IT was the year of the small-pox. The Pawnees had died in their cold
tepees by the fifties, the soldiers lay dead in the trenches without the
fort, and many a gay French voyageur, who had thought to go singing down
the Missouri on his fur-laden raft in the springtime, would never again
see the lights of St. Louis, or the coin of the mighty Choteau company.
It had been a winter of tragedies. The rigors of the weather and the
scourge of the disease had been fought with Indian charm and with
Catholic prayer. Both were equally unavailing. If a man was taken sick
at the fort they put him in a warm room, brought him a jug of water
once a day, and left him to find out what his constitution was worth.
Generally he recovered; for the surgeon's supplies had been exhausted
early in the year. But the Indians, in their torment, rushed into the
river through the ice, and returned to roll themselves in their blankets
and die in ungroaning stoicism.
Every one had grown bitter and hard. The knives of the trappers were
sharp, and not one whit sharper than their tempers. Some one said that
the friendly Pawnees were conspiring with the Sioux, who were always
treacherous, to sack the settlement. The trappers doubted this. They and
the Pawnees had been friends many years, and they had together killed
the Sioux in four famous battles on the Platte. Yet--who knows? There
was pestilence in the air, and it had somehow got into men's souls as
well as their bodies.
So, at least, Father de Smet said. He alone did not despair. He
alone tried neither charm nor curse. He dressed him an altar in the
wilderness, and he prayed at it--but not for impossible things. When in
a day's journey you come across two lodges of Indians, sixty souls in
each, lying dead and distorted from the plague in their desolate tepees,
you do not pray, if you are a man like Father de Smet. You go on to the
next lodge where the living yet are, and teach them how to avoid death.
Besides, when you are young, it is much easier to act than to pray. When
the children cried for food, Father de Smet took down the rifle from
the wall and went out with it, coming back only when he could feed the
hungry. There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and
the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows
of the Papillion. When they--the children--were cold, this young man
brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them
a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees. If he
wanted to cross a river and had no boat at hand, he leaped the uncertain
ice, or, in clear current, swam, with his clothes on his head in a
bundle.
A wonderful traveller for the time was Father de Smet. Twice he had gone
as far as the land of the Flathead nation, and he could climb mountain
passes as well as any guide of the Rockies. He had built a dozen
missions, lying all the way from the Columbia to the Kaw. He had always
a jest at his tongue's end, and served it out with as much readiness as
a prayer; and he had, withal, an arm trained to do execution. Every
man on the plains understood the art of self-preservation. Even in
Cainsville, over by the council ground of the western tribes, which was
quite the most civilized place for hundreds of miles, life was uncertain
when the boats came from St. Louis with bad whiskey in their holds. But
no one dared take liberties with the holy father. The thrust from his
shoulder was straight and sure, and his fist was hard.
Yet it was not the sinner that Father de Smet meant to crush. He always
supplemented his acts of physical prowess with that explanation. It
was the sin that he struck at from the shoulder--and may not even an
anointed one strike at sin?
Father de Smet could draw a fine line, too, between the things which
were bad in themselves, and the things which were only extrinsically
bad. For example, there were the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon. Mam'selle
herself was not above reproach, but her soups were. Mademoiselle Ninon
was the only Parisian thing in the settlement. And she was certainly to
be avoided--which was perhaps the reason that no one avoided her. It
was four years since she had seen Paris. She was sixteen then, and she
followed the fortunes of a certain adventurer who found it advisable to
sail for Montreal. Ninon had been bored back in Paris, it being dull
in the mantua-making shop of Madame Guittar. If she had been a man she
would have taken to navigation, and might have made herself famous by
sailing to some unknown part of the New World. Being a woman, she took
a lover who was going to New France, and forgot to weep when he found an
early and violent death. And there were others at hand, and Ninon sailed
around the cold blue lakes, past Sault St. Marie, and made her way
across the portages to the Mississippi, and so down to the sacred rock
of St. Louis. That was a merry place. Ninon had fault to find neither
with the wine nor the dances. They were all that one could have desired,
and there was no limit to either of them. But still, after a time, even
this grew tiresome to one of Ninon's spirit, and she took the first
opportunity to sail up the Missouri with a certain young trapper
connected with the great fur company, and so found herself at
Cainsville, with the blue bluffs rising to the east of her, and the low
white stretches of the river flats undulating down to where the sluggish
stream wound its way southward capriciously.
Ninon soon tired of her trapper. For one thing she found out that he
was a coward. She saw him run once in a buffalo fight. That was when the
Pawnee stood still with a blanket stretched wide in a gaudy square,
and caught the head of the mad animal fairly in the tough fabric; his
mustang's legs trembled under him, but he did not move,--for a mustang
is the soul of an Indian, and obeys each thought; the Indian himself
felt his heart pounding at his ribs; but once with that garment fast
over the baffled eyes of the struggling brute, the rest was only a
matter of judicious knife-thrusts. Ninon saw this. She rode past her
lover, and snatched the twisted bullion cord from his hat that she had
braided and put there, and that night she tied it on the hat of the
Pawnee who had killed the buffalo.
The Pawnees were rather proud of the episode, and as for the Frenchmen,
they did not mind. The French have always been very adaptable in
America. Ninon was universally popular.
And so were her soups.
Every man has his price. Father de Smet's was the soups of Mademoiselle
Ninon. Fancy! If you have an educated palate and are obliged to eat
the strong distillation of buffalo meat, cooked in a pot which has been
wiped out with the greasy petticoat of a squaw! When Ninon came down
from St. Louis she brought with her a great box containing neither
clothes, furniture, nor trinkets, but something much more wonderful!
It was a marvellous compounding of spices and seasonings. The aromatic
liquids she set before the enchanted men of the settlement bore no more
relation to ordinary buffalo soup than Chateaubriand's Indian maidens
did to one of the Pawnee girls, who slouched about the settlement with
noxious tresses and sullen slavish coquetries.
Father de Smet would not at any time have called Ninon a scarlet woman.
But when he ate the dish of soup or tasted the hot corn-cakes that she
invariably invited him to partake of as he passed her little house, he
refrained with all the charity of a true Christian and an accomplished
epicure from even thinking her such. And he remembered the words of the
Saviour, “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.”
To Father de Smet's healthy nature nothing seemed more superfluous than
sin. And he was averse to thinking that any committed deeds of which he
need be ashamed. So it was his habit, especially if the day was pleasant
and his own thoughts happy, to say to himself when he saw one of the
wild young trappers leaving the cabin of Mademoiselle Ninon: “He has
been for some of the good woman's hot cakes,” till he grew quite to
believe that the only attractions that the adroit Frenchwoman possessed
were of a gastronomic nature.
To tell the truth, the attractions of Mademoiselle Ninon were varied. To
begin with, she was the only thing in that wilderness to suggest home.
Ninon had a genius for home-making. Her cabin, in which she cooked,
slept, ate, lived, had become a boudoir.
The walls were hung with rare and beautiful skins; the very floor made
rich with huge bear robes, their permeating odors subdued by heavy
perfumes brought, like the spices, from St. Louis. The bed, in daytime,
was a couch of beaver-skins; the fireplace had branching antlers
above it, on which were hung some of the evidences of the fair Ninon's
coquetry, such as silken scarves, of the sort the voyageurs from the far
north wore; and necklaces made by the Indians of the Pacific coast and
brought to Ninon by--but it is not polite to inquire into these matters.
There were little moccasins also, much decorated with porcupine-quills,
one pair of which Father de Smet had brought from the Flathead nation,
and presented to Ninon that time when she nursed him through a frightful
run of fever. She would take no money for her patient services.
“Father,” said she, gravely, when he offered it to her, “I am not
myself virtuous. But I have the distinction of having preserved the only
virtuous creature in the settlement for further usefulness. Sometimes,
perhaps, you will pray for Ninon.”
Father de Smet never forgot those prayers.
These were wild times, mind you. No use to keep your skirts coldly clean
if you wished to be of help. These men were subduing a continent. Their
primitive qualities came out. Courage, endurance, sacrifice, suffering
without complaint, friendship to the death, indomitable hatred,
unfaltering hope, deep-seated greed, splendid gayety--it takes these
things to subdue a continent. Vice is also an incidental,--that is to
say, what one calls vice. This is because it is the custom to measure
these men as if they were governed by the laws of civilization, where
there is neither law nor civilization.
This much is certain: gentlemen cannot conquer a country. They
tried gentlemen back in Virginia, and they died, partly from lack of
intellect, but mostly from lack of energy. After the yeomen have fought
the conquering fight, it is well enough to bring in gentlemen, who
are sometimes clever lawmakers, and who look well on thrones or in
presidential chairs.
But to return to the winter of the smallpox. It was then that the priest
and Ninon grew to know each other well. They became acquainted first
in the cabin where four of the trappers lay tossing in delirium. The
horrible smell of disease weighted the air. Outside wet snow fell
continuously and the clouds seemed to rest only a few feet above the
sullen bluffs. The room was bare of comforts, and very dirty. Ninon
looked about with disgust.
“You pray,” said she to the priest, “and I will clean the room.”
“Not so,” returned the broad-shouldered father, smilingly, “we will both
clean the room.” Thus it came that they scrubbed the floor together, and
made the chimney so that it would not smoke, and washed the blankets on
the beds, and kept the woodpile high. They also devised ventilators, and
let in fresh air without exposing the patients. They had no medicine,
but they continually rubbed the suffering men with bear's grease.
“It's better than medicine,” said Ninon, after the tenth day, as, wan
with watching, she held the cool hand of one of the recovering men in
her own. “If we had had medicines we should have killed these men.”
“You are a woman of remarkable sense,” said the holy father, who was
eating a dish of corn-meal and milk that Ninon had just prepared, “and a
woman also of Christian courage.”
“Christian courage?” echoed Ninon; “do you think that is what you call
it? I am not afraid, no, not I; but it is not Christian courage. You
mistake in calling it that.” There were tears in her eyes. The priest
saw them.
“God lead you at last into peaceful ways,” said he, softly, lifting one
hand in blessing. “Your vigil is ended. Go to your home and sleep. You
know the value of the temporal life that God has given to man. In the
hours of the night, Ninon, think of the value of eternal life, which it
is also His to give.”
Ninon stared at him a moment with a dawning horror in her eyes.
Then she pointed to the table.
“Whatever you do,” said she, “don't forget the bear's grease.” And she
went out laughing. The priest did not pause to recommend her soul to
further blessing. He obeyed her directions.
March was wearing away tediously. The river was not yet open, and the
belated boats with needed supplies were moored far down the river. Many
of the reduced settlers were dependent on the meat the Indians brought
them for sustenance. The mud made the roads almost impassable; for the
frost lay in a solid bed six inches below the surface, and all above
that was semiliquid muck. Snow and rain alternated, and the frightful
disease did not cease its ravages.
The priest got little sleep. Now he was at the bed of a little
half-breed child, smoothing the straight black locks from the narrow
brow; now at the cot of some hulking trapper, who wept at the pain, but
died finally with a grin of bravado on his lips; now in a foul tepee,
where some grave Pawnee wrapped his mantle about him, and gazed with
prophetic and unflinching eyes into the land of the hereafter.
The little school that the priest started had been long since abandoned.
It was only the preservation of life that one thought of in these days.
And recklessness had made the men desperate. To the ravages of disease
were added horrible murders. Moral health is always low when physical
health is so.
Give a nation two winters of grippe, and it will have an epidemic of
suicide. Give it starvation and small-pox, and it will have a contagion
of murders. There are subtle laws underlying these things,--laws which
the physicians think they can explain; but they are mistaken. The reason
is not so material as it seems.
But spring was near in spite of falling snow and the dirty ice in the
river. There was not even a flushing of the willow twigs to tell it by,
nor a clearing of the leaden sky,--only the almanac. Yet all men
were looking forward to it. The trappers put in the feeble days of
convalescence, making long rafts on which to pile the skins dried over
winter,--a fine variety, worth all but their weight in gold. Money was
easily got in those days; but there are circumstances under which money
is valueless.
Father de Smet thought of this the day before Easter, as he plunged
through the mud of the winding street in his bearskin gaiters. Stout
were his legs, firm his lungs, as he turned to breathe in the west wind;
clear his sharp and humorous eyes. He was going to the little chapel
where the mission school had previously been held. Here was a rude
pulpit, and back of it a much-disfigured virgin, dressed in turkey-red
calico. Two cheap candles in their tin sticks guarded this figure, and
beneath, on the floor, was spread an otter-skin of perfect beauty. The
seats were of pine, without backs, and the wind whistled through the
chinks between the logs. Moreover, the place was dirty. Lenten service
had been out of the question. The living had neither time nor strength
to come to worship; and the dead were not given the honor of a burial
from church in these times of terror. The priest looked about him in
dismay, the place was so utterly forsaken; yet to let Easter go by
without recognition was not to his liking. He had been the night
before to every house in the settlement, bidding the people to come to
devotions on Sunday morning. He knew that not one of them would
refuse his invitation. There was no hero larger in the eyes of these
unfortunates than the simple priest who walked among them with his
unpretentious piety. The promises were given with whispered blessings,
and there were voices that broke in making them, and hands that shook
with honest gratitude. The priest, remembering these things, and all the
awful suffering of the winter, determined to make the service symbolic,
indeed, of the resurrection and the life,--the annual resurrection and
life that comes each year, a palpable miracle, to teach the dullest that
God reigns.
“How are you going to trim the altar?” cried a voice behind him.
He turned, startled, and in the doorway stood Mademoiselle Ninon,
her short skirt belted with a red silk scarf,--the token of some
trapper,--her ankles protected with fringed leggins, her head covered
with a beribboned hat of felt, such as the voyageurs wore.
“Our devotions will be the only decorations we can hang on it. But
gratitude is better than blossoms, and humanity more beautiful than
green wreaths,” said the father, gently.
It was a curious thing, and one that he had often noticed himself; he
gave this woman--unworthy as she was--the best of his simple thoughts.
Ninon tiptoed toward the priest with one finger coquettishly raised to
insure secrecy.
“You will never believe it,” she whispered, “no one would believe it!
But the fact is, father, I have two lilies.”
“Lilies,” cried the priest, incredulously, “two lilies?”
“That's what I say, father--two marvellously fair lilies with little
sceptres of gold in them, and leaves as white as snow. The bulbs were
brought me last autumn by--; that is to say, they were brought from St.
Louis. Only now have they blossomed. Heavens, how I have watched the
buds! I have said to myself every morning for a fortnight: 'Will they
open in time for the good father's Easter morning service?' Then I said:
'They will open too soon. Buds,' I have cried to them, 'do not dare
to open yet, or you will be horribly passee by Easter. Have the
kindness, will you, to save yourselves for a great event.' And they did
it; yes, father, you may not believe, but no later than this morning
these sensible flowers opened up their leaves boldly, quite conscious
that they were doing the right thing, and to-morrow, if you please, they
will be here. And they will perfume the whole place; yes.”
She stopped suddenly, and relaxed her vivacious expression for one of
pain.
“You are certainly ill,” cried the priest. “Rest yourself.” He tried to
push her on to one of the seats; but a sort of convulsive rigidity came
over her, very alarming to look at.
“You are worn out,” her companion said gravely. “And you are chilled.”
“Yes, I'm cold,” confessed Ninon. “But I had to come to tell you about
the lilies. But, do you see, I never could bring myself to put them in
this room as it is now. It would be too absurd to place them among this
dirt. We must clean the place.”
“The place will be cleaned. I will see to it. But as for you, go home
and care for yourself.” Ninon started toward the door with an uncertain
step. Suddenly she came back.
“It is too funny,” she said, “that red calico there on the Virgin.
Father, I have some laces which were my mother's, who was a good woman,
and which have never been worn by me. They are all I have to remember
France by and the days when I was--different. If I might be permitted--”
she hesitated and looked timidly at the priest.
“'She hath done what she could,'” murmured Father de Smet, softly.
“Bring your laces, Ninon.” He would have added: “Thy sins be forgiven
thee.” But unfortunately, at this moment, Pierre came lounging down the
street, through the mud, fresh from Fort Laramie. His rifle was slung
across his back, and a full game-bag revealed the fact that he had
amused himself on his way. His curly and wind-bleached hair blew out
in time-torn banners from the edge of his wide hat. His piercing, black
eyes were those of a man who drinks deep, fights hard, and lives
always in the open air. Wild animals have such eyes, only there is this
difference: the viciousness of an animal is natural; at least one-half
of the viciousness of man is artificial and devised.
When Ninon saw the frost-reddened face of this gallant of the plains,
she gave a little cry of delight, and the color rushed back into her
face. The trapper saw her, and gave a rude shout of welcome. The next
moment, he had swung her clear of the chapel steps; and then the two
went down the street together, Pierre pausing only long enough to doff
his hat to the priest.
“The Virgin will wear no fresh laces,” said the priest, with some
bitterness; but he was mistaken. An hour later, Ninon was back, not only
with a box of laces, but also with a collection of cosmetics, with which
she proceeded to make startling the scratched and faded face of the
wooden Virgin, who wore, after the completion of Ninon's labors, a
decidedly piquant and saucy expression. The very manner in which the
laces were draped had a suggestion of Ninon's still unforgotten art as
a maker of millinery, and was really a very good presentment of Paris
fashions four years past. Pierre, meantime, amused himself by filling up
the chinks in the logs with fresh mud,--a commodity of which there was
no lack,--and others of the neighbors, incited by these extraordinary
efforts, washed the dirt from seats, floor, and windows, and brought
furs with which to make presentable the floor about the pulpit.
Father de Smet worked harder than any of them. In his happy enthusiasm
he chose to think this energy on the part of the others was prompted by
piety, though well he knew it was only a refuge from the insufferable
ennui that pervaded the place. Ninon suddenly came up to him with a
white face.
“I am not well,” she said. Her teeth were chattering, and her eyes had
a little blue glaze over them. “I am going home. In the morning I will
send the lilies.”
The priest caught her by the hand.
“Ninon,” he whispered, “it is on my soul not to let you go to-night.
Something tells me that the hour of your salvation is come. Women worse
than you, Ninon, have come to lead holy lives. Pray, Ninon, pray to the
Mother of Sorrows, who knows the sufferings and sins of the heart.”
He pointed to the befrilled and highly fashionable Virgin with her
rouge-stained cheeks.
Ninon shrank from him, and the same convulsive rigidity he had noticed
before, held her immovable. A moment later, she was on the street again,
and the priest, watching her down the street, saw her enter her cabin
with Pierre.
.......
It was past midnight when the priest was awakened from his sleep by
a knock on the door. He wrapped his great buffalo-coat about him, and
answered the summons. Without in the damp darkness stood Pierre.
“Father,” he cried, “Ninon has sent for you. Since she left you, she has
been very ill. I have done what I could; but now she hardly speaks, but
I make out that she wants you.” Ten minutes later, they were in Ninon's
cabin. When Father de Smet looked at her he knew she was dying. He had
seen the Indians like that many times during the winter. It was the
plague, but driven in to prey upon the system by the exposure. The
Parisienne's teeth were set, but she managed to smile upon her visitor
as he threw off his coat and bent over her. He poured some whiskey for
her; but she could not get the liquid over her throat.
“Do not,” she said fiercely between those set white teeth, “do not
forget the lilies.” She sank back and fixed her glazing eyes on the
antlers, and kept them there watching those dangling silken scarves,
while the priest, in haste, spoke the words for the departing soul.
The next morning she lay dead among those half barbaric relics of her
coquetry, and two white lilies with hearts of gold shed perfume from an
altar in a wilderness.