
Untutored as she was, she read him, felt what was going on in him. She
saw the tears spring to his eyes. Then, coming close to him she said
softly, slowly: “I must go with you if you go, because you must be with
me when--oh, hai-yai, my chief, shall we go from here? Here in this
lodge wilt thou be with thine own people--thine own, thou and I--and
thine to come.” The great passion in her heart made the lie seem very
truth.
With a cry he got to his feet, and stood staring at her for a moment,
scarcely comprehending; then suddenly he clasped her in his arms.
“Mitiahwe--Mitiahwe, oh, my little girl!” he cried. “You and me--and our
own--our own people!” Kissing her, he drew her down beside him on the
couch. “Tell me again--it is so at last?” he said, and she whispered in
his ear once more.
In the middle of the night he said to her, “Some day, perhaps, we will
go East--some day, perhaps.”
“But now?” she asked softly.
“Not now--not if I know it,” he answered. “I’ve got my heart nailed to
the door of this lodge.”
As he slept she got quietly out, and, going to the door of the lodge,
reached up a hand and touched the horse-shoe.
“Be good Medicine to me,” she said. Then she prayed. “O Sun, pity me
that it may be as I have said to him. O pity me, great Father!”
In the days to come Swift Wing said that it was her Medicine; when her
hand was burned to the wrist in the dark ritual she had performed
with the Medicine Man the night that Mitiahwe fought for her man--but
Mitiahwe said it was her Medicine, the horse-shoe, which brought one of
Dingan’s own people to the lodge, a little girl with Mitiahwe’s eyes and
form and her father’s face. Truth has many mysteries, and the faith of
the woman was great; and so it was that, to the long end, Mitiahwe kept
her man. But truly she was altogether a woman, and had good fortune.