About a week after Marvin’s departure the mail brought the Riches four
envelopes. One contained the deed for Keego, properly made out and ready
for signing, another the wonderful check for four thousand dollars. This
one contained also a polite note from Chase Mahan, apparently addressed
to an aged spinster, trusting that he might have the pleasure of calling
upon her within a month.
Having now a Kittiwake at her disposal, the Humming-Bird embarked to
make a ceremony of the signing. Her retinue consisted of one editor of
Tacitus, one Scotchman, one Red Leaf, one Black Hawk, one postmistress,
one notary-gunsmith, and one dog.
Ojeeg and Shinguakonse were not at home, and Jean had to go after them.
She found them in a little hayfield hidden among the cedars, working
side by side, their long forks turning the masses of clover with ease.
They saw her afar off, and stopped. There in the hidden hayfield the boy
stood for a moment like his own tree, tall, and dark, and straight.
But he stood up no straighter than his father. In Ojeeg’s face there was
more than a reminiscence of ruined grandeur. Had not his
great-grandfather stood side by side with the Black Hawk’s ancestor,
Waubojeeg, and driven the Sioux so far west that white men thought of
them as plains Indians? It was that last battle at the Falls of St Croix
which saved the eastern half of the United States. Nobody remembered
these things now, but they were facts. And a poet named Longfellow had
taken the stories given to Schoolcraft by the children of Waubojeeg, and
made them into a poem called “Hiawatha,” thus crediting an Iroquois with
the divine feats of Manabozho!
But Ojeeg was content. His Bluebird had not died in vain. He had sent a
new war cry, death to the boasts of the Bwan! And this time it would be
a war in which all would gain. The common enemy was the evil little
manidos which creep into human lungs.
The two Indians walked up to the birch-bark lodge, where now the family
and the friends were assembled.
Shinguakonse made his father sit down on the red chest. Then from the
ancient bead-dress he brought an eagle feather and fashioned a quill
into a pen. Ojeeg took it, dipped up a good deal of ink, and laboriously
printed: Nick Fisher.
Then he drew a picture beneath—something meant for a fisher. It would
have done just as well for a bobcat, but he bushed out the tail at the
root and handed the deed to the notary. That personage, after holding it
close to his thick lenses, added these words: “an American citizen of
Chippewa County in the State of Michigan, and known in the Chippeway
language as Ojeeg, the Fisher, chief of the ancient and honorable Crane
totem, and further attested by his mark in the shape and image of the
animal so called.”
Then the wife signed, adding a leaf. Dr. Rich and Jean signed as
witnesses, the notary affixed his stamp, and the deed was done. Those
graves were gone forever.