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 . UBJUJffl, MS 
 
 Squaw Elouise 
 
 By 
 
 Marah Ellis Ryan. 
 
 Chicago and New York: 
 Rand, McNally & Company, 
 
 Publishers.
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY RAND, MCNALLY & Co 
 All Rights Reserved. 
 
 Eloulse
 
 "WHOM THE GODS LOVE, 
 
 This to the loved memory of 
 
 Our Friend, 
 "SIR KNIGHT," 
 and the dear days of which he was a 
 
 AUGUST 17, 1891, 
 
 KNOWN TO HIS BROTHERS IN ART 
 AS 
 
 ALDRICH KNIGHT, 
 
 ACTOR. 
 
 2138107
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER. PAGE. 
 
 I. Camp Diversions, 9 
 
 II. A Game, - 19 
 
 III. A Letter, - - 28 
 
 IV. The Lakes of the Arrows, 34 
 V. Past the Pictured Rocks, - -43 
 
 VI. Redney's Visitor, - 52 
 
 VII. Family Folks in High-Low, - - 63 
 
 VIII. Ikt Elite (One Slave), - 70 
 
 IX. You Sold Me! - - 79 
 
 X. In the Fort of the Unnamed Nation, - 89 
 
 XI. The Picture in the Locket, - - 107 
 
 XII. High-Low Reformed, - - - 118 
 
 XIII. Mr. Clevents Takes Notes, - -127 
 
 XIV. Her Mother's Story, - 146 
 XV. Her Songs, - 156 
 
 XVI. A Priest of the Wilds, - 171 
 
 XVII. In the Home of the White Women, - -176 
 
 XVIII. Warnings of the Heights, - 185 
 
 XIX. A Black Robe, - - 188 
 
 XX. The Gentleman from Washington, - 194 
 
 XXI. Above the Clouds, - 204 
 
 XXII. Henri Mercier, - 211 
 
 XXIII. filouise, - - 221 
 
 XXIV. On Thunder Mountain, - - 233 
 
 XXV. Back to the World, 237
 
 SQUAW ELOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 CAMP DIVERSIONS. 
 
 THE soft kisses of spring-time winds along the Columbia 
 had melted the last fringe of ice from brooks and rivers, 
 bound so tightly by the winter past; now and then the far 
 thunder of avalanches in the Selkirks beat through the 
 softened air, and told of changes in the snow king's 
 domains up there in high ravines, whose shadows show so 
 soft a violet above the clouds. 
 
 Where Tumwata Creek (the creek of the Cascades) joins 
 the River Columbia, between Farwell and the Rapids of 
 Death, the Indians of old pulled ashore their dug-outs or 
 " garpoint " canoes, and made themselves a camp for their 
 hunting season. Sometimes they brought with them their 
 good friends, the French, who trapped and hunted in the 
 same region, and took to themselves wives in the Indian 
 villages south of the Arrow lakes. Sometimes, too, those 
 adopted children of the tribes learned secrets of the soil 
 and of wondrous metals hidden beneath the crust of the 
 Gold Range and the Selkirk Spurs. 
 
 In time, those hidden magnets of the mountains were 
 heard of in the eastern provinces and on the Pacific Coast, 
 and strange motley assemblies moved upward on the water, 
 
 (9)
 
 10 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 pitching their tents through the short summer wherever a 
 show of color bewitched them. 
 
 And so, when the mine called the Little Rock was struck, 
 only a few miles above, and sold to a speculator of the 
 States, who changed the name to the Little Dell, and also 
 sent an engineer to push the work when all these interest- 
 ing things came to pass, the site of the old Indian resting- 
 place was settled on as a good social center for the workers 
 of independent claims, as well as those from the big mine, 
 and the traveler passing up and down their only thorough- 
 fare to the outer world. 
 
 A half-dozen cabins were scattered in a straggling line 
 along the foot of the hill, facing the creek. Some of them 
 were a year old, others of more recent structure; only one 
 had the bark stripped from the logs by wind and weather. 
 It had been the germ of High-Low. It was said the 
 Indians had so named the camp after watching with much 
 interest a fascinating game with which the earliest miners from 
 the States had begun their evenings. They had also consci- 
 entiously added " Jack and the Game," but the name seemed 
 top-heavy for the size of the bearer, and only the first two 
 words were adopted by the citizens of the sylvan hamlet 
 not exactly the peace-begirt abode of innocence, as one is 
 likely to suppose a hamlet should be, if we could judge 
 from the life lived there between the last of May and the 
 first of November. During the other months travel was a 
 difficult matter, and labor was at a standstill until the warm 
 sun came again. 
 
 Now the warm sun had arrived for its season, and its 
 coming had steeped the silent valley of the Tumwata in 
 the spring fever of June. 
 
 From one long log building the beginning of High- 
 Low arose the only signs of activity. It was the store- 
 house, the saloon, the trading-post, and the hotel for as
 
 CAMP DIVERSIONS. 11 
 
 many as could sleep on the floor and the tables. It was 
 also the place where the mail was to be found, if any came 
 up through Farwell in semi-periodical dug-outs. 
 
 An inviting legend for time-killers was displayed in crude 
 lettering outside the door, while from within was heard the 
 sound of several voices, and fervent prayers arose to a god 
 not " too great or good for human nature's daily food," 
 as several participants in itloktim the game of " hand " 
 seemed to look on him as a silent partner in their gambling, 
 and would demand, with slight ceremony, blessings on one 
 fellow's luck, or the ban of damnation on the chances of 
 the other fellow. 
 
 The shadows grew longer, and the straggly settlement 
 seemed to arise toward the dark instead of the dawn. 
 Some miners came, riding mules helter-skelter through the 
 little stream; some half-breed women of unhandsome ex- 
 terior, and no lack of dirt on their apparel, thrust their 
 heads from one shanty sleepily, and grinned and grimaced 
 at the new arrivals in a manner particularly inviting, for 
 which they received some remarks more forcible than flat- 
 tering, and which spoke little for the gallantry of the neigh- 
 borhood, since they were at present the only located 
 residents of the gentle sex that the little outpost could 
 boast of. 
 
 Two young men walked together away from the 
 " hotel." One of them halted as they reached the rise of the 
 mountain a boyish chap, with the bronze of red blood in 
 his cheeks, but with curly hair. 
 
 " Dang it, Milt, I've a notion to go back! " 
 
 "I won't," decided "Milt," moodily " if I do I'll get 
 drunk; I feel like cutting the whole country an' getting back 
 East." 
 
 "Oh, pshaw! she's all right, you bet!" answered the 
 other, hopefully; " that last letter she sent was slow comin!
 
 12 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 but it got here. Now don't get off yer feed just account o* 
 missin' a letter one mail it'll come next one." 
 
 " May be she's sick or else the baby." 
 
 "Naw! you'd get telegraphed instead of wrote if it was 
 that. Now quit a frettin', you old fool, Milt. Why that young 
 man'll jest come trampin' into the shack some o' these 
 odd-come-shorts a packin' his mammy's duds on his back. 
 How much you say he weighed? " 
 
 The question was asked as if entire forgetfulness had 
 swept that important amount from his mind, and Milt took 
 from his pocket a much-read letter and for the hundredth 
 time told the story. 
 
 "Nine pounds and seven ounces, Redney; that's some- 
 thing of a baby now! " 
 
 " An' nigh three months old. He ought to double his 
 weight in that time if he's any good," said Redney, "an* 
 be able to strike the beam at twenty by the time he hits the 
 breeze of our ledge." 
 
 " Poor little Nannie it's a rough place to ask her to fol- 
 low a man," and the speaker turned and looked down into 
 the ravine where the shanties were. " If there was even 
 one white woman one decent woman in the place, it 
 wouldn't be so bad; but the cursed squaws " 
 
 " Say, did you spot the ' princess?' She's back." 
 
 "Yes; saw her feet sticking out of a blanket. I suppose 
 she is drunk there at Antoine's place; but I didn't see the 
 girl." 
 
 "Sold her, may be," hazarded Redney. " The 'princess' 
 is of that stripe, I reckon. Yet do you know these scrub 
 Indians treat that old hag better than they do each other. 
 I got the word from a Selkirk man that they say she is of 
 their old king blood. It's been many a year, I guess, since 
 they had a kingdom." 
 
 " Her only idea of a scepter is a whisky-bottle," returned
 
 CAMP DIVERSIONS. 13 
 
 the older man. " I can't discover any royal traits in either 
 her or that owl-eyed slip of a girl that used to loaf around 
 here with her." 
 
 " She could fight royally if you riled her," grinned the boy. 
 
 Yes say, was that Neil Dunbar who rode in with that 
 gang from the mine? He looked as if he had an outfit with 
 him. Reckon he's going to pull up stakes?" 
 
 " Hard tellin'; an' you come trampin' away in such a fit 
 o' cranks that I didn't get to see anyone or anything." 
 
 " Oh, shut your growling and go back if you've a mind 
 to, you kid! " said his friend good-naturedly. " You always 
 want to see the circus and the band-wagon go past." 
 
 " I'd like to have as good a berth as Dunbar's leavin' 
 behind him if he is bound for across the line;" and Redney's 
 tones were covetous. 
 
 " May be he's got a wife left in the settlements," suggested 
 Milt, with a ready reason for a man leaving the hills. 
 
 " Naw; he don't look noways married," decided Redney, 
 "an' he's too light-hearted." 
 
 And with that unconscious plea for celibacy he went 
 upward through the giant spruces beside the man whose 
 thoughts and longings were away in the East, held by the 
 tiny hands of a child unseen, and centered in the wish for 
 the little wife he had come to find wealth for. Redney 
 was right, may be. The husband carried no such light heart 
 as the bachelor's left behind there. Love levies heavy 
 taxes on his subjects, taxes paid with aching hearts often, 
 even while one strives through blinding tears to follow in 
 the way he has gone He ! the king supreme in his season. 
 
 But down below there the care-free ones were growing 
 gently hilarious in the near death of the day, for the sun 
 was going down, slipping over toward the Coast Range and 
 thence over the gray sea to the abode of far-off mysteries 
 the land of the Orient.
 
 14 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 So boisterous did they become that even the castle of 
 Antoine proved all too small for their needs, and a mummy- 
 like form in a blanket was rolled off a bench just outside 
 the door that the wearied might find rest by turning it to 
 their own use, which they did, resting themselves in repose- 
 ful attitudes and betting on what would emerge from the 
 blanket. 
 
 Some grunted oaths came first Chinook oaths, varied 
 and awful. 
 
 "Hello! it's the princess," admonished one of the 
 accursed with a most earnest'air of surprise. " Gentlemen, 
 you have mistaken your party. You fancied it some scrub 
 Siwash on a drunk, while it is really a princess of the blood 
 royal sunk in a reverie. You should all get down on your 
 bended knees, but I'm afraid you're too drunk to get up 
 again, so if your gracious highness will pardon " 
 
 Her gracious highness scrambled to a sitting position in 
 the dust of the road, and turned eyes blearedly diabolical 
 up to the mocking face that was so handsome. 
 
 "You? Diaublalah! Nah!" (devil fool). 
 
 " Come, come, my princess, Talapus, your deity, has sent 
 you a bad dream. Yes, it is I come back to see you. Will 
 we drink? " 
 
 "Klatawah!" 
 
 " Go away? No no; lum have, much lum " (rum). 
 
 The lady in the road grunted. 
 
 " Luketchee (clams) many," he continued enticingly. 
 
 And finally, after several persuasions, the royal person- 
 age, La Mestina (the one of medicines or charms), by 
 descent the princess, slipped out of her blanket and, in the 
 face of many grins, slouched in to the counter at the heels 
 of the handsomest man in the diggings. 
 
 "Lord lord! but she's gone down," remarked Bob 
 Nichols, the mail-carrier and courier in general for the valley.
 
 CAMP DIVERSIONS. 15 
 
 "Only ten years ago that old bloat wa'n't far off bein* 
 good-lookin' come nigher to it than any squaws I see. 
 Reub Hart he owned her. He came out o' the Palouse 
 country. That girl that she has is his, an' he used to keep 
 them pretty decent. Then he reformed an' married a 
 widder down in the States, an' shuffled the squaw off his 
 hands, an' La Mestina has took whisky for her medicine 
 ever since; an' I allow the young one does too." 
 
 " Naw! " contradicted a rather thick tongue; " that brat 
 works an' grubs around like a boy fights like one too but 
 no rum." 
 
 And then polite conversation having become uninterest- 
 ing and dry, the bench was gradually forsaken by some 
 for supper, by others for the temptations under the roof of 
 Antoine. 
 
 It was yet forsaken when, through the sunset light, a 
 form came down the valley that looked strangely out of 
 place in the noise of carousal and rough words a tall form, 
 with a semi-Indian face, and wearing the dress of a priest. 
 
 The tousle-headed half-breed women drew within their 
 doors as he approached. One or two men he spoke to, 
 calling them by name. One of them, a Canadian-French- 
 man, greeted him as Brother Henri, and a certain air of 
 respect tinged the manner of the people he met, possibly 
 induced by the office he filled, but more probably by the 
 athletic frame, as straight, as vigorous as the giant spruces 
 whose murmurs had been his cradle-song. 
 
 Much of the " native " seemed expressed by the very way 
 he trod the earth and received greetings from those alien 
 wealth-seekers. At the door of Antoine's he paused, 
 checked by a movement and a low "winipie!" the Indian 
 boy who followed him with a pony, and, leaving them 
 there, entered alone the building containing as much of 
 lawlessness as is generally gathered together on the frontier.
 
 16 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Not that the proprietor was rough or lawless himself. 
 His smile, as he came forward to greet " Mon ami Fra 
 Henri" was the smile of a courtier impressive, flattering, 
 and flattered. 
 
 But the French blood of Fra Henri had lent him little of 
 its urbane camaraderie. Briefly as an Indian he cut through 
 those conciliating utterances. 
 
 "No, Antoine, no wine; nothing from you for myself; 
 but over the hills there far back disease is loose, borne 
 on the winds. I want medicines of these," and he motioned 
 to some glass jars that filled the apothecary-shelf of the 
 establishment, " and rum the best. We go at once." 
 
 "Ah! but it is all of one pity! It is weeks, whole weeks, 
 since you have once made entrance to our valley, and now 
 you go in the great haste, and never await the suppair, the 
 fete, if you but will, that I, Antoine Leclerc, so long your 
 friend, would be proud to offer." 
 
 " The people my people await across the mountain the 
 medicines; " and Antoine, never ceasing his chattering, com- 
 plied at once with the order in the tone and gathered 
 together the articles needed as they were pointed out to him. 
 
 " Your people ah! you say so; that is your pity for 
 them; out, it is gracious, that pity. But we are of your 
 people also yes, much, mon ami. You are of the French 
 fere more than of the Indian mbre certain, unmistakable 
 I tell it to you I, who have so well been acquaint with you 
 for the years out, oui the years before the church the 
 saints guard! did claim- to you the years before you did 
 leave the wayhut et lapiege (the trail and the trap) ; and I, 
 Antoine " 
 
 "I do not forget you are of my father's race yes, 
 may be; but the mother's race needs me " 
 
 He interrupted himself at sight of a figure in the far cor- 
 ner who blinked at him with heavy, stupid eyes. It was
 
 CAMP DIVERSIONS. 17 
 
 the " princess," enthroned on a box which was nailed about 
 five feet from the floor, too far from it for her to attempt 
 a descent in her present rather hazy condition, and totally 
 deserted by the courtiers who had enthroned her there; and 
 over their heads and across the gambling-table she was 
 leering at Fra Henri. 
 
 "La Mestina! " and the dark face of the priest grew 
 stern "here" and his keen eyes swept every corner of 
 the long room as if in search of some other. " I thought 
 she was in the south hills." 
 
 "Until to-day only to-day," explained Antoine, "and 
 then she come what you call with your people klahowyum 
 (poor, miserable); now she rest she refresh herself ; you 
 see?" 
 
 Fra Henri did. He had seen before his informant ceased 
 speaking and had crossed the room. 
 
 "Where is F^louise? " he asked the enthroned, and she 
 turned her eyes drowsily around the place. 
 
 " Wakeyakwa" (not here), she answered a bit sullenly, 
 as if not pleased with the fact stated. 
 
 A look of relief lit up the man's face; drove some of the 
 sternness out of his eyes. 
 
 " That is right, La Mestina; never, never here. You under- 
 stand? And you too should go back to the hills they are 
 best." 
 
 "Ugh!" and the lady on the box straightened up 
 angrily and then collapsed, muttering in Chinook, " For 
 dogs and priests, may be; I am princess." 
 
 " Come," he said, " listen to me. You remember when 
 we talked last; it was of FJouise and the church. She is 
 almost a woman now, and must no longer do work, as she 
 used to do, for the miners and men here. She was a child 
 then, but now . In our convent across the mountain there 
 is room for her; when is she to go to it? " 
 
 2
 
 18 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 The " princess " understood, and leered good-humoredly 
 at the earnest face. 
 
 " If you, Henri, son of Mercier the Frenchman, had not 
 covered yourself with the dress of a squaw, you would find 
 other place for a girl than with the black robes; your father 
 knew better. How much money you carry? " 
 
 He smiled a little, showing her an empty purse; Antoine 
 had received its contents. 
 
 " Then go your ways," and she kicked at him inef- 
 fectually; "go to your prayers. If the church wants 
 ^Ilouise, it is rich, it can pay. If you want her " 
 
 "We never buy con verts we win them," he interrupted; 
 and she grinned. 
 
 "Well, I'll sell you a chance to win her for tahla " (dol- 
 lar), she said, and looked pleased as his face paled. 
 
 " I will talk to her, not you," he said, sternly; "not now. 
 I go to the sick, where you should go too you were of 
 Lames tin (medicine) once; and to the child I will talk when 
 this work is done." 
 
 The princess nodded grotesquely, like some grinning 
 Indian devil enthroned there. 
 
 " Mika klap elip yahka" (you'll find her first), she mut- 
 tered, and sat looking contemplatively after the p'riest as 
 he followed Antoine out of the door where the pony was 
 being loaded with his purchases; and ere the dusk had 
 quite fallen he had left the dust of High-Low, and plunged 
 into the spruce along the trail, shadowy and odorous. 
 
 And then the ruminations of the princess found vent in 
 a series of short, sharp squalls, through which the habitues 
 tried to continue their amusements and failed. Some sul- 
 phurous remarks were flung at her, but they checked not 
 a particle the din she was raising. The princess wanted to 
 get down, and depended on her musical voice to accom- 
 plish her desires.
 
 A GAME. 10 
 
 It did. The handsome young fellow who had coaxed her 
 in staggered to his feet (the him glasses had been filled so 
 many times), and staggered more under the royal weight 
 as he lifted her to the floor. 
 
 " You're a nice little woman, princess," he remarked, 
 with much of reverie and more of sleepiness in his eyes; 
 " but I never am able to doubt the reality of a personal 
 devil when you're around. Now dear out! " 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 A GAME. 
 
 Two hours later the curly-haired Redney proved his 
 partner's truth by again slipping down to High-Low to see 
 all of the crowd or commotion near their hill life. But 
 used as he was to unusual things, he gave a whistle of sur- 
 prise at the scene before him. 
 
 The princess had not gone far when dismissed not so 
 far but that she had already returned, and beside her a girl 
 with the Indian color showing through her face, and the 
 face itself, and the eyes of it, darkened and flashing with a 
 pent-up fury. 
 
 " Ikt tahla! " (one dollar), the princess was saying, and 
 then Redney saw a drunken miner leer at the girl, and lay 
 a round silver dollar in the hand of the princess in exchange 
 for a slip of paper drawn from a covered box. Several 
 slips of paper were held in the fingers of men who were 
 laughing, and as many tahlas reposed in the brown hand of 
 the princess.
 
 20 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " And why not," smiled Antoine to Redney's amazed 
 questioning of this new trick of gambling. "What man 
 here would give to the girl a harder life than to live with 
 the princess? It is so I look, it is so I make decision in my 
 mind, when they did speak of the raffle and you see? " 
 
 Antoine himself held one of the small numbered slips. 
 It was not the first squaw the boy had seen sold or traded 
 life on the North Pacific Slope holds many such revela- 
 tions; but his young face flushed as he met the eyes of 
 the girl who stood in that circle of half-drunken exiles 
 from civilization a young slave questioning mutely the 
 faces among which was one who would claim her as master. 
 And among them all, not one sober enough to appeal to 
 if appeal was in her thoughts. 
 
 Redney did not know, but he wished he knew how many 
 chances there were and he had money enough to cover 
 them, but he could not. House-furnishing takes money, 
 and many resplendent things in their shack had been 
 bought by Redney in honor of that wife and babe belong- 
 ing to his partner. Two dollars were all that jingled in 
 his pocket; and, shamed though he felt, they were added to 
 the store of La Mestina, who grunted and laughed as she 
 looked at the boy blushing so furiously. 
 
 " Hello, Hop-o-my-thumb! you dealing in live-stock 
 these days? " hiccoughed a big giant of a miner good- 
 naturedly. " But that's all right, sonny; put up your 
 money like a little man, and then," he added, " may be 
 you'll get her; luck generally does go to just such pretty- 
 faced whipper-snappers where women are concerned. But 
 I'm your friend, my boy, I'm " 
 
 Then sleep tied his tongue, while Redney edged out of 
 the crowd, and heard the princess call " High-yih! " as she 
 spied, over the heads of the others, the tall young fellow 
 who bade her " clear out " not so long before.
 
 A GAME. 21 
 
 With the lateness of the evening his face had gained an 
 added flush, and was a marked contrast to a quiet-looking, 
 pale-faced man who came in with him, and who had drank 
 only mild drinks, while lum was the standard drink for th 
 rest of the crowd. 
 
 He laid a restraining hand on the arm of the other as the 
 princess called. 
 
 "You don't want any of that, Dunbar," he said con- 
 temptuously. " A squaw up for sale keep clear of the 
 case; and if we're to finish that game " 
 
 "Oh, see here, this isn't a squaw; it's little squaw 
 ^Ilouise, my errand-boy long ago." 
 
 And then he pushed through the crowd; and Redney, 
 seeing the girl's face brighten, her eyes shine as with glad- 
 ness, looked for the reason. He saw only the cool-eyed 
 gambler, who was a stranger to him, and Neil Dunbar, 
 laughing and victorious over a late game, and heartlessly 
 jocular over La Mestina's method of disposing of her family. 
 
 " Hi! you old Indian witch, what devilment is it you want 
 my help in to buy a ticket? How many you got? And 
 you, you young slip of royalty, is it you that is to be 
 the prize? That's droll. Why, it was only yesterday yon ran 
 errands and blacked my boots or was it last year? You've 
 grown taller, anyway a dollar's worth taller?" 
 
 But he bought the ticket, the only one left. The girl 
 had not answered his greeting, but turned away her face 
 a bit of possible sulkiness that angered the princess, who 
 caught her and attempted to twist her head around to the 
 gaze of the audience; and in the scowling resistance, the 
 poor oVess she wore was torn stripped from one shoulder 
 and arm, showing the creamy skin and girlish form to the 
 waist an accident that restored the maudlin good-humor 
 of the princess, who laughed. Most of the others were too 
 tipsy to comment; but the gambler noted the two tickets 
 in Redney 's fingers.
 
 22 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 " Say, young fellow," he said, carelessly, " I'll just take 
 those tickets off your hands, and double your money for 
 your bargain." 
 
 The young fellow looked into the speculative eyes that 
 rested on the girl, who was striving to re-adjust the rags 
 over the arm that was less thin and sinewy than that of the 
 average Indian. 
 
 " The tickets ain't for sale," he growled. 
 
 " Give you five apiece for them." 
 
 "You couldn't buy them for a hundred;" and Redney 
 turned on his heel and walked away. The gambler and 
 himself were the only sober men in the place, and the boy 
 was ashamed of the whole scene. He was half angry, too, 
 at the eager way in which the girl filouise watched Neil 
 Dunbar, though she did not speak to him. 
 
 Neil Dunbar " Gentleman Neil," as he had heard him 
 called handsome, good-natured, charming; a man whom 
 men liked and women loved, and for what? Few were the 
 people to whom he had ever been of actual benefit in life; 
 yet the frank gaze of his blue-gray eyes, or the clasp of his 
 hand, had won him many a friend; the caressing tendencies 
 of his voice, and a few non-committal whispers, had won 
 him many a love. But to none did he seem bound closely, 
 since for over a year he had lived in the Chinook region. 
 With the crowd sometimes, when the isolated life would 
 make lum a temptation, but not of them at other times, 
 keeping ever that little line drawn that marks the man of 
 opportunities from the unlearned mass, but doing it in so 
 gracious a way that never an enemy was made, only the 
 sobriquet of " gentleman " given him and glances won, 
 such as irritated Redney as he looked at the girl filouise. 
 
 " Hang it! she's no better than the rest, may be," and he 
 looked discontentedly at the tickets that bespoke two 
 chances for her among twenty-five; "and that Dunbar's 
 half -shot now. Pshaw! she deserves to be sold."
 
 A GAME. 23 
 
 An un-Indian-like eagerness filled the girl's manner, 
 though she said never a word, as Antoine held one num- 
 bered slip in his hand and the other buyers thrust theirs 
 forward for comparison, the mate of the numbered ticket 
 winning the prize. 
 
 " I myself have not got it, not so near as ten numbers; 
 no, nor you, Roberts; nor you, Redney, with both your 
 papers; nor you, nor you! " 
 
 How filouise strained eyes and ears for each shade of 
 comment that would end the matching! It seemed an 
 hour that Antoine laughed there with them and poured 
 drinks for the losers, and then, at a word from his com- 
 panion, Dunbar, who had evidently forgotten he held a 
 ticket, staggered up. 
 
 " Here we are, gentlemen; 'xcuse me if I kept you wait- 
 ing in your grand lottery drawing; here's my ticket. I paid 
 the last dollar on the princess apparent, and the last dollar 
 wins." 
 
 "It does do so, indeed, Monsieur," and Antoine laid 
 beside it the matched card. " It is the thirteen, which is 
 called unlucky, but to you it brings the good luck the 
 squaw ISlouise." 
 
 The girl's face grew white as Dunbar turned to her 
 laughing. 
 
 " A nice addition you are to a man's outfit just when he's 
 taking a trail back to the world," he remarked. "Come 
 here. You don't belong to ' her royals ' there any longer; 
 don't be afraid. Will you come with me? " 
 
 "filouise is not afraid now," she said, with a prouder look 
 on her face, a face that had something like content in it. 
 
 "Don't believe you are,*' he said; " living with Satanas 
 must make strong nerves. Don't know what I'm to do 
 with you, Illlouise, 'pon my soul I don't, unless I get a boy's 
 outfit for you and call you Louis; that might do, hey,
 
 24 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 Antoine only you're too pretty for a boy, much too pretty. 
 What do you say, Cleve? " (this to the clear-eyed gambler 
 near him). " It makes a heap of trouble for a man when 
 they're too pretty." 
 
 And then, as the gainer of the prize, he was called on to 
 treat the crowd. The prize herself slipped away into a 
 corner, unnoted by her owner and seemingly uncared for 
 by the princess, who dribbled the price of her from one 
 hand to the other contentedly, not even missing the belt- 
 knife l^louise had deftly stolen from her in the commence- 
 ment of the raffle, and which she yet held fearfully in the 
 breast of the blouse she wore, doubtful, perhaps, of success- 
 fully keeping it if the maternal mind turned toward its 
 loss. 
 
 But Redney had noted the petty thieving, considering it 
 a bit of a virtue to steal from that keen-eyed Satanas, as 
 Dunbar had called her; and then his quick sympathy for 
 her was forgotten in watching the games commenced, one 
 between the stranger called Clevents and Dunbar, who 
 shuffled the cards, gayly elated with his luck, and confident 
 of luck to come. 
 
 "Lay out your ' tahlas,' Mr. Clevents; I'm waiting for 
 them, and have an idea that I could win the stars out of 
 heaven to-night." 
 
 The gambler looked at him and smiled. The flushed 
 face and eyes, feverish from Antoine's liquor-store, were not 
 the signs of a winner in a play of science, and for a player 
 to hoodoo his own game by boasting of high luck was 
 another folly. Mr. Clevents knew better than that. 
 
 And the truth of that old gambling superstition was 
 proven by the money that after the first game ah! that 
 first game that brings hope! went steadily across the table 
 and away from Dunbar's hand, that grew more and more 
 unsteady with every loss and the drinks that followed.
 
 A GAME. 25 
 
 "We'll quit now, if you say so," said the gambler 
 obligingly, as he slipped the gains into his pocket, knowing 
 that there was little left to win. 
 
 "No, sir, you don't! " objected the other with the stub- 
 bornness of the whisky asserting itself; "the last dollar 
 wins, I tell you! Where's that Indian I won? The last 
 dollar that's where my luck lies, and you owe me a chance 
 to get even, Mr. Mr. Cleve. Lord! how my head aches. 
 Give me another drink! There's the rest of it," and he 
 emptied his pockets on the table; "count it, you little fel- 
 low; I'll do as much for you some day. How much? 
 Thirteen dollars thirteen? Cover that, then, Mr. Cleve, 
 and here goes for luck! " 
 
 The gambler hesitated; not a bad sort of a fellow and 
 not wanting to strip a man. 
 
 "Go 'head," said one of the bystanders; "give a man a 
 chance to get his money back." 
 
 And Mr. Clevents did so. The thirteen, with that last 
 dollar among them, were covered, the cards, with fate in 
 them, portioned out, and at the finale it was again the slen- 
 der, finely-formed hand of the gambler that had reached 
 out for the stakes. 
 
 "Satisfied?" he asked. " Tell you what I'll do; give you 
 back a fifty to play against someone else if you promise it 
 won't be played against me." 
 
 Dunbar shook his head at the stipulation founded on a 
 time-honored superstition. 
 
 " No, I don't; you're the man I want to play, do you see? 
 and I'm played out, I reckon, ain't I? " He looked at his 
 fingers and laughed tipsily. " I used to wear a ring that 
 might have backed me, ditto watch, but I don't see them 
 now, gentlemen, do you? No; a girl down the Palouse 
 country made love to that ring girls were scarce down there 
 and she got it. Not a d d ounce of jewelry have I at "
 
 26 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Then his hand, mechanically raised to his throat, touched 
 something that checked his speech. 
 
 "Yes, I have, too," he continued, and a bit of slender 
 gold chain was dragged above his open collar. " I've 
 got" 
 
 In a corner of the room far away from him, but where 
 her eyes could rest on his face, the Indian girl was 
 crouched looking at him looking at him; and as he 
 raised his eyes he saw her. " I've got you," he added; and 
 the chain with its pendant was dropped again under its 
 cover. " Come here, filouise; let me see how much money 
 I can win with you. There she is, Cleve; if you'll start her 
 at a hundred, we'll play." 
 
 "Pshaw!" you can buy squaws all along the coast for 
 less than that," remarked one of the men, and the gam- 
 bler, hearing him, smiled. 
 
 "Maybe, , but not a princess of royal blood," he said 
 coolly. "I'll do it, Dunbar; there's your ducats." 
 
 Other games were forgotten for the moment, and the 
 men gathered around to watch this final one with a bit of 
 humanity among the stakes. 
 
 " What's up? " asked a tall man, peering over the heads 
 of the others into the circle, and a half-breed trapper from 
 the south country answered in Chinook: 
 
 "The man from the mines won the squaw; now he 
 gambles her against the stranger's money." 
 
 And the girl, who had come at her master's bidding, 
 stood close beside the speaker. She had not known why 
 she was called, nor understood the words of the two gam- 
 blers; but she heard the words of the trapper, and her 
 hand grasped quickly the back of her master's chair. She 
 understood now. 
 
 " That cursed squaw has eyes like augers," said one man 
 who was across the table from her, and on whom her eyes
 
 A GAME. 27 
 
 were resting, though seeing nothing. " She's pretty white, 
 but the devil in her eyes is a red one." 
 
 And then the game went on close to her, but she saw noth- 
 ing of it. She never moved ; she seemed scarcely to breathe ; 
 but when the trapper spoke, one hand had gone quickly to 
 her blouse, where the knife was hidden, and remained there. 
 
 Then there was the thud on the table of the last play, a 
 long breath from the watchers that said the game was 
 over, and the gambler arose and looked across at filouise. 
 
 "I guess you go with me this trip," he said pleasantly; 
 but the girl drew back, with her eyes turned to her master, 
 and such a world of beseeching in them! 
 
 " Yes, he's right; won you, you know," explained the loser 
 drowsily. "I'm sorry, but you go along; he's all right you 
 
 go-" 
 
 He turned in his chair, laying a persuasive hand on her 
 arm, pushing her toward the stranger. 
 
 And then a shrill cry of rage rang through the room; a 
 gleam of steel flashed up from her bosom as she stood be- 
 tween the two men, and then it was turned against, not the 
 stranger she shrank from, but deep down into the shoulder 
 of the man she had watched with worshiping eyes. 
 
 Someone caught her arm as the knife was drawn out, 
 dripping, and turned toward her own throat. And there 
 were shouts and oaths, general crowding and confusion, 
 amidst which she glided like a snake from her captor's 
 hands, but only to be grasped by the boyish-looking fellow 
 who had thought she deserved to be sold. 
 
 She tried to escape from him, but his grip was like steel. 
 In the struggle they drew away from that table where the 
 man lay, as they said, dead. 
 
 Suddenly the boy muttered, in the jargon she knew: 
 "There is the side door; go through the stable and up the 
 cliff. You're plucky, anyway. Now go! "
 
 28 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 And as she darted through the door she stepped on and 
 wakened the princess, who was sleeping the sleep of the 
 weary, stretched out along the wall. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 A LETTER. 
 
 ANOTHER week had gone by, and by chance another mail 
 had been borne upon a passing garpoint a mail of two 
 letters, one for Milton Ewing, who pushed his way to 
 the door, followed by Redney, and, once free from the 
 others, opened the envelope they had both waited for. 
 
 "Well?" said the boy, impatiently, as Ewing, after a 
 glance, gave a low whistle of surprise and pleasure, then a 
 sorrowful "Well, well, that's too bad!" and then, turn- 
 ing the page to look at the heading, he arose hastily. 
 
 "By Jove! she's been there three days, and worried half 
 crazy, I'll bet. Well, I'll just start to-night." 
 
 "Likely to take time to leave your address behind?" 
 asked his partner, sarcastically; and Milt laughed, with 
 elated, excited eyes. 
 
 "You kid! " he said, with contemptuous fondness in his 
 voice, " you can't be expected to understand the feelings of 
 a family man. Nannie's coming is down at. Farwell, 
 poor little girl. Met some nice folks, she says, one of them 
 a young lady a young lady, Redney. Ever see one? Not 
 in this basin, I'll swear. Her party is bound for this 
 region. Name Raeforth. Raeforth? Ain't that one of the 
 partners in the ' Little Dell ' mine? I thought so. And 
 Nannie fell in with them at some junction across in God's
 
 A LETTER. 29 
 
 country. Lucky she did. And instead of going on to Port- 
 land, as had been planned, this girl, Miss Raeforth, con- 
 cludes to come up here sight-seeing, since she finds another 
 woman is coming; and, listen to this, Redney, 'Is it true, 
 Milt, that there are no white women at all up at High- 
 Low?'" 
 
 Redney whistled and looked at Milt out of the corner of 
 his eye. 
 
 "There's 'Dutch Liz,'" he hazarded, "or your friend 
 * Piano Lou.' " 
 
 "Stop it! You've got no more 'savvy' than to make a 
 break like that before Nannie, and and she might think 
 you meant it," he wound up, lamely enough, and with his 
 face flushing under Redney's delighted eyes. 
 
 "I do mean it," he grinned "so did old 'Piano.' She 
 asked why you never come in, and sent word she liked 
 white blond men." 
 
 "Oh, break away, can't you! AVomen say lots of things 
 to kids that they wouldn't want men to hear." 
 
 "Ugh, ugh!" agreed the boy with an Indian grunt, 
 " and one or two things to men that they wouldn't want 
 kids to hear." 
 
 "Hello!" broke out Milt again, turning to the written 
 page. " How's this? ' I've an idea that Delia Miss Rae- 
 forth has a sweetheart up there in the mines. She talks of 
 him a good deal, but hasn't seen him for two years. His 
 name is Dunbar, and if you should happen to know him, it 
 would be nice to have him come with you and surprise 
 Delia.'" 
 
 " Delia will find her surprise all in shape," said the boy, 
 heartlessly; "and then we'll all have to take turns sitting up 
 with Delia, same as with Gentleman Neil." 
 
 "You never liked that man, did you, Redney?" asked the 
 older man; and the boy's lip curled.
 
 30 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " Like like? I don't know. I was glad when the girl 
 cut him, anyway;" and with the deep wrinkle between his 
 brows, Redney looked another person from the joking 
 "kid" who was his partner's comfort and torment. "I 
 wouldn't a pined away any if she'd killed him." 
 
 " I guess that's what she struck for," said the other, and 
 then paused at a cabin where a man sat smoking at the 
 door. 
 
 " How's your patient, Collins crazy yet? " 
 
 " How is he? Well, I'll be !" and the bans that might 
 
 be spoken against Mr. Collins by the " powers that be " are 
 unwritable. " Hain't you fellows heard? " 
 
 " Heard nothing; what is it? " demanded the kid. 
 
 " He skipped last night, slipped the noose some way, an* 
 I'll be if he ain't gone! " 
 
 "But he couldn't go far," debated Ewing. 
 
 "That's what I says," affirmed Mr. Collins. "I says 
 gentlemen, may be I might a had a pretty good load on last 
 
 night; I ain't a swearin' different, I'll be if I am; an' I 
 
 might a slep' sounder than usual in consequence. But 
 s'pose I did lay here on the step all night, an' s'pose he 
 did, in some o' his flighty turns, walk out over me, where's 
 he a walkin' to? That's what I'm askin'. Him, with a bad 
 cut that may break open any time, an* his head so flighty 
 with the fever yesterday that I wa'n't noways sure he's to 
 get out of it alive after all." 
 
 Redney glanced at the tumbling waters of the creek that 
 belted the cliff. 
 
 "Yes, we looked there; ain't along it unless he's floated 
 down the Columbia. He couldn't walk far in his kelter, 
 though he was crazy to get out o' the door every time my 
 peepers was off him. I've been worried to death thinkin* 
 of him, a starvin', may be, an' not havin* sense to know 
 what ails him."
 
 A LETTER. 31 
 
 "You look it," remarked Redney; and then, " What does 
 that man Clevents say about it? " 
 
 "Ain't here; left Monday. Acted like a white man, too, 
 
 about Dunbar; I'll be if he didn't! Paid out money 
 
 without a word for two weeks' nursin' to come said he'd 
 float up here again by that time. He's got a heart in him! " 
 
 Redney was poking along the side of the cabin where the 
 one window was. Inside of the Uttle square was the bunk 
 the wounded man had used, and his inquisitive young eyes 
 glanced around and returned again to the soil without that 
 had attracted his eyes first. 
 
 " No use smellin' around there, even if you are one-quarter 
 Injun," said the nurse, with contempt for the boy's pre- 
 tenses. " Do you suppose a man that size could wriggle 
 through that ten by twelve air-hole? Then, I'm tellin' you, 
 he didn't have to; the door was open. Injun blood must 
 always pretend to jugglery," he added, peevishly, to Ewing. 
 " It ain't how he got out but where he's gone that's con- 
 fusin' this camp. Can you tell us that, you little red devil? " 
 
 The boy straightened up and scraped his heavy boot over 
 the soil softened by a rain the evening before. 
 
 " I can, but I won't," he said, laconically. " Come along, 
 Milt." 
 
 And Milt, nothing loath, did so. Somehow, some way, he 
 must start that evening for Farwell the old post of the 
 Hudson Bay trappers the outfitting town for the entire 
 mining region of the Selkirks that stretches far to the north 
 the old post named by the Indians because of the sepa- 
 rations seen there. 
 
 But it was little of the separations that the young hus- 
 band was thinking of, with those glowing eyes, as the two 
 went over the road together, but of a greeting, and the 
 certainty that Nannie and the baby were within a day and 
 a night's ride of him.
 
 32 SQUAW ^LOUISE 
 
 So slight a showing was there of the red-skin in the boy 
 who was his partner, that Ewing was apt to forget his fabled 
 ancestry at times, though he never forgot to have faith in 
 the boy's knowledge of woodcraft, which seemed at times 
 subtle and uncanny to the uninitiated. 
 
 Remembering it in the midst of his thoughts of Nannie, 
 he halted at the entrance to the one shed for mules tnat 
 was owned at Indian Spring, and turned to the boy. 
 
 " Say, Redney, were you talking straight when you said 
 you could tell where Dunbar had gone? " 
 
 "When did I lie to you?" demanded the other, half 
 sulkily; "and what matter where he goes? He's gone to 
 what he deserves, may be. It's nothing to us." 
 
 " But the strangers " 
 
 "Oh! Delia?" and the young cub uttered the name 
 with a mimicry of affectation. " Well, Delia will have to hus- 
 tle around for some other tenderfoot, and if Delia is any 
 good, she'll find plenty o' men to take his place men, too." 
 
 Every available canoe was fifteen miles down the river on 
 a big fishing frolic, and neither pleas nor persuasions could 
 win from the stable more than one horse for the trip there 
 one " kyuse " to go under the saddle, but no more. 
 
 " I'm elected to walk, then, and save my money for shoes," 
 grunted Redney, eying a couple of sick horses that short- 
 ened the road allowance. " Why don't you take in your sign, 
 then, an' shoot them crow-baits?" 
 
 But ill-temper availed nothing. There wasn't a mule on 
 which Redney could go as best man to meet the bride of 
 his friend. Redney had to stay home and scour up the tin 
 pans and make the shack shine, against the arrival. He 
 would have walked, willingly, but Milt objected. 
 
 "You know I wouldn't see you do that, you contrary 
 Red, you! " he said. " If you go, it will mean a walk, time 
 about, with the one horse between us, and I couldn't cover 
 ground near so fast so."
 
 A LETTER. 33 
 
 " Go 'long! " adjured his partner, at that view of the case. 
 " Hump yourself, now, and get back in time for grub to- 
 morrow night I'll have it ready in great shape; and here," 
 as Milt leaped eagerly into the saddle, " just s'pose you get 
 some o' that bakin' powder like they have down there I'm 
 sick o' saleratus; an' I want a nutmeg Antoine hasn't 
 any; an' if you've got any dust after you pay expenses, 
 how'd it be to freeze to another blanket we're like to be 
 short for extra beds. Where do you reckon we'll stick 
 Delia? " 
 
 The other man gathered up the reins, his lips twitching 
 at the perplexities of his partner. 
 
 " Don't know," he said, carelessly. " You're running the 
 boarding-house. My end of the cu'oin will be full when 
 Joseph Dyce Ewing and his mother come. But the young 
 lady isn't likely to be big, and there's plenty of room in 
 your berth, and I should think " 
 
 A shot fired under the belly of the beast Mr. Ewing was on 
 caused that animal to cav6rt some, in a way that checked 
 the recital of its rider's thoughts, to the delight of Redney, 
 who slipped his revolver back in his pocket, with a grin 
 that belied the frown between his eyes; and having given 
 his partner that parting salute, he climbed up to their 
 cabin, perched above the settlement, and sedately went to 
 work at house-cleaning.
 
 34 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE LAKES OF THE ARROWS. 
 
 SEVERAL days previous an event wonderful occurred to a 
 camp of Indian hunters camped alongside the rapids that 
 celebrate the last run of the independent Kootenai. 
 
 Up from toward Fort Shepherd came a whole fleet of 
 canoes, a fleet elongated as they were paddled in single file 
 close to the shore, their dusky steersmen taking advantage 
 of the eddies which the swift downward drive of the center 
 current flings backward in its flight. 
 
 But it was not so much the number or the perfection of 
 the fleet as it was the occupants who astonished the 
 natives, and sent little grunts of questions and low-voiced 
 replies around the Indian circle. 
 
 They had women of their own with them, but no woman- 
 hood their eyes had ever seen was quite like the dainty 
 little creature who came with a laugh over the side of the 
 canoe, and toward them. Back of her came another lady, 
 also young, and with a child in her arms. She walked 
 more sedately, and took advantage of the proffered arm of 
 an elderly, silent gentleman, who gave some orders to the 
 interpreter (a white man, and the least reputable-looking 
 of the lot of employes), and then followed up to the grassy 
 level, where the young girl had already joined some of the 
 earlier arrived of their steersmen, and where she bowed and 
 smiled at an old man who came forward from the door of 
 his lodge a man bareheaded and with the severe repose of 
 a patriarch in his dark face, a face imposing, but not over- 
 aweing to the young visitor, who smiled again at his one
 
 THE LAKES OF THE ARROWS. 35 
 
 English word of "welcome," and nodded acceptance of it,, 
 and gazed about at the rest of the little camp, the mem- 
 bers of which returned her scrutiny with interest. Only 
 the few squaws would look at her with shy, wondering eyes, 
 and turn swiftly away if she caught them at it; and then, 
 with their backs half-turned, they would converse in the 
 gentle tones native to them, using few words but many ges- 
 tures of their expressive hands, and stealing ever and anon 
 a glance at the new-comers, at the white baby, but, above 
 all, the small, dainty figure of the girl who laughed and 
 nodded and smiled at the people about her like some gold- 
 crowned singing-bird that had strayed out of its course and 
 into the midst of sober russet and workaday hued birds of 
 prey, and fearing them not at all, or else trusting her powers 
 of fascination to insure her a path of peace among them. 
 
 And, in truth, they looked as if she had won it without a 
 word, just as a child does that walks into your garden with 
 baby insolence and laughs at you as it gathers blossoms. 
 
 She was like a child in her little tyrannical ways, and the 
 gentleman who followed shook his head and tried to frown 
 on her haste and her ignorance of the subdued manner 
 fashionable among female things of the Indian country. 
 
 But she only laughed. 
 
 " Now, if you did not know him well, Mrs. Ewing, you 
 might imagine he meant to be very disapproving with that 
 glare in his eyes it was a glare, Uncle! but, bless his 
 heart, he don't. He's a little frightened lest they'll want to 
 steal me, maybe, but that's all." 
 
 The "uncle" was already speaking, through his inter- 
 preter, to the tall old man before mentioned, and trying to 
 bargain for some fresh meat for their evening meal, as they 
 were pushing up-stream, with the desire to lose no time in 
 hunting on the way. 
 
 The meat, as well as the welcome, was obtained from the
 
 -36 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 Indians, who were also pushing up to the lakes, but not in 
 much haste. Their chief, Simon of the Colvilles, told the 
 visitors that it was now their season for taking the water to 
 their hunting and fishing grounds, and the trail led where 
 that of the travelers was to go, where many whites had 
 gone in a few months, up toward the " Big Bend " region 
 where the placer-diggings are. Only the Indian hunter did 
 not need to go so far; there are fish in the lakes which really 
 began at the junction of the rivers, where the camp was 
 pitched, and in the Selkirks, but a two days' journey, were 
 found all of wild flesh and mountain sheep their boats 
 would hold. 
 
 They had an idea that this white man with the women 
 and " iktus " (plunder or baggage) was a new trader going 
 to live the rest of his life in the north country, and 
 looked puzzled and incredulous when told it was but a stay 
 for a few days that was intended, and that the open-eyed 
 young lady was really going just for a pleasure trip. 
 
 They had never heard of anything like that. Indian 
 women had gone up into that country, but never a white 
 wife with a white child had floated upward over the Arrow 
 lakes; or, if so, Simon had never heard of it, and he had 
 lived always near the waters of the Columbia, and now was 
 an old man. 
 
 "And this child the white stranger's daughter?" asked 
 the chief, and looked kindly on the girl who had entered 
 the Selkirk country for pleasure. At that moment she had 
 the white baby in her arms, and had approached a rather 
 neatly cared-for scion of the Colvilles, aged about one 
 year, and was persistently endeavoring to have them 
 " make up." 
 
 And as personal histories and divulged intents were the 
 fashion, Chief Simon learned that it was a niece of the 
 stranger called Raeforth; that he (Mr. Raeforth) was to
 
 THE LAKES OF THE ARROWS. 37 
 
 visit the diggings south of the Big Bend; that much 
 land there was covered by his name, near by where the 
 trail from the Shuswap country reached the Columbia; that 
 the new diggings near the old trading-place were called the 
 " Little Dell " in honor of the young lady, who was going 
 up to visit her six-months-old namesake, and that in the 
 lower country it was said her name was more than pretty 
 its mark on paper meant much money and the uncle was a 
 man of far sight and keen scent for paths that led to the 
 precious metals. 
 
 Needless to say that the interpreter an accommodating 
 person named Cottrell, and called " Cot" gave his Indian 
 acquaintances more information of that sort than Mr. Rae- 
 forth was aware of, naturally wishing his charges to be 
 estimated at their full value. The little woman with the 
 gray, steadfast eyes and the baby he knew less of, as she 
 had only joined them at the fort below. 
 
 But such was the introduction of the white group to the 
 lake country, a very satisfying one to the strangers, who 
 settled comfortably for the night as neighbors of Chief 
 Simon and his hunters; and when the evening meal was 
 spread, with the two parties within speaking distance, the 
 surprise of the strangers was great when a sudden calm 
 fell over the circle of Simon, and turning their attention to 
 the cause of it, they noted the patriarch with bowed head 
 and the same reverence of attitude expressed by his family, 
 while a low, half-whispered monologue from his lips told 
 the others that he was saying grace before meat in Chi- 
 nook. 
 
 " I expected surprises in this region," confessed Miss 
 Raeforth, " but decidedly not of this sort. Why, this 
 seems the very farthest corner of the world, and those 
 Indians are said to belong in Washington, that seems only 
 newly discovered, and I'd like someone to account for
 
 38 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 their religion and their real courtesy, for they are not at all 
 like our average Indian of the States." 
 
 " The difference, I suppose, is because the priests long 
 ago thought this field worth working, and worked it," 
 explained her uncle. " The work of the Catholic missions 
 through this region has been something tremendous, and 
 the Colvilles as a nation are devout Catholics, no doubt 
 fulfilling the spirit of their faith more absolutely than the 
 white converts of the cities or settlements." 
 
 "Yes," affirmed "Cot," who overheard them, "they are 
 the best reds you're likely to run across; mind their own 
 traps and don't freeze to any other man's; raise their own 
 crops and flour-mills, and keep up their churches, too. Yes, 
 they are all church Indians, and the fellows who are not 
 have a hard row to hoe among them. They kill members 
 for breakin' some o' the moral laws that in a white settle- 
 ment a lawyer could talk a man clear of." 
 
 Mrs. Ewing's face was lighting up wonderfully. " Oh, 
 you don't know how glad I am to have you tell me all this," 
 she confessed, with a little laugh. " I was growing quite 
 hopeless back at The Dalles, for they did tell me there such 
 depressing things about the life of the mining country; in 
 fact, I never should have ventured up here but for you 
 and your kindness," she said, with a fond look at the young 
 girl, who responded promptly," Same here," and leaned over 
 to give the little wife a hand-pressure in return for the look. 
 
 But Mr. Cottrell smiled dubiously at Mrs. Ewing's words. 
 
 " Well, now," he advised, " I wouldn't be too much set up 
 on account of this tribe being sort of decent people, for you 
 see these are Indians, but when you strike Farwell, or High- 
 Low, or the Big Bend, you won't hear many hymns being 
 sung. You see, Missus, you'll be among white men and 
 half-breeds then, and they are some different." 
 
 But it was hard to convince the ladies of that fact. One
 
 THE LAKES OF THE ARROWS. 39 
 
 of them had a husband up there whom she felt sure would 
 never come second to any Indian in nobility, and the other 
 had someone was it friend, or sweetheart? She called 
 him "cousin," anyway, and gayly and confidently invested 
 him with all moral attributes possible to masculine human 
 nature, laughing a little as she did so, but hesitating not 
 at all to show that his presence in that locality might have 
 influenced her decision that the Columbia River was worth 
 following toward its source for several days' journey. 
 
 " You see," she confided to Mrs. Ewing, " he hasn't 
 been so lucky as I. Men can't save money when they live 
 all over the country as he has been doing, and what money 
 he has made has been for other people some of it for me, 
 for he advised Uncle of some splendid investments; and, 
 money or no money, he is quite the handsomest man I ever 
 knew, and would be distinguished in any society. Here's 
 his picture, taken when we were engaged. We are the only 
 ones of the family, he and I, though the relationship is not 
 very close; and as I've an idea that he is getting prouder 
 as he gets poorer, I am going to surprise him in his villainy, 
 and tell him it is all nonsense, for he is the dearest fellow 
 alive, and if he's tired of roughing it, he can quit it." 
 
 Hence the reason that Mr. Cottrell's statements fell on 
 soil barren of belief. For in those feminine, hero-worship- 
 ing hearts reposed an idea that their own particular heroes 
 contained the leaven of virtue equal to the purification of 
 miners more hopeless than those of High-Low. And then, 
 were not even the Indians of the region religious and virt- 
 uous? and is not the white man ever his superior? . 
 
 So, in the quick June twilight that followed the sun, the 
 two enthusiasts talked understandingly of those things, 
 and of the sylvan charms of life in Chinook land, and the 
 unreality of the peaceful scene about the lodges of their 
 dusky neighbors. For Miss Raeforth was for the first time
 
 40 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 west of the Mississippi, and Mrs. Ewing for the first time 
 west of the Alleghanies, and the soft- voiced Indians of the 
 ^akes were pictures unexpected for them, totally unlike the 
 tribes farther south and east. They were several degrees 
 cleaner, much more progressive in all desirable things, and, 
 above all, they appeared so surprisingly well-to-do. 
 
 "Not much like the whisky-polluted wretches at some of 
 the towns along the railroad," said the girl, admiringly, as 
 she noted Simon and Mr. Raeforth in stately converse by 
 the side of the flickering blaze of the camp-fire, and with 
 them Mr. Cottrell, and the Indians of both parties grouped 
 about, taking part in the wau-wau (conversation) by the 
 respect of their attention. " No, these people are not a 
 bit like our savages nearer our civilization. They are 
 altogether ideal at a casual glance, and I confess I should 
 like to take more than a casual glance at them. AVhat a 
 frolic it would be to go summer boarding with them; get 
 an Indian dress and make oneself up accordingly what an 
 experience that would be!" 
 
 "No doubt," assented Mrs. Ewing, drily; "and, to com- 
 plete the romance, you would of course join their church, 
 and marry the favorite son of the chief at the end of the 
 season. I do believe you are simply hungry for an advent- 
 ure of some sort." 
 
 " Have you ever doubted it? I am sure you might have 
 read 'adventuress' on my face the moment you set eyes on 
 me at the Little Dalles. What else do you suppose would 
 start me from a sofa-cushioned home into canoes and tents? 
 But, if you disapprove, you must just scold Neil for my 
 faults; he is responsible for most of them." 
 
 But the young wife was not sure she did disapprove. 
 The softly-tinted, childish face, the impulsive manner 
 and romantic fancy, and the addition of a keen, worldly- 
 wise brain when business matters were discussed, made up
 
 THE LAKES OF THE ARROWS. 41 
 
 a combination new to Mrs. Ewing, and always touching her 
 to kindly appreciation at every new development of the 
 girl's character. Her queer ways all seemed such harmless 
 ones, often generous ones, as the troubled little woman had 
 been given proof of at the trading-post where she was 
 waiting anxiously for word from her husband; and Miss 
 Raeforth, learning the facts, had at once proposed that Mrs. 
 Ewing join the Raeforth party and chaperone the young 
 lady herself on a journey to the place where the desirable 
 husband was located. Otherwise, Miss Raeforth must wait 
 in dismal solitude the return of her uncle, or else continue 
 a lonely journey to the coast and remain there until he saw 
 fit to end his inspection of the Kootenai and Big Bend 
 region. That had really been the plan of travel when they 
 started from home, but the younger Raeforth saw fit to 
 change her plans if she could find a shadow of an excuse, 
 and Mrs. Ewing seemed a very providential shadow of a 
 pretext, and was at once taken advantage of by the young 
 schemer. 
 
 " Make extra work and expense? Yes, of course it will," 
 she agreed, airily, when that question was mentioned. " It 
 will take a couple of extra warriors, I suppose, to carry us 
 over the rough places, and some extra blankets and sheets 
 and things, and maybe the noble reds will want our weight 
 in gold for the trouble we'll be; but men were made to 
 wait on women, my dear, and dollars were made round so 
 they could roll, and if you'll only agree to come along and 
 keep me in countenance, you need not trouble your head 
 about the pennies." 
 
 And so did the two strangers begin a friendship in the 
 northern trading-town, and help each other to enjoy every 
 bit of beauty they passed on the unquiet bosom of the 
 Columbia. But while they had passed several groups of 
 Indians, they had halted for converse with none, though
 
 42 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Mr. Cottrell had informed them that they would surely 
 come up with the people of Chief Simon, who had made a 
 start north, but could not have yet gone beyond the mouth 
 of the Kootenai; and after much questioning, MissRaeforth 
 learned enough of the old chief to hesitate not at all in 
 saying " Klahowyal" to him, her one word of Chinook, 
 while the chieftain himself had just about as extensive 
 knowledge of English. 
 
 But the girl decided one did not need to know their lan- 
 guage, as she and Mrs. Ewing discussed them, and as the 
 stars came out one by one and sent points of light to tem- 
 per the deepness, and complete the pictures about the 
 Indian camp. Still, bronze faces picked out in color by the 
 fitful fire, soft tones of content, against which the words of 
 the white men struck with the. sound of metal in their 
 voices; and then, from where the squaws had gone to bring 
 some fish from the river, the two watchers heard a song, 
 solemn, yet serene, come over the level to them a low 
 breath of music sung in childish faith and in English 
 words, for many of their hymns have been translated by 
 the priests, and both renderings sung by them. Listening 
 very closely, they could hear that it was a hymn to a guar- 
 dian angel, one of praise: 
 
 "Oh, angel, ever in my sight, 
 How lovely must thou be 
 To leave thy home in heaven to guard 
 A little child like me." 
 
 The weird, pale lights that yet lay against the sky of the 
 north, and the sweet calls of the night-birds that spoke of 
 peace, perhaps intensified the atmosphere of purity that 
 seemed to breathe about them. The breeze from the 
 ancient mystic Lakes of the Arrows wafted to them sugges- 
 tions of a world undefiled, and the cheery blaze of the 
 camp-fire where the children of the forests gathered, and
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 43 
 
 the hymn to their guardian angel that sounded tenderly 
 on the night, completed a scene and an impression that 
 stripped Mr. Cottrell's statements of all belief. 
 
 "The idea!" said Miss Raeforth, with warm contempt; 
 "that man is simply too stupid to appreciate the influence 
 of these idyllic surroundings but it can not be possible 
 there are many so callous. Those devout squaws down 
 there make me feel like a miserable sinner. Let us say our 
 prayers and go to sleep," 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 
 
 BUT she did not look like a soul very deep in the convic- 
 tion of sin next morning, as she ran hither and thither in 
 the dewy freshness of the new day, looking herself much 
 like a picture of Aurora, with her disk of golden hair fram- 
 ing her face, and winning her many a gaze from among 
 the dusky neighbors who were astir before the dawn, and 
 were getting out their "garpoint" eanoes for half the 
 hunters, who were also going northward over the waters. 
 
 Among them went Simon. But the new-comers noticed 
 that never a move made he in preparation; the youths and 
 the squaws could glean what joy they might from the 
 game of labor; Simon was a chief and would have none of 
 it, though he finally arose from his after-breakfast smoke, 
 and, crowned by a cap of swan-skin, walked down to the 
 edge of the water, where he entered the cockle-shell of 
 birch-bark that was his especial conveyance, and led the
 
 44 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 fleet like a true chieftain, after indicating that the long 
 canoe of the strangers should come next his. 
 
 "Can you imagine yourself in North America and in the 
 nineteenth century? " said the girl, sotto voce. " I feel as 
 part and parcel of the ancient voyageurs of Eastern Can- 
 ada six generations ago, only we should have left offerings 
 at some saint's shrine by the shore, to insure the safety of 
 our souls and bodies, and, to complete the illusion, Chief 
 Simon should lift up his voice in some French river-song 
 and lead us along by music." 
 
 But their leader left all such frivolity to children or 
 squaws, and made a most grave and imposing appearance 
 as he moved steadily, and seemingly with slight effort, 
 onward and upward, over the lower lake, where, in olden 
 times, the mystic rocks of the east shore decided the fort- 
 unes of the tribe for the season. 
 
 Only when the great wall was reached did Simon halt, 
 holding his canoe motionless and making a gesture to Mr. 
 Raeforth, and then, pointing to the strange face of the rock 
 that rises straight a hundred feet above the shore: 
 
 "Yakwa!" (here), he said; and then Mr. Cottrell ex- 
 plained that the wall was a thing of unusual interest to the 
 lake country Indians. The night before, Simon had been 
 drawn into speaking of it to Mr. Raeforth, seeming pleased 
 that this sacred place of the old tribes had a fame that had 
 reached far into the white man's country. And the ladies, 
 hearing its legends, looked with renewed interest at the 
 strange cabalistic characters picked in red upon its face. 
 All along the surface small holes, like eyes, peered out at 
 them from the desolation of their abode, whose meaning is 
 forgotten. How often had it looked fatefully to the west 
 over the circles of dusky warriors who chanted their war- 
 songs in its shadows and showered their flights of arrows 
 at its face! How often has it echoed with glad calls, as
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 45 
 
 the pierced wall held fast the darts they have sped there! 
 But, if their tribute was refused, and a greater part of the 
 arrows could find no cranny to lodge in, and were flung 
 back to drift down the waters, then were seen sad but re- 
 signed faces as they gathered the fallen darts which warned 
 them to beware the war-path for that season, as the god of 
 strife would surely lend strength to the enemies who ranged 
 to the east of the lake mountains. 
 
 Many other legends have clustered about the pictured 
 rocks marked by mystic hands of the past; but of all the 
 others, this one of the warrior-chants and the fateful arrows is 
 remembered best by the modern tribes, and has given a 
 name to the beautiful sheets of water where the great river 
 grows lazy in its journey and creeps with cool kisses along 
 the pretty beaches or the ancient walls of rock. 
 
 " I wonder," said Miss Raeforth, as she glanced at the 
 dark faces, " if, back of their Christian training, there lurks 
 never a bit of pagan prayer as they pass here? If I could 
 only be sure of it, I would be reconciled to so many civil- 
 ized traits that are upsetting my old ideas of them." 
 
 " Are you longing for the excitement of a scalp-dance? " 
 asked Mrs. Ewing. "For my part, I am in a state of 
 wordless gratitude for every proof of their very advanced 
 manner of life here. Milt has never written me much of 
 the Indians I suppose he sees little of them at the dig- 
 gings; and I have been pleasantly astonished by so many 
 things about them. They have banished half my terrors 
 of the Indian country; and when the railroad crosses this 
 country " 
 
 "When it does," returned her host, "you will likely see 
 the same thing up here that you complained of near the 
 railroads across the line drunkenness, beggary, and filth; 
 nor will you hear hymns to the guardian angels sung by 
 Indian women at nightfall."
 
 46 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "That's what you won't," agreed Mr. Cottrell. "You 
 can't, no matter how you fix it, grow red-skins alongside of 
 steam-whistles and get the worth of your money out o' the 
 investment. They're planned different." 
 
 " Well, I'm sure they take kindly to mills for their corn, 
 and modern working implements," protested Miss Raeforth, 
 " and I can't see any harmful effects from them. They are 
 a credit to many a lazy white man who has been bred from 
 numberless generations of improved stock." 
 
 "Delia!" admonished her uncle. But Mr. Cottrell nod- 
 ded assent. 
 
 "Yes, that's the priests' work," he continued. "They've 
 only been among these reds since the 40*5, but something 
 in their religion gets a big hold on them. Why, they keep 
 up their schools, and some o' the bucks and squaws too 
 are turned out for missionary work. Yes, and one o' this 
 very tribe," and he nodded toward Simon, " was schooled 
 fora priest. He was a half-breed, and I hear he is raising 
 well, roping in the back-sliders up in the north. That's 
 where all the outlaws of the tribes break for, you know, 
 and that's where Henri Mercier picked out his work. I've 
 a notion, though, that he just was stuck on the trail and 
 the hunt too much to give them up even for their church, 
 and he managed it to have them both." 
 
 "Tell us some more about him," suggested Miss Delia. 
 " He is another ' unexpected,' and if we cross his path, I'll 
 be tempted to ask to have my sins forgiven, just to hear 
 him absolve me in the Indian language." 
 
 "Oh, he can jabber to you in English or French either," 
 explained their guide. " His father was French one of the 
 old-timers; died with the tribe he took to. A good man, 
 and a tough one. The boy's the same." 
 
 "A tough priest! Well!" 
 
 " Men have to be tough, whether they're white or red,
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 47 
 
 to stand life in the Big Bend winters," he said, and then 
 raised his voice and spoke to Chief Simon, who yet held his 
 place in the stream, and rather pleased at the animated 
 words of the whites, which he supposed were entirely of the 
 mysterious works on the rocks above them; and he looked 
 none the less pleased when Cottrell asked, " Kah le plet, 
 Henri, alta? " (where is the priest, Henri, at this time?) 
 
 " Siah si-ah" (far away); and he swept his hand to the 
 northwest. " Siwash klahowyum, hyin, hyin sick. Henri 
 yahwa " (Indians that are miserable, with many, many sick. 
 He is there). 
 
 "Henri is his nephew," explained the other, "and a 
 family is honored among them if it sends anyone as a 
 missionary, or if one is picked out by the priests to train 
 for the church. That's what they did with Mercier's boy, 
 and you can't please old Simon better than to let him hear 
 you ask about Brother Henri." 
 
 And even at the sound of the name the vanity of the chief 
 was shown by the complacent glance he turned on them, and 
 then with deft strokes he once more headed the van, and 
 turned his canoe until it breasted the current, speeding 
 as the swans do over the fair mirror between the mountains. 
 
 Many more bits of Indian legend were burnished up by 
 their interpreter and recounted for the pleasure of the 
 ladies; but nothing told of the people had quite so much 
 interest for Miss Delia as had the story of the Indian boy 
 who had promised to be a mighty hunter by his many 
 exploits, but who had turned from the trap and the trail to 
 don the black robe of the church, and her interest was in 
 nowise abated when she learned he was yet young. 
 
 "Take care," admonished Mrs. Ewing. "You seem 
 likely to fall in love with this new hero before you see him. 
 Just remember a few of the half-breeds you have seen, and 
 take warning."
 
 48 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 " Don't be horrid! If I want to dream romantic things 
 among these romantic surroundings, do let me have a chance. 
 It is the first time in my life that I've ever been allowed a 
 breath outside of the commonplace world, and even this 
 Uncle would spoil, if he could, by talking of pay-dirt in the 
 gulches, and all sorts of prosaic things." 
 
 But her uncle only looked at her fondly and a little 
 teasingly. 
 
 "To hear her you would imagine her one of the people 
 who thought pay-dirt and the ills of wealth most objec- 
 tionable things," he said, turning to Mrs. Ewing; "but 
 she has really a very good idea of business, and I always 
 suspect her of hiding stock reports between the leaves of 
 the novels she pretends to read." 
 
 He was a rather quiet man, this Mr. Raeforth, whose 
 eyes twinkled very kindly from under gray brows, but whose 
 smoothly-shaven lips did not seem given to either laughter 
 or jest cool, firm lips, suiting well the idea of suppressed 
 knowledge that his silence conveyed. And while he saw 
 that his niece had all things conducive to her comfort and 
 fancy, it was done with so little of demonstration that a 
 stranger could not have guessed which of the two attract- 
 ive young ladies was his own special charge. 
 
 " Is it any wonder," complained his niece, " that I rush 
 into numberless romances to spice life with? Uncle is a 
 charming companion, if one can talk figures with him, but, 
 as figures are facts, I have to get relaxation by educating 
 my fancy on all available material, and I am simply revel- 
 ing in the scope one has here. Why, we have not passed 
 even a mile since we left Little Dalles that we have not 
 heard or seen something unusual, and several of the 
 unusual things have been charming. And then, see the 
 collection I have made! " 
 
 The " collection " was the fruit of a tiny box, with nothing
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 4 
 
 distinguishing but a clicking sound that escaped from 
 it now and then, if something especially desirable came 
 within range of Miss Raeforth's vision; for what place so 
 isolated but that the modern tourist can convey the pho- 
 tographer's outfit for amateurs into it. 
 
 Chief Simon was several times depicted in the little 
 squares that were to be developed into things of beauty 
 the circle of canoes about the pictured rocks the scenes 
 about the lodges of the Colvilles the squaws carrying 
 water, with the white sheen of the river back of them, and 
 the young grass about their feet anything and everything 
 of the new life that appeared to her fascinating and was 
 surely not unpleasant when viewed from the luxury of that 
 young lady's personal surroundings. 
 
 " Don't you feel just a little like an Indian Cleopatra on 
 your way to subdue some warrior of the north? " she asked, 
 after pleased contemplation of the young wife's face; " for 
 you really look quite royal against the silver-gray of those 
 robes." 
 
 But Mrs. Ewing only laughed happily. "Your romanc- 
 ing must always have such grand characters," she objected. 
 " Can't you find a few nearer commonplace content? For 
 I've an idea that Cleopatra never had so much happiness 
 in all her gorgeous life as you are trying to help me to, and 
 I'm quite sure she never won better friends on so lucky a 
 chance." 
 
 " Never mind, we'll make Antony pay tribute," threat- 
 ened the girl. " I know I shall depend on him to find us a 
 big tree to camp in, since they tell us ther.e is not a hotel 
 at the place. And if the rest of this country and inhab- 
 itants are as pleasant as the portion we have seen, I may 
 conclude to live in the tree until you get through your in- 
 spection trip. What would you say, Uncle?" 
 
 "Better wait and see what Neil says," he suggested; 
 
 4
 
 50 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " and he will likely have some prose, instead of poetry, to 
 read you about High-Low as an abode for ladies." 
 
 "Well, I'm sure Mrs. Ewing is to abide there for 
 awhile, at least." 
 
 "Else you should not," added her guardian. "Little 
 women who like pioneering should provide themselves with 
 just the sort of body-guard that is to be surprised by her 
 arrival." 
 
 " Give me time, can't you? My intention is to provide 
 myself with just such a safeguard, as soon as I can find 
 someone to say 'yes' without attaching too many condi- 
 tions to the bargain. That boy of Mercier's, now, he 
 sounds nice and promising. But that selfish black robe! 
 Ah, well, it only adds one more to the tragedies of ' might 
 have beens.' " 
 
 But the others showed little of belief in her mockery. 
 Mr. Cottrell gazed at her rather critically, as if with the 
 endeavor to locate her in any class of ladies he had ever 
 known; but the others, recognizing the frivolity, betook 
 themselves to their own dreams, and she was left to her 
 enjoyment of realities. 
 
 And among them was the dinner, partaken of a little 
 way up from the pebbled shore, one that was a repetition 
 of their breakfast in bill-of-fare; and, as little time was 
 given to its consumption, Mr. Raeforth had but a limited 
 space of time to give the Big Bend region at that season, 
 and the fairest beauties of the land and water were pushed 
 past hurriedly. 
 
 Even their camps for the night were left for late seeking 
 by theiir guides, who rowed as easily by the light of stars, 
 or the moon, so near full, as by the June sun that took the 
 chill from the water. 
 
 And so it was that they were still moving as they passed 
 through the narrows, where the upper lake empties with a
 
 PAST THE PICTURED ROCKS. 51 
 
 great rush into the lower water. The ascent was slow and 
 perilous, but the desire to camp on the upper lake pushed 
 them on through the sunset and twilight, not willing to halt 
 midway in the narrow and reckless channel. But, dark as it 
 was growing, a sudden "Ki!" from Simon aroused his 
 white friends to the fact that others than themselves were 
 on the rushing water, and then, from the shadows above, a 
 canoe darted downward on the current; and Miss Rae- 
 forth could have touched with her hand a white stranger, 
 reclining in the boat that met them and vanished again 
 quickly. The dark boatman called greetings to some of 
 the Indians as he passed. But his passenger might have 
 been a ghost for all notice he took of them in fact, as he 
 was facing aft, he did not see them until the boats had 
 passed each other, and even then he did not speak; but the 
 questioning gaze of Miss Raeforth did receive a token from 
 a raised hat, and eyes that met hers in swift exchange of 
 amazement, and then his boat darted downward, leaving 
 with her the impression of a fair, aristocratic face, old 
 enough to look tired, and young enough to look attractive 
 altogether, so vivid a contrast to the "good Indian " or the 
 bad "squaw man" of the north country that the speculat- 
 ive young lady asked many a question of his identity. 
 But that he was probably some stray from the mines was 
 the only suggestion their guide could give an idea rather 
 pleasant to the feminine ears. 
 
 " For where there is one of that rather pleasing person- 
 ality, there is likely to be more," reasoned the youngest 
 schemer, " and the place less likely to be the howling wil- 
 derness they try to make us believe. Only I can't help 
 wishing that such as this handsome unknown would await 
 our coming, instead of flying as soon as we take the trail 
 there."
 
 52 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 REDNEY'S VISITOR. 
 
 LONG after the moon had risen, by whose light Milt was 
 covering the rough trail down the river to the canoes, 
 Milt's chum was yet in the midst of renovations and male- 
 dictions, and about him was chaos. 
 
 " If I only had time to knock together another shack to 
 stow things in, or to stow that Miss Fresh in. She's like 
 to locate here, an* turn up her nose at everything we've 
 got. I'll bet her nose turns up, anyway," and his hand 
 went up to that straight, well-formed feature of his own 
 face with a good deal of complacency. " Yes, sir, I'll bet she's 
 a little snipe with a turn-up nose that can't raise her hands 
 to help herself with one o* the squally, scarey sort that I 
 seen down by Victoria. Name just sounds that way 
 Delia! oh, Delia! " and the words were emphasized by the 
 broom with which he whisked a pile of chips and dust into 
 the fire-place. "Darned if I sweep any when she comes. 
 Miss Dell rhymes with " 
 
 And then Redney whistled the rhyme to his own satisfac- 
 tion, rather elated to find a mild way of " cussing " at the 
 unwelcome guest whom he was confident would upset the 
 routine of their lives. 
 
 Mrs. Nannie was different. Nannie and that baby were 
 wanted, and in their two-room cabin the owners felt there 
 was just room enough for one little woman, a cradle (Red- 
 ney had already manufactured that article of furniture), and 
 themselves. But a fifth member was a superfluity to the 
 establishment, and the housekeeper got what revenge he
 
 KIDNEY'S VISITOR. 53 
 
 could by making up his mind that she was ugly and call- 
 ing her Miss Fresh. 
 
 But growling at an object so far away is unsatisfactory 
 work, and Redney desisted to rest and nurse the new pups 
 which he was treasuring up as an offering to the baby. 
 For six months he and Ewing had been together, meeting 
 by chance along the line of the States, and throwing their 
 luck and work together to develop the claim Redney hacj 
 staked out the summer before, up in the Selkirks. 
 
 Wealth had not yet come, though friendship had, and 
 hope, and many a plan for the future, and through them all 
 sounded the name of Nannie, Nannie, on the boy's ears; 
 and this was the last bachelor night for the cabin, to-mor- 
 row the queen would rule. 
 
 He was telling the pups so, and watching the fire fall 
 lower and lower on the hearth. It was really tima 
 to hunt his blankets, and he was just telling himselt 
 so, when a sound from without sent the sleepiness from 
 him; yet it was a very slight sound, that of a careful step. 
 It was the slow carefulness that interested him. The pups 
 were tumbled, blind and grunting, into their nest under his 
 bunk. The cabin was darker than the moonlight without, 
 and, slipping to the window, he drew back with a quick 
 exclamation, as another face appeared there, and for a 
 second the two pairs of eyes peered at each other question- 
 ingly. Then the young fellow walked to the door. 
 
 "Why don't you come in?" he demanded; "what are 
 you scared of, anyway? " 
 
 And she came in, silent as a shadow, and dropped down 
 on the hearth, holding out her hands to the few embers, a 
 shivering, deprecating form squaw filouise. 
 
 " I saw him go gallop, gallop the man you like," 
 she said. " It was beyond the bend, but I come you were- 
 good to me you oh "
 
 54 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 She was tremulous as well as shivering, and Redney 
 threw some bark on the fire, looking at her closely in the 
 blaze of light, and drawing her closer to the warmth. 
 
 " Cole sick ?" (ague or chills), he demanded, seeing the 
 face that had grown older, paler, in some way, not a vestige 
 left of the red devil in her eyes, but tired, so tired! 
 
 She shook her head, but he saw that her lips as well as 
 the hands were tremulous now, and he accordingly put a 
 little more of brusqueness into his next query. 
 
 " Hungry? " 
 
 She did not speak even then, only looked up at him; and 
 he who had growled all the evening over an additional 
 boarder to be fed, /. e., Miss Delia, now hustled some eata- 
 bles out of the provision-box with an alacrity that sug- 
 gested willingness. And the girl took them; she seemed 
 half-starved, by the eagerness with which she ate, though 
 one-half the contents of the plate was pushed aside ere 
 she began, and was left untouched when she finished. 
 
 "How so?" he asked in Chinook, and pointed to the 
 plate. " Plenty here; eat it." 
 
 But she shook her head. 
 
 "]louise will take it when she goes," she answered; 
 " not now, but pretty soon; rest now a little while." 
 
 He handed her a cup of coffee, which she drank and seemed 
 refreshed by. " So good," she said, in the soft tones of the 
 northern Indian that would make the voice of the average 
 American sound like a peacock's in comparison, " so good! " 
 
 Redney only grunted at the compliment to the coffee, and 
 rolled up a blanket for her to use as a pillow. 
 
 " Rest, then," he said, curtly, as if to temper so much 
 consideration with some sort of alloy; "sleep." 
 
 " No," she answered, but lay there with closed eyes 
 -quite awhile, and then her host, glancing at her, saw that 
 they were no longer closed, but were watching him.
 
 REDNEY'S VISITOR. 55 
 
 "What did you do to him?" he asked then, and 
 laughed silently when she signed non-comprehension. 
 " Don't lie," he advised. " Some folks told me you 
 were a church Indian, and the priests tell them not to lie, 
 so I'll be priest and you can confess your sins," he 
 grinned. "What did you do with him?" 
 
 She looked at him a long while, and then she said: 
 
 "Put him in the mountain." 
 
 "Planted him!" said the boy, sotto voce, and grinning no 
 longer. He was looking in wonder at the slight girlish 
 form, and the face, wan and refined in the glimmering 
 light, and the slender hands that looked passive and weak 
 just now, and remembering Dunbar's physique, he realized 
 what strength it would take to " plant " such a specimen 
 of mankind. 
 
 " Yourself your lone self? " 
 
 She nodded. " He walk all, all the way, and not know. 
 A cover I made for him. He is there, so still now; but no 
 bread, no meat to put before him, so I come to you." 
 
 Redney's respect for her increased with his horror, for it 
 was a bit horrible to hear so young a thing speak with so 
 much calmness of a man she had killed. 
 
 " I said you had pluck that night, didn't I? and you've got 
 it, dead loads of it. But you've got to lay low; kumtucksl" 
 
 She nodded that she understood. 
 
 "They'll be after you like hounds," he went on; and 
 then remembering the strangers who were to come "whew! 
 won't they, now! You struck the right trail when you 
 dropped in here to-night. I'll help you; yes, sir. You just 
 lay low for awhile and I'll find some trail for you to get 
 through on dow.n the country. Pity you're a girl," and he 
 glanced at her disapprovingly; " still, you've got sand, and 
 that counts. But you don't need grub to give him, now 
 he's done for."
 
 -56 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " May be so, may be not," and tears rose to her eyes and 
 fell one by one unchecked on the stone hearth. Redney 
 was perplexed. This was not "sand." What ailed her? 
 
 " Oh, let up on the melancholy, can't you? If stackin* 
 grub around them is part o' your religious pow-wows, stack 
 away. I'll give you some, only don't weaken like that. 
 You're played out, though, an' half-starved, I reckon. 
 Where have you been eating since the night well, when I 
 saw you? " 
 
 "On the mountain berries, roots, fish." 
 
 " Ever since? " 
 
 "Always; I hid from all people." 
 
 " Even the princess? " 
 
 She nodded. " See her no more, . never! Elouise is 
 alone." 
 
 " No friends nowhere? " 
 
 "One, far, far now, may be; the "Father" now, Priest 
 Henri. But I no go to him." 
 
 "Kerrect! Them priests think as much of a tenderfoot 
 as they do of a man. Well, you are in a box, and a girl, 
 too. You've got as little to anchor to as I have." 
 
 "You no friends, no family?" she asked, pityingly. 
 
 " Naw, don't want any. Got Milt, he's plenty; got a 
 daddy somewhere down in the States. Don't take stock in 
 him, though. He shook me when I was a pappoose; left me 
 at a shebang for a board bill and never showed up again. 
 I was about four years old, they allowed there, and I've 
 been my own man ever since.'* 
 
 "And they call you Red? " 
 
 " Yes; that's 'cause he let out my daddy, you know that 
 my mother had Indian blood in her; more likely nigger by 
 jny hair," and he shook the long tresses forward, showing 
 the wavy tendency in their blackness. " He'd lived among 
 the tribes a heap, though. Went back an' got another
 
 REDNEY'S VISITOR. 57 
 
 squaw after he left me, so I heard once. I used to think 
 I'd shoot him on sight; but pshaw, what's the odds! Tramps 
 like him leave brats all over the range an' forget all about 
 them. Your daddy was a white man, too, wasn't he? 
 You're too bleached to be even a half-breed." 
 
 " La Mestina is half; my father was white white, with 
 curly hair, and laughed always. ' Jolly,' the white hunters 
 called him. 
 
 " That's the sort," remarked Redney, seriously. " I've 
 seen them. They do the laughing an' leave someone else 
 to do the crying. Don't reckon the princess did much o 
 that, though." 
 
 "Yes," contradicted the girl; "much. I was half so old 
 as now, I remember. Then she turned against all the 
 church, and the chief, and for long time we took the trail; 
 go go, looking for him, in where men drank. Then she 
 drank, much, much, but never see him. Then the tribe 
 cut her off, though she was La Mestina. She never go 
 back, she never find the Ha Ha Harte." 
 
 The boy looked at her with startled eyes for a moment, 
 and then asked: 
 
 " Harte? Was your daddy's name Harte? " 
 
 " It is so. Rubee, she called him, but the men said Harte. 
 Just how white he was I remember, and how curly his 
 hair." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Redney's hand went mechanically up to his own hair, 
 that waved and curled when the air was moist. He asked 
 no more questions, but looked with a new interest at the 
 girl who rested there, and whose hair was not curly. 
 Though fair in face, she had the hair and features of Indian 
 ancestry. 
 
 " But I talk so much, I stay so long," she said, rising on 
 her elbow. " The trail is long, and "
 
 58 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 She staggered a little as she arose, and Redney, with an 
 air of proprietorship, caught her arm. 
 
 " Easy there! Sit down. You can't take a trail when 
 you're that shaky. You just locate in the cabin for to- 
 night." 
 
 " No, oh, no! " and she stood upright again. " He is 
 there all alone. I come. I can starve a little, but he he 
 is not used to that; so I come. I will work fish any- 
 thing." 
 
 " We'll look after the work another day," said the young 
 fellow; and, turning away, he made up a bundle of stuff 
 for her, adding a small flask of whisky, as he thought of 
 the trembling, exhausted figure she had made on entrance. 
 She was steadier now; the bit of supper had been of help. 
 But, looking at her, he decided that her brain was a bit 
 "touched." That was why she persisted so that the dead 
 man must not be left without something to eat. Well, it 
 was enough to upset any woman, he supposed, and she was 
 not even that, only a girl; and against her the justice of the 
 law that asks a life for a life. 
 
 Redney had not nearly so much respect for the law as he 
 had for " sand." An overhauling of his moral code would 
 have suggested the need of a missionary. But just then 
 he knew she needed help, and who but he to ask for it? 
 
 " It's a queer go, though, her coming to me, me being the 
 one to look after her. Well, darned if I'm ashamed of her, 
 anyway." Then to her he said: "Will you tell me where 
 you camp? " 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 "Don't, if you don't feel like it," he added quickly. 
 " But you'd better tell me some place where I can meet 
 you, or leave signs for you; then I'll want to go for fish, too." 
 
 " How did you see I took him?" she asked suddenly, 
 ignoring his speech, though looking at him.
 
 REDNEY'S VISITOR. 59 
 
 " Moccasin-tracks little," and he pointed to her feet 
 encased in skin shoes, " on tip-toe under the window. I 
 rubbed them out." 
 
 " Yes, through the window like here I looked. Then 
 he talked, talked, but the other man never hear. I hear. 
 Then by an' by he gets up, walks over other man through 
 the door. I just whisper, only whisper, an' take his hand, 
 an' he never turned back. He come right up into the 
 mountain. I only whisper whisper! " 
 
 " So that was the ' how,' was it? Well, that's done for; 
 and now, where can I locate you? " 
 
 " You know the Stegwaah lamonti (Thunder mountain), 
 and the tumwata? (cascade) there at the foot, every day 
 when the moccasin can cover the shadow so, filouise 
 will be. You come? " 
 
 " Certain. I'll go past the settlement with you this trip, 
 too, I reckon. I've my doubts about you keeping up for 
 the trail. I'll carry that plunder. Ready? " 
 
 " You are good," she said once as she walked beside him. 
 " The same that night at Antoine's, I saw." 
 
 " Didn't allow you saw anything but that guzzling ya- 
 hoo that won you," remarked Redney, sourly, remembering 
 his ill thoughts of the night, and the girl's eyes with the 
 adoration in them. But he said nothing further; he did 
 not question, in the slightest, her deed or her impulse. 
 People learn not to ask questions in outlawed communi- 
 ties, and Redney had never lived in any other. The wonder 
 was that so much of boyishness remained with him through 
 all the rough life he had struggled in. Milt could only ex- 
 plain it to himself by the fact that whisky had no charm 
 for him. He had no conscientious scruples about the 
 free use of "lum," only he did not seem to take to it 
 himself; consequently, if there were any sober men in the 
 gangs, he was usually with them, and usually liked, and
 
 60 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 still nick-named "the kid," though he must have been 
 twenty, at least. 
 
 The pair of them circled the settlement like stealthy 
 ghosts. Scarce a whisper was exchanged between them, 
 though Redney noted that she covered the trail quickly and 
 kept on her feet better than he had thought for. 
 
 " You'll do. You're a skookum (brave or strong) squaw, even 
 if you ain't grown up yet," he said, as she halted and reached 
 for the little bundle, signifying that she would go on alone. 
 
 They were over a mile from the camp and were along 
 the river, though he fancied she kept to it for a blind. 
 
 "I'll go on to the cascade, if you say so; it's only about 
 a mile." 
 
 "No-, you go home, rest," she said, halting to rest her- 
 self ere taking the pathless way to her hiding-place. 
 "You want sleep." 
 
 " I reckon say, filouise, did you ever know any white 
 women?" 
 
 She drew back a step and looked at him. " Down there," 
 with a contemptuous fling of her hand toward the settle- 
 ment "them I see the Dutch Liz the " 
 
 "Ugh! no, they ain't what I mean, he interrupted; 
 "they're tough. I mean women the sort square men 
 marry; Milt, my partner, has married one. She'll be here 
 to-morrow and the kid. Lord! if you hadn't been so 
 so onlucky, she'd likely done you a heap o' good. Women 
 folks is what you ought to know." 
 
 " Nah! don't like them none," said the girl, decidedly. 
 "I know I hear the hunters talk no good." 
 
 "You're right about most of them," agreed Redney, as if 
 from the summit of mature experience, "but some are dif- 
 ferent. There's one to come to-morrow that'll be a show 
 to see in her town 'get up.' I don't allow she's much 
 account, but she's white."
 
 REDNEY'S VISITOR. 61 
 
 " You know the woman? " 
 
 " Naw and I don't want to! She's a little snipe with a 
 turned-up nose, I hear " (hear! oh, Redney !) " and I'll likely 
 have to camp out while she stays; and they call her Dell 
 Delia." 
 
 There was some vicious satisfaction to be got out of the 
 contemptuous repetition of the name he thought babyish, 
 and he got it all. 
 
 " Dell? " and the girl turned to him quickly " Dell that 
 is what he he Neil called me when I led him away. 
 <Dell,' he said 'little Dell.'" 
 
 "Oh, pshaw!" and he tried to laugh and failed, facing 
 her wide, questioning eyes, and remembering, with a bit of 
 a shock, that the Indian filouise and the Caucasian Delia 
 had one bit of interest in common that man; then an 
 inspiration led him into an adroit lie. 
 
 " Why, it was the mines he meant not a woman. Lit- 
 tle Dell mine, you know; that's where he's been for months. 
 I allow he thought he was on the trail there." 
 
 "Oh!" she breathed, with a little air of relief. "Now 
 klahowya " (good-by). 
 
 She was about to leave him, when suddenly bits of noise 
 came to them through the silence, and without a word they 
 shrunk together in the shadow, waiting. 
 
 Then each relaxed a little the tension of nerves as the 
 sound of paddles and horses' feet told them it was no pursu- 
 ing party, and it was meeting instead of following. A 
 pleasant party, for as they came closer a woman's clear 
 laughter came to them on the night laughter and canoes 
 showing in the moonlight. One was close in-shore, and 
 beside it rode Redney's partner. 
 
 "Hello! it's Milt," gasped Redney in amazement "Milt 
 and the whole outfit. Well I'll be ! " 
 
 In his excitement he leaned forward more than he
 
 62 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 intended, his foot slipped, and the horseman wheeled with 
 drawn revolver as a dark form pitched forward in the moon- 
 light, making a crackling in the brush above the narrow 
 strip of beach. 
 
 "Hold up, there!" came gaspingly from the shadows. 
 " I'm no grizzly." 
 
 " Redney! Well, what in the mischief are you doing out 
 here? " 
 
 " Come for a walk," answered the youth, righting himself, 
 and glad filouise had more sense than himself and was yet 
 hidden above them, "and to meet you." 
 
 " Meet me? " and Milt's tones had nothing of doubt but 
 all of amazement in them. " And what blessed Indian 
 jugglery told you I had met the canoes coming up? " 
 
 Redney smiled a smile suggesting all that was myste- 
 rious. He was quite ready to be thought possessed of any 
 occult power just then if it would settle queries and get the 
 party on a move, lest that girl above there on the bank 
 might make some misstep or movement that would betray 
 her. 
 
 " Oh, I felt it in my bones; " and then, lower, as the canoe 
 moved a little ahead, " How's he? " 
 
 " Great! Nannie Mrs. Ewing will show him to you. 
 Go closer." 
 
 He took a few steps with the intention of seeing the 
 storied " he," for in the moonlight he could see a lady hold- 
 ing in her arms a restless, squirming bundle a lady who 
 leaned forward smilingly at her husband's words; and then, 
 right across her, he saw another face, one that stopped 
 him a pretty, tired face, with a childish mouth, and eyes 
 that were gazing very intently, even in a startled way, right 
 over his head and up at the bank from which he had 
 tumbled. 
 
 " Oh, I guess he'll keep till he reaches the shack," he
 
 FAMILY FOLKS IN HIGH-LOW. 63 
 
 muttered, backing out. "You folks ride on, Milt; I'll take 
 the nigh trail." 
 
 And without another word he broke into the brush and 
 left them. In the sudden meeting he had forgotten the 
 interloper Delia; the instinctively detested one Miss 
 Fresh. She had deigned to drop her eyes to him for one 
 brief instant, but the gaze had a quizzical quality that made 
 him hate her. 
 
 He had met the enemy, and retired routed. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 FAMILY FOLKS IN HIGH-LOW. 
 
 THE social atmosphere of High-Low was shaken next 
 morning by something cyclonic. Three things had struck 
 the camp in the night, three things not as yet recorded in 
 its annals a capitalist from the States, ladyhood twice rep- 
 resented, and babyhood once; but though the smallest in 
 bulk, his drawing powers as an attraction were stupendous- 
 even the dainty girl who held him as often as his mother 
 gained not nearly so much notice, though occasionally 
 some of the visitors from the near camps did look enviously 
 at the unconscious son and heir of the Ewing establishment. 
 
 But they said little. The prospectors were mostly French- 
 Canadians or half-breeds, and these new-comers were for- 
 eigners in a way from down across that invisible line that 
 shuts " Americans " on the other side, where some of them 
 would just as soon have had the Americans stay. Vast 
 as the unexplored territory was there, a dog-in-the-manger
 
 64 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 attitude was often held by the natives toward the comers 
 from other climes; especially those from across that south- 
 ern line, who laughed at them often, and talked of " annex- 
 ing" them, much as one would suggest a guardian for 
 incapable children thereby starting many a small war that 
 launched its participants from this vale of fighting shadows 
 into the "Golden Presently." 
 
 Dunbar had been one exception to the minds of these 
 quick-tempered northerners. He had laughed none at 
 their squaw men. The social system of the Canadian 
 frontier was a thing to commend for aught any of the 
 sensitive ones ever heard him hint to the contrary. Ah! 
 he was the man for them he Gentleman Neil! 
 
 But their pleasant one was no more, so they told Cap- 
 ital, as represented by Mr. J. B. Raeforth, so they told 
 Beauty, as represented by Miss Delia Raeforth. 
 
 In fact, as the days wore on, it was astonishing how much 
 they found to tell her of their opinions on the question. 
 Coming up in wonderfully conceived attempts at full dress, 
 and sitting sheepishly around, would say, " I may be take 
 the trail along the water to-morrow, may be bring you 
 news;" or, " Mees, we go me, my brother up where the 
 snow is for the mountain goat. It may happen we find 
 your relation." 
 
 And so, instead of a flying trip up into the wilds, the 
 girl from the East stayed on and on, listening to strange 
 tales of strange disappearances of men in the mountains, 
 and long after, when they were about forgotten, some had 
 been known to walk back into camp like revived Van 
 Winkles, having only " cut loose " for a change. 
 
 " He is not found dead he may yet be living," Nannie 
 assured her, and Milt assured her; and Redney, crowded out 
 of the house into a hammock under a shed, grinned at his 
 own fancies, but offered no opinion, notwithstanding the
 
 FAMILY FOLKS IN HIGH-LOW. 65 
 
 fact that Miss Delia had a fashion of gazing at him in an 
 inquiring way if the subject were under discussion. 
 
 " That young Indian, or whatever he is, always impresses 
 me as having more knowledge of poor Neil than he will 
 tell," she confided to Nannie. But Nannie's negative was 
 emphatic. 
 
 "Indeed no. Milt says he is a splendid fellow, and 
 devoted to a friend, though he is a little shy with ladies. 
 Poor boy never knew any before. But he knows no more 
 of Mr. Dunbar than Milt does. There was so little to 
 know that is you see " 
 
 And then Nannie turned her attention to the dinner that 
 was in preparation. 
 
 The winning and losing of the princess apparent was as 
 yet a thing unknown to the girl. " Poor Neil " had been 
 suffering from brain fever, and in delirium had strayed 
 away, that was the story which was skimmed over for her 
 benefit. 
 
 " It's noways polite, anyhow, to meet ladies the minute 
 they strike the camp with a hullabaloo about carousin' an' 
 cuttin'," was the decision of the gentleman who had been 
 Dunbar's nurse; "an' watch your words, anyway, when 
 you're a speakin' o' the dead." 
 
 But Milt had told Nannie, and that little lady was prop- 
 erly shocked, and at once took on so tender and pitying a 
 manner to Delia that Mr. Raeforth, after his quick, busi- 
 ness-like view of the mine up the country and some 
 prospects nearer High-Low, had to take his departure 
 without her. 
 
 " All right," he agreed, amiably; " thought you wanted to 
 make the coast trip, though, to the Mexico diggings But 
 if you're bent on staying with Mrs. Ewing, make out a list 
 of what you need to be comfortable and I'll send it from 
 that outfitting place. If Neil turns up, write, and if he 
 5
 
 66 SQUAW fLOUlSE. 
 
 don't, don't you worry yourself thin by the time I get 
 back for you." 
 
 And as she was an obedient child, she lost neither color 
 nor flesh, only noted with those childish, open eyes of hers 
 all the wild life about, and caught sly mischievous impres- 
 sions of people and things with the aid of the amateur pho- 
 tographer's outfit, a thing that Redney eyed afar off and 
 by no sort of persuasion could be induced to get in 
 range of. In fact, his presence about the house was a 
 scarce article. He had suggested boarding by himself up 
 nearer their work, but his partner's wife had protested. 
 
 "Am I such a. very bad cook, then?" she asked; "and 
 how am I to manage the table and ' the boy ' at the same 
 time. Miss Delia declares he watches for you every morn- 
 ing." 
 
 " Oh! she does, does she?" 
 
 "And she says, too," continued the little lady disap- 
 provingly, " that you don't like her. Now why is that, Mr. 
 Redney? She is such a nice lady." 
 
 "Um! hum!" assented Redney, without opening his 
 mouth; and then, " I reckon there ain't much of love lost, 
 nohow." 
 
 "Why, Redney, she likes you; indeed, yes. She has so 
 many pictures already of you, and says what a good face 
 yon have to photograph, and " 
 
 " Huh! " 
 
 Redney stood up suddenly, and really looked very tall to 
 Nannie, who was not at all so, and his black eyes made her 
 remember that, after all, he was part Indian, and if he 
 should be angry 
 
 "Oh! it was for fun only," she tried to explain; "riot 
 for offense at all, only " 
 
 But Redney was gone. It was morning, not nearly th 
 time for the moccasin to cover the shadow /. e., midday.
 
 FAMILY FOLKS IN HIGH-LOW. 67 
 
 Yet he struck back from the path to High-Low or other 
 thoroughfares where men walk or work. He turned in the 
 direction where he had gone daily of late for fish. And 
 Nannie watched him go with misgivings. Had she driven 
 away her husband's best friend? And why in the world 
 need he glare like that at her? 
 
 " He is really only a young savage, after all," she told 
 Miss Raeforth later. " I suppose he has a lot of superstitions 
 against picture-taking. But I do wonder where he has 
 flown to? " 
 
 " Gone to see his girl," suggested the other. 
 
 "Girl? Why, he has no girl." 
 
 "Hasn't he? Well, then, I saw him once when he had 
 borrowed some other fellow's girl for a moonlight tryst." 
 
 " Nonsense! Redncy? " 
 
 "Redney it was," laughed the girl, " and I'll not tell you 
 another word. Do you suppose that young gentleman will 
 go through life without winning some sweetheart with that 
 handsome face? " 
 
 " But there are no no reputable girls here for the boy 
 to know." 
 
 "Then I'm much afraid your 'boy' is disreputable, and 
 I'm afraid also that you forget that the ( boy ' is older than 
 you are, Mrs. Nineteen, at least he looks so. And why 
 should he not have a girl? " 
 
 Was it, then, a girl that drew his feet away into the wild- 
 ness of the woods? There he went, anyway, going as the 
 bees go, straight to the place of the tumwata, climbing the 
 steepness of the northern shelf. But once there, in the 
 shadow where the water sweeps by in swift whiteness, he 
 dropped down and watched it, muttering, as was his 
 fashion, his face flushing warmly, perhaps angrily, at Mrs. 
 Nannie's revelations. 
 
 And there iLlouise came to him came down from abovej
 
 6b SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 in her hands a string of tzum salmon (speckled trout) and 
 some nooses of the white inner bark of the hickory, her 
 only net. 
 
 "Sick?" she asked, quickly; and was scarcely assured 
 when he grunted a negative. 
 
 " Till? " (tired). 
 
 " Not much. Just crowded out o' the blankets. Let me 
 be, can't you? " 
 
 Which she did until the silence grew unbearable, and he 
 was glad to break it himself. 
 
 " Look here, Louise, when are you ready to hit the trail 
 down there? " and he pointed to the south. " I'm about 
 ready to cut loose too many people loafing into High-Low; 
 an' you better follow suit." 
 
 " No," she said, with a little troubled look at his state- 
 ment. "No, he owns me; he can't go yet; I must stay." 
 
 "Oh, say, look here," he said, impatiently. "When the 
 man's dead he can't own you. You can't follow him to 
 hell, even if you want to, and darned if I don't believe that's 
 what you would like! Just like a fool woman! " 
 
 Her eyes filled with tears, as they had that other time 
 when he had spoken of Dunbar's death. 
 
 " No, not yet," she said, simply. 
 
 "S'pose look here, now s'pose you had a say a 
 brother, that would get you out o* this country and make a 
 livin' for you, same as white folks have? " 
 
 "I have no brother; and even then " 
 
 "You wouldn't shake that blamed carcass you've got 
 stowed away somewhere! " he burst out, wrathfully. 
 " That's like a woman, too, I s'pose." 
 
 "And you don't like them women? " 
 
 'Like them! Well, I no, I don't," he ended, doggedly. 
 
 " Not the pretty white squaw, even? Ah, you should like 
 the pretty ones."
 
 FAMILY FOLKS IN HIGH-LOW. 6& 
 
 "Ugh! she ain't pretty; it's only the clothes and things 
 she wears. I hain't said she was pretty." . 
 
 "No; but you talk of her much," said the girl, dream- 
 ily. "When people talk of each other long, they must 
 think. When they think much, there is no hate, not much 
 hate; so I think." 
 
 "Well, think again," he growled, with a very red face; 
 "and while you're at it, just think when you'll take the 
 trail out o' this hole in the hill, or wherever you camp." 
 
 " May be not at all. Do not be angry, not you, nika tilli- 
 kum (my friend). Some day you will see why. I am his; 
 that is all." 
 
 " But he don't want you now," he blurted out, brutally. 
 
 "May be not; may be some day," was the sad, patient 
 reply; and Redney arose. 
 
 "Women folks at High-Low are bad enough; you're 
 worse," he said, tersely. " Give me the fish." 
 
 "There are also the skins, six of the marten." 
 
 " All right; what do you want for them?" 
 
 "Tea, some, little; sapolil (flour), little. Can you?" 
 
 "Oh, I'll get it," he said, confidently, "though my pard 
 did get curious over that salt I toted from Antoine's." 
 
 " Do they ask of him of me? " 
 
 " No; not of any account." 
 
 He had told her not a word of Neil's anxious friends. 
 He had made up his mind that ^louise was a bit crazy over 
 the question of being owned by Dunbar, but how could he 
 prove that mental state to others? In no way he could 
 see. All he could do was to keep her hidden until some 
 chance of her own inclination led her to leave with him. 
 For if she was ever found with that dead body ! 
 
 Redney stopped, and shivered when he thought of what 
 would happen. 
 
 "Listen," she said, as he turned away; "they must not
 
 70 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 track you. S'pose you come only every six days? I am 
 strong now. I can hunt. Only sapolil must I need. The 
 fish I will leave on the little stream every morning. 
 
 " But they may see you." 
 
 " Not filouise not when alone." 
 
 And with that final arrangement he turned his feet 
 toward the camp again he, Redney, who had never gone 
 near women, and was now decidedly beset by the annoy- 
 ances two of the creatures were daily launching at him. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 IKT ELITE (ONE SLAVE). 
 
 And filouise? Guileless trust was surely not one of her 
 traits, despite Redney's kindness, for like a slim snake she 
 crept after him, just keeping far enough away to avoid 
 him if he turned, and watching carefully to see that he did 
 not turn. Satisfied at last, she retraced her steps, and leav- 
 ing their place of meeting, walked carefully, very carefully, 
 toward the source of the stream. Not once did those little 
 moccasins by which Redney had tracked her first touch soil 
 if stones were in her way. Not a track was left in the 
 wet sands; no such haste moved her as that night by 
 Neil's window. Not a tuft of grass with its gleams of 
 gold at the roots was trampled as she went over the trail 
 that looked as if never disturbed by human feet. And so 
 still so still! only the whimper and murmur of the water 
 turned loose by the mountain, only the muffled sound of 
 pheasants' thunder beating against the silence, a sound
 
 IKT ELITE (ONE SLAVE). 71 
 
 that accents isolation. Shy birds fluttered up into the 
 sunshine from their ground-nests and slipped back again to 
 their young when the feet had passed, and the young human 
 thing, needing motherhood as much as the birds in nests, 
 went on and upward thinking not any of that. 
 
 Why should she? Motherhood, like womanhood, was a 
 thing to be avoided by her. All she had known of them 
 was evil. Men were better, so she thought. 
 
 None would, without a clew, have ever thought of 
 searching for her where she went. If all High-Low had 
 turned out with blood-hounds, they would have halted 
 before they reached the end of her trail; for where the 
 stream dwindled to a narrow bit, creeping under low brush 
 and thick with tangled vines, the moccasins were loosened, 
 and carrying them, she bent low and walked in the water 
 through the long, leafy tunnel not nearly so easy a thing to 
 do as to tell of, for dam-like weaving of dead limbs crossed het 
 way often, the wash of many a midsummer torrent July sends 
 down from the snow-peaks, and over them and through them 
 she crept, breaking never one by which she would be traced. 
 
 And emerging from it, she reached a bare place where 
 stones lay loose and warm in the sun, and on them she 
 stepped to drive away the chill of her feet from that walk 
 through the shadows. Many a one would have halted 
 there, if but for the sake of the view that spread so far 
 below mountain past mountain, across which white 
 clouds drifted as they were drawn up from the valleys at 
 the kiss of the sun; and above the clouds so many a white 
 crown towered, so many a snowy shoulder bathed in the 
 rose-light, for the day was yet young, the dusk of dawn 
 scarce driven from the shadowy clefts away below. 
 
 The girl did turn for one satisfied glance over it all as 
 she arose from adjusting the moccasins; it was so much 
 her own all that beauty which seemed to uphold the sky.
 
 J2 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 No other than herself had to creep like this to their deep 
 wilderness, asking of its waters the fish, of its jungles the 
 game. Other women had kindred; other girls had homes. 
 She had only her bonds to the master that Redney had dis- 
 liked so. Did the wild things know all of her bitter need 
 that so many of their kind came slipping into her nets and 
 nooses? In her gratitude, she asked those questions; 
 sometimes she asked so many unanswerable ones there in 
 her loneliness and uncertainty. Perhaps it was some long- 
 ing for those unanswered things which had given her eyes 
 of late so serious a wistfulness, the look in them that had 
 puzzled Redney so the night in the cabin. He finally con- 
 cluded it was the grip of remorse that was having a steady 
 hold of her up on the peaks there, and which had turned 
 her brain just enough to make her a queer one. 
 
 A queer one! And the boy knew no more than herself 
 that she was a thing beautiful, with wild, uncommon grace. 
 He had known so long these fairest Indians of the north, 
 with their fineness of feature, their forms of symmetry, and 
 their voices of velvet, but that any of his interest had first 
 been won for this one because of exceptionable beauty did 
 not once occur to him. He growled a good deal at her, but in 
 spite of that he was influenced much by her wishes, and 
 looked at her much in sudden discoveries that she was not 
 quite like any other tenas kloocheman (little squaw, /. e., girl) 
 whom he had ever seen. But that she was more beautiful, 
 he never told himself; nor would he at sight of snowy fleets 
 of the graceful swan that breasted Arrow Lake, or at the 
 dainty dignity of the wood-dove, or the pride, yet the soft- 
 ness, in the eyes of the young deer. He liked to see these 
 wild creatures. A sense of completeness was with him as 
 he gazed, but he could scarcely have told why. Looking 
 at filouise, he had much of the same feeling she was only 
 a sister to those others.
 
 IKT ELITE (ONE SLAVE). 73 
 
 And to her nest she crept quite as stealthily. Not a 
 dainty-looking nest, either; so high up the steeps, with an 
 entrance frowning out at the world through its great over- 
 hanging shelf of rock that reached out portico-like above 
 a porch so covered with vines and small growths that one 
 could have walked above and around with never a guess 
 that below there was a dwelling-house, while from under a 
 stone near the entrance bubbled out the tiny rill that was 
 really the source of the Tumwata Creek away below. 
 
 In it she laid the fish on their wand of light, flexible 
 wood, fastening it by a stone in the shadiest place; and 
 for an instant she stood just inside the cave entrance, her 
 head bent in toward the shadows, listening, listening. 
 Then a tender, satisfied smile touched her lips, her eyes 
 softening as when something well-beloved crosses the 
 vision; yet her glance met only the stone portal. She was 
 seeing through some other sense than the visual. 
 
 The ashes were drawn from over live coals close to the 
 wall, where the smoke-black was hidden by the shadow; 
 and above it, far up, a bit of zigzag daylight crept, making 
 a better chimney than the dwellers in tepees know. On 
 the coals she dropped bits of dry bark until the blaze arose, 
 and over it twigs and broken sticks, which vanish in hot 
 ashes so quickly. And in the hot ashes what delicious 
 things can be baked; and over the red coals how crisply 
 the trout browns. 
 
 But the young squaw had other work in conjunction with 
 the breakfast. Some white, fibrous roots, strangely aro- 
 matic, were mashed and beaten on a flat stone until they were 
 mere creamy pulp. On a leaf similar to the plantain, a leaf 
 already wilted in the sun and cooled in the shadow, she 
 spread the preparation, covering it deftly with another of 
 the green coats, and arose, looking with a bit of serious 
 scrutiny to find a flaw in the enveloped preparation, and 
 noting none, passed into the shadows.
 
 74 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 But they lasted such a little way, just around a jutting bit of 
 rock that reached like a pillar from floor to roof; and through 
 the wall near it an opening up near the top let in light 
 from the south that streamed across the white, sandy floor 
 and flashed on glistening atoms of crystals in the rear wall. 
 
 It lightened also the niche made by the natural partition, 
 and rested on the man's face who lay on the low bed there. 
 The girl knelt beside him, with an inexplicable look in the 
 black eyes, an odd, un-Indian-like tremble of the red 
 mouth that scarcely prisoned a quick sigh. 
 
 And either the mesmerism of her gaze or else that 
 broken breath aroused him, for with a grimace of pain he 
 moved restlessly and opened his eyes eyes dazed and 
 questioning as he met those of the girl, who no longer knelt 
 beside him, for at his first movement she arose and stood 
 erect, impassive, by his couch. 
 
 "It is the time to cool your shoulder," she said, quietly, 
 " so I have come." 
 
 "Yes, I suppose so," he assented. " You did it before 
 yesterday? I saw you, I know, and you would not let me 
 talk. When was that? " 
 
 ** That was yesterday," she nodded. " Sleep is better than 
 talk; it makes you strong again." 
 
 He watched her face dreamily as she bent above him, 
 removing the blackened leaves from his shoulder and plac- 
 ing the cool, moist ones in their stead, and feeling an 
 exquisite sense of ease follow the touch of her fingers. 
 
 "Wish you'd sit down and say something," he said, and 
 smiled at her persuasively. " I've got all sorts of queer ideas 
 of you tangled up in my head. Seems as if I've seen you 
 bending over me for ages and ages in a dozen different 
 lives; always bending over, never sitting down or talking; 
 and I wish you'd scatter some of these crazy fancies by 
 seating yourself just once and saying something."
 
 JKT ELITE (ONE SLAVE). 75 
 
 " There is nothing to say," she answered, seating herself 
 obediently, " only you have been sick head sick, shoulder 
 sick; both held the fever. Now it is gone you must have 
 things to eat; the things are on the fire, and the fire will 
 die if I sit long." 
 
 " Oh, go along, then! " and the blue eyes with the great 
 shadows about them almost laughed at her passivity. " Only 
 if you had been living with ghosts through a fever, or what- 
 ever it was, you'd appreciate having something of flesh and 
 blood to look at for a change." 
 
 She made no answer, only obeyed his first words and 
 went out, while he craned his neck ineffectually to see 
 where the door was. 
 
 " I've an idea that I've been through it dozens of times, 
 too," he thought, and gazed about the walls that looked 
 familiar, though he could state no time when he had of a 
 certainty seen them before. There was a puzzling sense of 
 unreality in it all, but any quick movement dispelled any 
 shade of unreality from his shoulder; the wound there 
 was a certainty. " And the most puzzling part of it is that 
 I have so little remembrance of how I came to get it 
 thanks for that to Antoine's rum. I must have been 
 beastly;" and pale as his face was, it grew warm at his 
 vague reminiscences. 
 
 He remembered buying that ticket thirteen; he remem- 
 bered wondering what in the world he would do with his 
 prize when won, at the same time that he decided she would 
 have to be put in a home somewhere; he remembered that, 
 but that was not the portion of the night at which he blushed 
 to remember; there was Cleve's face and the money the 
 last dollar; and then 
 
 He supposed it was because fiiouise had refused to go 
 with her winner that Cleve had turned on him in a rage. 
 He supposed Cleve was drunk too, else he never would
 
 76 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 have broke loose like that. He remembered the flash of a 
 knife, the cut, down where that hurt was, so deep, and 
 then he had either fainted or sobered up, for he had no 
 remembrance of anything after he seized Clevents until on 
 that cot in Collins' cabin. 
 
 Collins had thought his patient still delirious when, after 
 a long stare from the cot, he had quietly asked, " Did I kill 
 Cleve?" 
 
 The gambler's face was the last he remembered. It had 
 drifted into his sick fancies as an accompaniment of that 
 wound, and the direction of his fancies was proven by the 
 question, which was answered by the nurse as he thought 
 the patient wanted it. 
 
 "Lord! yes; you sent him to the smoky range in good 
 shape. Now take a snooze and you'll feel better." 
 
 And then the nurse wondered mightily that his patient 
 had straightway lapsed again into unintelligible jargon, and 
 that his fever arose several degrees. 
 
 And after that had passed, ages of chaos, with, through it 
 all, the voice of an old sweetheart that called to him, and 
 ever above him the face of filouise, that was such a silent, 
 shadowy sort of a presence; and now the finale of it all was 
 this rock wall, with the warm sunlight making a golden 
 glory of its grayness, and even here was filouise. 
 
 How to account for it all he did not know, and in trying 
 to conjecture he only brought great throbs of pain to his 
 head and a strange confusion to his brain; and when the girl 
 came back he lay with closed eyes, as if sleeping. 
 
 "Here," she said, softly, and he saw her as he had in his 
 dreams always above him; and in her hands was a little 
 trough made from the bark of a sapling and filled at the 
 ends with woven reeds that were water-tight. " The water 
 is cold," and she touched for an instant his forehead with 
 her light fingers; " it is good for you bathe."
 
 IKT ELITE (ONE SLAVE). 77 
 
 But at his first awkward attempt to reach the primitive 
 basin she motioned him to lie down, and herself wet the 
 dead white moss which she used as a sponge by tying it in 
 a little sheaf with a strip of fine bark. 
 
 "What an inventor you are, ^louise," he said, lazily, as 
 the cool drops touched his face. " I can't be quite sure 
 whether I'm awake or dreaming; but if you're a dream, 
 you're a very nice one." 
 
 She seemed not to hear, or the only sign of it was a 
 slight contraction of her straight brows she whose eyes 
 had held infinite tenderness when he lay unconscious; and 
 she drew back as he laid his hand detainingly on hers. 
 
 "Where are we?" he asked; "I can't remember." 
 
 "In my home in a nook of a mountain." 
 
 " No one else? Just you? " 
 
 "And you," she completed; "that is enough till you are 
 strong." 
 
 "Will you tell me how I got here?" 
 
 "Walked. I walked with you in the night. Your head 
 was sick, and the man who watched was asleep; then you 
 escaped." 
 
 The man who watched! Then his impressions were cor- 
 rect; he had been guarded there in Collins' cabin. He did 
 not reflect that invalids were also guarded; he was thinking 
 only of Collins' words of the unmistakable criminality 
 implied by them. 
 
 " Then the man who gave me this was killed? " 
 
 She only looked at him with startled eyes, and all the 
 color drifting from her face the moment she had feared 
 through days and nights was here. 
 
 " I don't remember killing him did I get the knife, or 
 how? But I was drunk drunk! " 
 
 Her eyes, avoiding his, turned to the floor. 
 
 "But that wouldn't free me with a jury, I suppose," he
 
 78 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 went on. " Justice would give a man an extra swing of the 
 rope on that account. Did you think of that when you hid 
 me you, just a bit of a girl? Did no one else help?" 
 
 " No other knew." 
 
 The words fell with slow distinctness from her lips. She 
 was telling no lie, but fate or her Manitou was doing it for 
 her; and from the great sickness of dread that was over- 
 whelming her she grasped at his mistake, as one in a whirl- 
 pool of waters will grasp at the nearest floating thing, 
 though it keep him up but for a breath. 
 
 And her season of breath was given to her, though the 
 beating of her heart seemed choking up her throat. She 
 was dizzy, and put out one hand blindly as she turned and 
 went out into the sunshine, out into the shimmer of leaves 
 and the call of bird-songs, where, alone, she fell on her 
 knees, huddling down there, whispering over and over 
 " MasaJichie! masahchie! " (evil evil I), beating her breast 
 at every repetition, as the teaching of her Roman church 
 made natural in her self-accusation. But at heart, after 
 all, she was still a pagan; for, rising suddenly, she flung 
 back her head, reaching out her arms with a passionate 
 gesture of appeal, of decision, of defiance. 
 
 " No, I can not! The black robes (the priests) say con- 
 fess, repent, else the curse will come. I try; no use. See, 
 Manitou!" and from her bosom she drew the little black 
 cross, worn since baptism, and, closing her eyes, flung it far 
 out, heeding not its fall. " Now I am yours; fight my bat- 
 tles against the curse. See! the beak of the eagle drives 
 out lacloa (the cross.) I am your child by the talisman 
 only Indian, nothing else. Help me in evil as in good. I 
 did not lie, but I can not now confess. If it is a curse for 
 his sake, I claim it. Only, Manitou, spirit that guards! 
 close his ears if any bird should carry to him the truth. 
 That is all, that is all, Manitou! "
 
 YOU SOLD ME! 79 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 YOU SOLD ME ! 
 
 AFTER that morning of awakening he was not so well; 
 the eager life rushing back in such haste to question to 
 confused reasonings had left him weaker. But with each 
 sleep that fell over him he awakened a little more clear in 
 his thoughts, though he did not question much. He knew 
 now why he was hidden away so, why the girl who made 
 herself his servant never left him but a little while alone. 
 Sometimes- he wondered that she should have done all this 
 for him; but generally, with the passivity of fever weak- 
 ness, he accepted it as a matter of course. 
 
 "You sick much sick; it is a shame for any who would 
 not help the sick," was all she said, trying to lessen all 
 importance of her own acts. 
 
 " You are a better Christian than I, little one," he said, 
 looking at her with caressing eyes. " I've seen many a 
 man sick without giving him a second thought. But they 
 always told me you were 'good Indian;' even the priests 
 say that, don't they?" 
 
 "No, they will not," she said, quietly; "not anymore. 
 I am no Christian. See! " and she pointed to her breast, 
 where the feather of an eagle rose and fell with each 
 breath, while above it the beak and claw swung pendent. 
 "This is of the Indian prayer (religion); this the talisman 
 of my Manitou." 
 
 " But what difference between the Christian's God and 
 the Indian Manitou?" he asked, listlessly, not supposing 5 
 there was any; but she answered, sadly enough:
 
 " There is much. The God of the church helps only the 
 good; my Manitou helps both good and evil hearts, if only 
 they are strong and can brave much for him." 
 
 " And can you? " 
 
 She did not answer; the quizzical tone disturbed her. 
 She never had ready speech for people who laughed at the 
 faiths; and her thoughts were with the cross flung out from 
 her among the quivering aspen-leaves, and the certainty 
 that the curse of the church God was drawn down on her 
 by the act that chose the help of Manitou. 
 
 She was braiding the green split wands of the water-rush 
 that lay in coils about her. The days would come, when 
 the sun was burning, when, to gain strength, he must walk 
 both in the noon and the dark, and she was making a 
 substitute for the cloth hat left back there in High-Low. 
 
 Somehow she had never looked so really Indian to him 
 before. Had Manitou really set his seal on her with that 
 symbol of the eagle's claw? Had he also given her that 
 shy consciousness of self which he could not remember as 
 a part of the little half-breed with the reckless temper 
 whom he had known a year ago? 
 
 She had laughed then that year ago; she had run races 
 like a boy for a bit of silver coin. She would flash back 
 looks of rage at him if he teased her as she held his horse 
 at Antoine's door, but woe unto any rash Indian youth who 
 endeavored to forestall her in that task. More than once 
 had howls broken the peace of High-Low, and scratches 
 and bites, with dire threats, had left her triumphant at the 
 door of the hostelry. 
 
 That was the filouise he had known, a fighting, indus- 
 trious little vagabond, contemptuous of her mother, yet 
 doing battle for her valiantly, fighting with any who dare 
 ridicule the strong weakness of that personage. But this 
 shy, devoted weaver of rushes was something very different.
 
 YOU SOLD ME! 81 
 
 She reminded him for the first time of those chaste- 
 eyed sisters of hers whom he had seen once in the lodges 
 by the long Lakes of the Arrows lodges whose people have 
 forgotten the ancient pagan rites of the Kalispels and, with 
 the later name of Colville, have taken in all faith the cross 
 of Christ from the hands of the priesthood. It reaches 
 them in many a lodge of the wilderness, and under its 
 slender shadow is lived a life patriarchal in its simplicity, 
 undeviating in its rules of duty and morality. 
 
 He had admired those soft-toned, seldom-speaking Indian 
 women, who had looked at him with shy good- will but would 
 speak to him not at all. In his meeting with various tribes 
 or clans that graceful nation remained pre-eminent for 
 virtues unexpected, and for an atmosphere of refinement in 
 their womankind. 
 
 He remembered them when looking at ^louise, with her 
 downcast eyes and deft fingers, and thinking of their beauty 
 was suddenly conscious of hers. 
 
 " Did you live here alone before I came?" he asked, and 
 felt a sense of pleasure when she nodded her head. 
 
 "All but one day," she added; " that day Henri come." 
 
 " Henri? " 
 
 "He is 'Father' now you say 'priest;' once he was 
 only Henri a boy, and was a good hunter. He showed 
 me the traps to make when I was still little. He carried 
 me often that I might come north with the hunters." 
 
 " And he brought you here? " 
 
 She looked up at the abrupt speech that expressed 
 annoyance. 
 
 " Brought? No. He found it first long ago, very long, 
 and told me. He thought other people than ours had lived 
 here, and I never forgot. Then once last year La Mestina 
 was mad; in a passion. I was not so big then, but I ran 
 away. I found this where Henri had told me of. I was 
 
 3
 
 82 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 all alone. I was happy all day. I wanted never to go back 
 and see people or smell rum. Then Henri came from over 
 the mountain. They told him I was gone; but he found 
 me," and she smiled at the thought of his skill "the black 
 robe never tangles his feet." 
 
 " I know the one you mean a monk a half-breed? " 
 
 A scarcely perceptible tone of depreciation in his speech 
 made her answer quickly: 
 
 " It is so; his mother was all Colville. He is more Indian 
 than me, so he is better than me." 
 
 " He could be no better friend," he asserted, looking at 
 her with amused eyes, and noting the flush of color that had 
 swept over her face for an instant. He liked her best when 
 she showed temper. He understood her best. " But how 
 comes it that your valiant friend did not choose the trail 
 and the trap instead of the black gown? He should have 
 found a squaw and sat in his own tepee." 
 
 "No not Henri," she said. "He never look much at 
 squaws only at me when I was little; 'little eagle,' he 
 called me, like a boy. Then his father, who was good, 
 wanted to give what was best to the church, so he gave 
 Henri; that is how." 
 
 " A very interesting ' how,' too. And so Henri was an 
 offering on the altar of this Canadian Abraham; and you?" 
 
 " Nothing of me. We were cut off from the tribe long 
 ago. La Mestina can never go in their lodges, though of the 
 chief blood. Henri was tall and knew much when we saw 
 him again; much of books and all things. But he is never 
 traitor to his people. He comes back instead of to stay 
 where the towns are. The hunters call him 'Le plet et 
 lemolo' '[ 
 
 "The priest of the wilds? Well, he looks it. I stumbled 
 on his camp once when he was coming east by the low 
 pass. Is he around here now? "
 
 YOU SOLD ME! 83 
 
 " May be, but I think not. It is long since I have seen 
 him when the birds flew south last." 
 
 " Eh! Why, he was there there at Antoine's the even- 
 ing I got down from the mines; the evening " 
 
 But she dropped the plaited reeds, turning away her head 
 with a little gesture of protest, and he checked his speech 
 with an idea that she felt an added abasement in being 
 gambled away in presence of any of the Pharisees of her 
 mother's people. 
 
 " Nevermind; come here! " he said, holding out his hand 
 from the couch. " He had left for the mountains before 
 dark, I think. But no matter who was there, you must not 
 worry now; do you hear me, ISlouise? I will be strong some 
 day; then we will take the trail, you and I. We will go 
 far, to the very end of the Arrow Lake River, and then on 
 down the coast, where the snow never falls, where the 
 flowers bloom all the year, where no one of the Gold Range 
 or the Selkirk hills will ever come, where you need never 
 work, and I need never hide. What do you say, my lass 
 Louise is it yes? " 
 
 She did not touch his hand. Something in her heart 
 ached when he spoke kindly and caressingly to her, and it 
 was most natural for him to speak to all women in that 
 appealing tone. It really meant less from him than most- 
 men; it was so much of a habit. But its gentleness over- 
 whelmed her with a sense of her own unworthiness, she 
 who had driven that knife into his shoulder! She longed 
 to kneel at his feet and confess. Yet the first actual fear 
 of her life held her back, and in the complexity of emotion 
 she could only say, dully: 
 
 "Thou the chief, filouise the slave; and the trail is good 
 for you to take." 
 
 " That sounds well; but you are not the most submissive 
 slave I've ever seen," and he looked at her reproachfully*
 
 84 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 " How is it you will not even touch my hand now that I am 
 getting better? That is not friendly." 
 
 "Have you wanted for anything I could get? " she asked 
 in return; "a best friend can do only what he is able." 
 
 "A friend would take my hand," he insisted, curious to 
 know what her strange reserve meant. And he learned 
 when she turned her black eyes, large with feeling, on him, 
 a mingling of love and rage, of pride and abasement in the 
 glance. 
 
 "You sold me to the stranger," she said, and walked 
 away, leaving the wet rushes unplaited and the coil of braid 
 looking like a flat green snake on the stone floor. 
 
 With the petulance of physical weakness, he felt angered 
 at her leaving him like that. Her sullen briefness left him 
 no chance of apology, of explanation, or defense. 
 
 "Has she just remembered it now?" he asked himself. 
 "She knew it all the time I was helpless here; but I sup- 
 pose it's Indian nature to hold grudges." 
 
 And then he called "^llouise! ^louise!" but no returning 
 step answered, only the twittering of the birds that built 
 above his window ceased for a moment. That was all the 
 notice any living thing took of his voice. 
 
 If she had reproached him, as he felt it was perfectly 
 reasonable to expect; had complained in woman fashion, 
 and in the same fashion let herself be coaxed into forgiving 
 and forgetting; if she had done like that, as would have 
 done the greater part of the women he knew, then he would 
 have understood just how to manage her. She would have 
 sobbed away her moody anger and been petted into smiles 
 again, and the miserable days of hiding would have become 
 less dreary by her presence. But if she was going to stand 
 on her dignity and an Indian grudge in that fashion 
 
 The mark of the sun fell from the wall to the floor, gild- 
 ing the pale yellows and deep greens of the rushes in its
 
 YOU SOLD ME! 85 
 
 passing, and, finally withdrawing its lances of light, sent 
 within only its reflections; and then he knew the noon was 
 near. But not ISlouise. 
 
 The stillness and loneliness of those rock walls were 
 horrible to him. He liked the hills, but would have made 
 a poor hermit. Human voices and laughter were the 
 things that made half his life; the crowds and the contest 
 of wits, and the genial companionship of men and women 
 those were the things worth living among to him, and he 
 chafed against the need to stay housed there with a fitfully 
 sullen Indian as an only companion. And the worst of it 
 all was the debt he owed her. 
 
 For even in his impatience at her he did not forget the 
 slave-like devotion she had shown him. It weighed on him 
 made him feel contemptible, remembering his last game 
 of cards; and Mr. Dunbar was little given to taking that 
 view of himself but when that squaw made it impossible 
 for him to seem anything else. 
 
 So he argued, and fretted and fumed in his loneliness 
 until, with much thinking, his head began a most tumultu- 
 ous throbbing. He was feverish, and the water within 
 reach of his hand had stood until its freshness was gone. 
 He longed, as though in a desert, for the cool flow of 
 waters unfettered, and, following the wish, he arose and 
 walked slowly, for the first time, at midday, out through 
 the larger room. But it took such a few steps to make the 
 perspiration break out with a little chill all over him; and 
 on the boughs of spruce heaped against the wall he sank 
 dizzily before he could reach the entrance. 
 
 "filouise! filouise!" he whispered, meaningly, and even 
 in his weakness thought how right it would serve her to 
 come back and find him there more ill through her deser- 
 tion. She would be sorry then. He would be willing to 
 endure the sickening weakness for that.
 
 86 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 But she did not come; and finding a stick among the dry 
 l>its of wood in the corner, he used it as a cane, and with 
 its aid, and groping along the wall to steady himself, he 
 finally reached the entrance and dropped down beside the 
 cool, clear rill that crept from the shadows there. 
 
 It was luxurious just to dash the water up and feel it 
 splash in his face, and drink great draughts of its clear- 
 ness; and the wind was blowing briskly from the west the 
 odorous wind, with the breath of the ocean mingled with it. 
 It and the cool earth and the immense spread of mountain 
 and valley, river and lakes below was so welcome a change 
 that he did not attempt to move. He would not go back 
 to that rock wall alone; in his weakness he had a morbid 
 antipathy to the very comfortable shelter it was so repel- 
 ling; it spoke to him of nothing human; and with filouise 
 gone no, he told himself, he would not re-enter; if he died 
 from dragging himself out there well, he would die; that 
 was all. She would find him there on her return she 
 would be sorry she 
 
 And then he finished his determination in dreamland, for 
 the exhaustion of the little walk, aided by the lulling winds, 
 had brought him so delicious a drowsiness that he made no 
 attempt to fight it off. 
 
 It seemed to him that he slept hours a sleep freer, less 
 dreamful than those on the couch in the cave. Closing his 
 eyes on that view of the rock wall did not bespeak abso- 
 lute rest. Sometimes Clevents' face, calm and colorless, 
 seemed to repeat itself in the shadows. But the wind had 
 blown away that specter was it only to replace it by 
 another? 
 
 A swift chill crept over him as he asked the question on 
 awakening, wondering what it was that wakened him, any- 
 way. Through his slumber he fancied he had heard a little 
 feminine "oh!" and without moving he opened his eyes,
 
 YOU SOLD ME! 87 
 
 that were turned up to the sky, and there, only a few feet 
 above him, bent forward another thing of dreams a white- 
 dressed body, with tresses of yellowish hair showing under 
 a white hat. He did not see the wings, but had a convic- 
 tion that he could if she turned around which she did 
 not. 
 
 She bent above there, looking down at him with curious, 
 startled eyes, but saying never a word. It was a specter, 
 without doubt, for he thought he had never seen a woman 
 so fair so white. Only children sometimes are so; but this 
 was not a child, either. 
 
 Without a word, he tried to rise to get closer. He did 
 get on his feet, without once removing his eyes from those 
 above, though the white form seemed to draw away away! 
 
 Then the bushes at which he grasped crashed under his 
 weight, and as the specter fled it seemed to take his life 
 with it, for when Louise dragged herself up the mountain 
 at sunset, he was still there, and still unconscious. 
 
 When he reopened his eyes, it was the shadowy rock 
 roof again arching above him, and between it and himself 
 the face of the young squaw, who turned away and did not 
 speak when he uttered her name. He did not guess it was 
 to hide the great gladness, so near tears, that shone in her 
 eyes. 
 
 " You are here, and she where is she? " 
 
 She turned toward him at that question, and shook her 
 head. 
 
 " There is no one else no woman here or is it a 
 woman you mean? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 He looked at her long and wonderingly. The substitu- 
 tion of the black-eyed squaw for the angelically fair face 
 was yet an unsolved problem.
 
 88 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " You saw no one? " 
 
 The girl hesitated before speaking; frank, open speech 
 was growing rare with her. 
 
 " Yes," she said at last. " I stayed long down the slope, 
 because there were people on the mountain. I laid low 
 because of their eyes." 
 
 "Who? tell me." 
 
 "A miner of High-Low and his wife, and then some 
 other men I saw. They passed me close in the brush, 
 going up the river. They took the west trail, that leads to 
 the top on the other side; they did not find my path." 
 
 " A man's wife? All in white clothes, was she? " 
 
 filouise bent over him, passing her cool hands over his 
 brow. 
 
 " No," she said, soothingly; " it was not so. The woman 
 dressed dark; only the child had a dress of white. It was 
 little; it slept as she passed on the horse. Sleep now; it 
 was not sleep you had there in the sun. You were weak, 
 and the sun touched your head." 
 
 " Likely," he agreed, hopelessly. " Yes, it was only a 
 fancy, that and the sun that made me ill all because you 
 left me." 
 
 He had only just then remembered that she had left 
 him; but she knew nothing of that, and her voice had a 
 tremulous humility in it as she bent before him. 
 
 " I will never leave you again; never, until you wish it," 
 she said.
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 89 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 
 
 FIRST in one direction and then in another, there had 
 been more concerted sight-seeing in High-Low than ever 
 before in the history of that ambitious hamlet; and the 
 number of its leading citizens who were required to guard 
 and care for two ladies during those little excursions spoke 
 much for the terrors of the district, or little for the valor 
 of the escort if their services were among the necessary 
 things. 
 
 " I never was so persistently waited on in my life," 
 declared Miss Raeforth, " nor so decidedly bored. The 
 only exception, Mr. Ewing, is that shy friend of yours. 
 Perhaps it is the enchantment of distance that is his, but I 
 certainly find him enchanting above all others, if only he 
 would grow a little more tame." 
 
 Milt Ewing laughed and looked down at the bright face 
 of his wife's friend. He was not wise in the reading of 
 girlish natures; and this dainty little one, with her affec- 
 tionate, winning ways and quizzical speeches, that he 
 always felt meant either more or less than she said, was an 
 unsolved problem to him, but none the less attractive. 
 
 " I think you tease poor Redney until he's afraid to come 
 near you, for it can't be inclination that keeps him away." 
 
 " Don't you begin," she laughed, " for Mrs. Nannie and 
 I are already growing dizzy from the varied compliments 
 of the rest, and you need not say pretty things to make 
 amends for your partner; he is incorrigible. Not once 
 has he been gallant enough to go with us on our little
 
 90 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 * outings.' I'm going to ask him to go as my escort next 
 time, and see if he will refuse such a pointed invitation." 
 
 But, to the surprise of the rest, he did not. When Miss 
 Delia rode forth at the head of their little picnic party, 
 Redney rode beside her; not quite the Redney of the 
 house-cleaning and saleratus days, althougn so short a 
 time had passed since then. A sullen sort of dignity had 
 given him added age, and his black eyes flashed menacingly 
 over the faces of the others as he rode forward to join 
 Miss Delia Raeforth. If any of them had dared to grin! 
 But they did not, and after a season of wary watching, his 
 attitude relaxed somewhat, and in the gracious, questioning 
 presence of the young lady he became almost sociable. 
 It was the first time in the man} 7 days since her arrival that 
 she had heard him talk his flight at her approach had 
 been so obvious. 
 
 " Why would you not go with us last week on our little 
 canoe-trip?" she asked, with a determination to make him 
 talk; his voice was so musical! "We only went a little 
 way, just far enough up the river to enjoy a fish dinner out 
 of doors. But we wanted you." 
 
 "May be the baby did," he agreed; "but there was 
 enough of you to take care of him without me along." 
 
 "The baby! Do you suppose Mrs. Ewing and I don't 
 want society as well as that baby? " 
 
 " You've got the whole camp," he said, laconically; "and 
 I have not heard yet where you are all bound for to-day." 
 
 "Oh, some mountain. I get the names jumbled up, 
 there are so many; but there is a lovely cascade, and a 
 wonderful view, and it is not far away. I guess no one in 
 particular is guide, but they all seem to know where it is." 
 
 "Yes, I know too," he answered, briefly, and turned to 
 Ewing. 
 
 " Is it Thunder Mountain you're after? "
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 91 
 
 "That's it; going to the cascade, and fish a little below. 
 I've never seen the place, but Andy knows it." 
 
 Andy was the gentleman who had proven out of his 
 element as a watchful nurse for Dunbar, and who now 
 looked correct as a temperance lecturer as he rode near 
 Mrs. Ewing, gorgeous in a yellow and blue striped necktie, 
 with a gleaming bit of iron pyrites in his flannel shirt- 
 front. Glancing at him, Redney felt newly conscious of 
 some swell additions to his own toilet in the shape of a 
 new hat and the finest, highest boots that had ever covered 
 his shapely legs. In fact, the careful arraying of the outer 
 man was having a boom in High-Low. 
 
 " What trail you making for? " he asked, and sneered a 
 little when told. 
 
 " If you want to see anything worth riding for, why don't 
 you take the other side of the mountain? " he demanded. 
 " You can go near the top there and see straight west to the 
 glaciers, and across the Columbia to the Gold Range. If 
 you've been tramping the valleys and water-courses, it 
 would be a change." 
 
 "But there is no trail open," objected Collins. 
 
 Redney looked at him superciliously. "Ain't there?" 
 remembering that gentleman's slighting remarks on his 
 own trail-hunting. " Well, may be I can find some Indian 
 jugglers to help us find one." 
 
 " But we'll get no fish," said Ewing. 
 
 " I'll agree to find you a fishing-place if you want to see 
 the glaciers," said Redney, "and I'll put you on a trail 
 that the horses can carry you over, too; a trail made and 
 given the ' go by ' before any of this gang saw daylight. 
 What do you say? " 
 
 "Why, of course," said Ewing, looking undecidedly at 
 Collins. 
 
 "Why, of course, we want to see the glaciers and the Gold
 
 92 bQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Range, and the old trail," broke in Miss Delia, "and if we 
 can go horseback all the way that is an advantage, is it 
 not? We can not, you say, to the cascades." 
 
 And what man among them would cross Miss Delia's 
 wish? especially when seconded in a mild way by Mrs. 
 Nannie, who was influenced by the promise of not having 
 any walking to do. 
 
 And so it happened that instead of following the ways of 
 filouise, the heads of their horses were turned to the right, 
 and leaving the road they followed Redney's lead. It 
 took them straight into the timber that reached from the 
 mountain down to the edge of the Columbia great giants 
 of the wood that shaded no underbrush. At times one of 
 the fallen would bar their way and make them circle its 
 huge trunk, but except for that the slope was much like a 
 great shaded park, cool, and fragrant with spicy wood- 
 scents. Sometimes they would cross the fern-feathered 
 brooks that carry the cool water down to the river, and on 
 the borders of some the ladies insisted on dismounting and 
 seeing with their own eyes the show of " color " caught by 
 the grass-roots, and telling of gold in the hills above, and, 
 altogether, Redney received several words of commenda- 
 tion for leading them away from the thick brush that 
 grows in the wake of forest-fires, and into the great woods 
 where gigantic pillars uphold the green roof. 
 
 And then, where a great green hollow went up into the 
 mountain, their guide left them all but Miss Delia, who 
 insisted on prospecting too, and together they rode up along 
 where the water fell in white and green cascades over many 
 stones, on up where the girl could see never a trace of 
 former travel, until an isolated rock of huge proportions 
 arose like an impassable barrier ahead of them; and Redney 
 gave an exclamation of satisfaction, and fired two shots as 
 signal for the rest to follow.
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 93 
 
 " But how are we to ride over that? " she objected. 
 " Surely this can't be the old trail where you said we ride 
 all the way." 
 
 "We don't go over it; come, I will show you." 
 
 And following him, the hoofs of their horses soon struck 
 a floor made by the rock, and rode into what seemed 
 a great hall that arched overhead and led up a slight incline; 
 at its end a shimmer of green showed. 
 
 " Why, this looks like a tunnel masons would make! " she 
 exclaimed; and he smiled as he told her to ride close to the 
 wall and note the marks of the drills still plain despite 
 places where the lichen had crept on the flint-like surface. 
 
 " May be there were masons here at sometime," he agreed; 
 "they pushed a good road through this pebble, anyway. I 
 heard an old prospector say they must have had a fort up 
 here, for there's a rock ledge near the top on the other side, 
 and this was their main gate to the whole upper mountain." 
 
 "They? Of whom are you speaking? " 
 
 "We don't know that. Just people who ranged through 
 here once. They've left some signs, but no one knows 
 their name rightly." 
 
 "Indians? " 
 
 He nodded. "Ages and ages ago, men say." 
 
 The girl rode between the rock walls to the upper end of 
 the tunnel, and then returned, listening to the clear, bell-like 
 ring of horse-shoes on the rock floor. 
 
 "Why, this is wonderful, really it is! You must tell me 
 more of the signs they have left; and is there never a one 
 left to tell of their race or nation?" 
 
 "Well," he admitted, reluctantly, "there is one squaw in 
 the Northwest who lets on to know, but she's a rank Indian 
 witch, and her word ain't a thing to bet on. And she always 
 swears she come of that old nation herself, but she never 
 mentions its name; it's just the unnamed nation."
 
 94 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " And you knew what an odd old place you were bring- 
 ing us to, but never mentioned a word of aught but the 
 view? " she asked, wonderingly. "The view! I don't know 
 what it is yet, but I am sure your unnamed nation is much 
 more interesting. Tell me some more." 
 
 " There is no more. The Indians say much, but no one is 
 sure; only La Mestina " 
 
 "Who is that?" 
 
 "Just the witch; they call her princess yet, though she's 
 outlawed, and drunk most of the time. She's of the chief 
 line of the Kalispels that turned in with the Colvilles. She 
 says her family goes back through Colville and Kalispel and 
 a dozen nations that have changed and forgotten their 
 names clear on back to the ones who had this mountain. 
 That's what she claims, and no Indian denies it. Scared of 
 her Manitou, I reckon." 
 
 " Manitou? but I thought these tribes had given up the 
 Indian God." 
 
 " So they have, all but some stray pagans that's what 
 the black robes call them, and that's what the old princess 
 is a pagan from away back." 
 
 " And where does she live, this pagan princess? Are we 
 likely to see her? Can't you hunt her up for us?" 
 
 " I can, but I won't," said Mr. Redney, concisely, and then 
 glanced at her darkly. " Do you want her picture to put 
 alongside of mine in your book? " 
 
 " I well, you needn't look so ferocious about it," she 
 stammered. " I'm sure I'll give you back the picture if 
 you are vexed about it. Are you vexed? " 
 
 He only looked at her, and then turned his eyes tran- 
 quilly toward the trail over which the rest of the party 
 were coming. 
 
 "Well, I would not take a dislike to anyone just because 
 they wanted my photograph," she said, poutingly, and then
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 95 
 
 laughed; "and when I go away I will leave you the biggest 
 one I can make of myself in exchange. Will that weaken 
 your warlike attitude toward me? " 
 
 "You laugh at us all up here, just like you will laugh 
 over our pictures when you go down to the States," he said, 
 hotly. "I know them men down there," and he nodded 
 toward High-Low, "are fools. They think it's nice if you 
 even laugh at them. I don't." 
 
 " No need to tell me that," she declared, a little more 
 self-possessed when she saw him lose his cooiness. " Laugh! 
 Why, I'll soon be afraid to even smile in the same province 
 with you, though you can laugh yourself. They tell me 
 you used to, but you won't for us. Why? Don't you like us, 
 Mr. Redney? " 
 
 "My name don't happen to be Mister," he said, briefly, 
 ignoring the rest of her chatter. 
 
 "Well, tell me what it is, then. I've really never heard, 
 except your nickname." 
 
 He hesitated a little, and then answered: "The nick- 
 name is all there is to it. Folks in the diggings are satis- 
 fied if they have that much of a one, and can stick to it." 
 
 "But," persisted the inquisitive young person, "haven't 
 you a an Indian name, anyway? " 
 
 "I haven't even an Indian tribe," he retorted. " I may 
 belong to the people who made this," and he pointed to the 
 rock walls, " or I may get my red blood from the Diggers 
 or the Snakes." 
 
 "Nonsense! " she laughed; "you don't believe that, and 
 you know it. I would sooner believe you of these masons; 
 and it may be so why not? Since there is no other heir to 
 their greatness, I shall take the liberty of thinking you 
 one." 
 
 "But there is one, filouise " Then he stopped. It 
 never had occurred to him until now that if the princess
 
 90 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 was of the unnamed nation so also was the girl who crept 
 like a thief into their old strongholds. 
 
 " louise? Who is that? " 
 
 " Another squaw La Mestina's daughter." 
 
 "Oh! " and the glance that accompanied the word sent a 
 flush over his face. "And is this heiress young, and 
 pretty? " 
 
 "I I don't know. Yes, she is; she's young." 
 
 "But you will not speak of her charms to strangers? 
 Never mind; you are right enough. But I thought she was 
 rather pretty myself." 
 
 He pretended not to hear or understand the gay signifi- 
 cance of her speech. The rest of the party were almost in 
 sight, and their voices drifted up through the whispers of 
 giant spruce. 
 
 "I wonder," she said, after a little, " how often sentinels 
 have stood like this and listened for hostile advances from 
 below? Often and often, I suppose, if this was really a sort 
 of military stronghold. Can't you imagine yourself one of 
 those sentinels? " 
 
 " Not any," he answered, with little sign of sympathy for 
 her fancy. " And then, if old Mestina talks straight and 
 is posted, this never was a fighting fort, but a refuge place, 
 a place where the murderers and that sort skipped for, so she 
 says; a tepee of Manitou, I reckon, and their lances couldn't 
 cross the ledge boundary. All Indian lies, I reckon." 
 
 "Well, I like to think it true, anyway; and, you know, in 
 olden times there were cities of refuge like that in the 
 East; the Bible tells of them. So why should there not 
 have been in this land? I don't care how drunk your prin- 
 cess gets, I want to see her if she tells such interesting 
 stories as that. I am delighted that you brought us here." 
 
 And so were the others, as they rode through the echoing 
 tunnel and reached the land above, where the quivering
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 97 
 
 aspens tossed like boughs of pale-tinted bloom; and then 
 on, up around a great curve where of old the trail had led, 
 where the traces of it yet remained in the deep gully that 
 now looked like the stony bed of a dry creek, and strangely 
 clear of obstructions. But only the stones and slight sift- 
 ings of soil were on that part of the mountain no heavy 
 timber to be blown by the winds and in places one could 
 go for rods with never a hesitation as to where the old 
 trail lay. One could almost fancy the spirit feet of the 
 dead unnamed nation keeping plain the path through their 
 refuge. Sometimes it led them along the top of the ledge that 
 dropped its wall thirty feet below. Sometimes it was nar- 
 rower, but never enough so for a pass. The mountain 
 seemed, a half-mile from its summit, to be girded by the 
 invincible terrace that had kept its form intact through 
 centuries. 
 
 " How in the world does it happen that High-Low 
 knows so little of this? " asked Mrs. Ewing, as they halted 
 to drink at a spring that bubbled up through white peb- 
 bles; " not one of you have I ever heard mention it." 
 
 " I've heard tell of it," acknowledged Mr. Collins, " but 
 I never pinned much faith in it, and didn't allow it was so 
 near here, anyway. But this is the place, I reckon. Big 
 Medicine, the reds call it. Did they tell you? " he asked, 
 turning to the young guide. 
 
 "May be," he returned; and then pointed out what 
 looked like a bit of summer sky dropped on the summit of 
 a lower hill that was close on their north. 
 
 " There is your fishing-grounds," he said. " There's a 
 little pass goes down to it, unless it's choked so they tell 
 me, but I never went over. Whether the rest of the stories 
 are true or not, the Indians never fish in the lake, though 
 they say it's full of them; but some old witch notion 
 makes all tribes leave it for the refugees." 
 7
 
 98 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " Then for to-day we'll be the refugees," said Mr. 
 Ewing, briskly. " Up where those dwarfish trees are will 
 be a good dinner-site, and we'll get our tackle ready." 
 
 Up at the dwarfish trees they were above every wall 
 that shut out the view. Across the river they had left 
 below them arose the Gold Range, with its hills piled 
 upon hills. Beyond, and through the dips or passes, the 
 more distant waves of verdure drifted into the blue-green 
 that was like sea-ripples; and above all, that scheme of 
 emeralds and palest turquois, the glaciers of the Selkirks, 
 gleamed north and south of them, the noonday sun striking 
 them into slivers of white light, and in the distance tingeing 
 them with warmest opal. 
 
 Ewing turned to his chum in irritation. 
 
 " What have you been hiding all this for? " he demanded. 
 " We've been here for months, and I've never heard you 
 mention it." 
 
 " Forgot to, may be." 
 
 " That shows what a heathen red you really are," was 
 the candid retort, flanked by a smile of comradeship. 
 41 Who but an Indian would keep quiet about such a bit of 
 wonder? " 
 
 " Oh, he was guarding the altars of his ancestry," 
 explained Miss Raeforth. 
 
 " And, luckily for us, grew ashamed of his selfishness this 
 morning," added Mrs. Ewing, who was giving a final pat 
 to the bed for the baby; a bed so soft, and so fragrant with 
 spruce-boughs, that he quickly rolled from drowsiness into 
 sleep on it. " But now that we are here, do get some of 
 those sacred fish, and get them quick! " 
 
 Miss Raeforth went with the fishing party as far as the 
 little pass a natural cleft in the great rock, and barely 
 wide enough for one to squeeze through, and one not diffi- 
 cult to close with bowlders against the outside world.
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 99 1 
 
 It was all like enchanted ground to her curious young 
 eyes, lifted by that stone terrace above the commonplace 
 world they had left in High-Low, and the scant history 
 given by their guide was tantalizing. 
 
 She easily found her way back to the camp, where Mr. 
 Collins was already gathering twigs and all sorts of com- 
 bustible matter to fry the fish with, and among the trio was 
 discussed one theory after another regarding the extinct 
 race in whose domain they were prowling, when the girl 
 suddenly remembered the daughter of the princess. 
 
 "Mr. Collins, who is iClouise?" she asked; and Mrs. 
 Ewing gave him one appealing glance and felt herself grow 
 pale. 
 
 " Why, she oh, ^louise? Well, she's just a squaw that 
 sort o' kind o' loafed around High-Low a spell. Just a 
 half-breed squaw." 
 
 " Pretty? " 
 
 "Well," he said, "I hain't ever seen the man yet that 
 said she was. Squaws generally look a heap alike. She's 
 just like the others." 
 
 "I've seen some 'others,' as we passed the Colvilles,. 
 that were not all alike," she persisted. " Some fairer than 
 any of the States Indians; in fact, they were the first ones 
 I've ever seen that suggested Fenimore Cooper." 
 
 " Was he a reservation red? " 
 
 And, in the girl's laughter and the matron's attempt at 
 explanation, the latter breathed more freely, seeing the 
 danger drift by for one more time. 
 
 She could scarcely tell how it had begun that decep- 
 tion of the young girl; but one thing sure, no one imag- 
 ined it would have to be kept up so long. Mr. Raeforth 
 was making but a flying trip, not stopping at the mine 
 forty-eight hours, and at High-Low barely two. He had 
 heard a version of "drinking a little Dunbar gambled
 
 100 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 and had trouble over the stakes; cut some by an Indian, 
 and had a spell of fever; went off his base and took a 
 moonlight flitting; most likely dead in the brush." 
 
 And that was all the principal stockholder in the Little 
 Dell heard. The social lights of High-Low had no notion 
 of letting capital think they had an objectionable hamlet. 
 On as slight a thing as a chance visit has the scale tipped 
 for a camp and a boom of prosperity commenced. High- 
 Low needed the boom needed it bad, decided the city 
 fathers, and should a chance stroke over a game be allowed 
 to dim its future glory? 
 
 Some of the more jealous, eying the clerical black that 
 adorned capital when its duster was removed, suggested the 
 advisability of trying to bribe Miss Lou and Miss Liz, and 
 the various breeds of their various sisters, into a vow of 
 strict retirement while the speculator was seeing the town, 
 that he might be " played " on its moral aspect. 
 
 But, sad to relate, the feminine residents refused to take 
 a hand in the moral game; the gentlemen had to play it 
 alone, and with doubtful success. Mr. Raeforth showed 
 very little interest in the probable future of the settlement. 
 He had to get back to reach the Pacific Coast in as short a 
 space of time as possible to meet other speculators with 
 whom he was to make a Mexican tour of inspection, and 
 did not seem greatly vexed that Miss Delia, at the last 
 moment, decided to remain north. He did halt long 
 enough to offer a reward for the recovery of Dunbar, who 
 had been the adopted son of his sister, and who, leaving 
 him penniless at her death, had begged her brother to 
 encourage the childish liking betwen Delia and the boy, 
 and had only died contented when promised that if Delia 
 objected an allowance should be set aside from her inher- 
 itance that would allow the young fellow to continue life 
 among the comparatively well-to-do. " That is, if he is not
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 101 
 
 lazy," stipulated the Jove of the occasion; and the young 
 fellow proved so far from that, that he grasped eagerly at 
 the offer of Western experience and work. And Mr. Rae- 
 forth, seeing that the liking of the young folks was lessen- 
 ing all possibility of the allowance, let the responsibility of 
 the lad's future fall off his shoulders. 
 
 Three years had passed since they had seen him at all, 
 three years that had changed the hoydenish little girl of 
 short skirts and adoring eyes into a less demonstrative 
 little girl in longer skirts and an ingrained appreciation of 
 the romantic in her mind; and all her romances for many 
 years had held but one hero the handsome fellow who 
 had lifted her off her feet to say good-by just as he had 
 done when she was very little, and who said as he kissed 
 her that he would not dare come in reach of her again for 
 four years, else he would certainly elope with her instead 
 of waiting for the socially correct wedding; and that would 
 never do, for Delia was tabooed from marriage until she 
 was nineteen, the only restriction laid on her by her father's 
 will in conjunction with the very neat little property that 
 Uncle Raeforth had cleverly doubled and doubled again 
 many times, until Delia was probably heiress to more than 
 she knew of. 
 
 But if she cared for its advantages, it was more for the 
 future than the present, more for the time when her hand- 
 some, winning fiance should share it with her, should come 
 back from the wilds with the charm of adventure add- 
 ing to his glory in her eyes; then, indeed, wealth would be 
 good to have. Wealth can buy success, social or political, 
 when accompanied by the merits Delia felt sure that Neil 
 possessed; and so Miss Delia dreamed worldly dreams 
 that were in odd contrast to the unworldly romances she 
 gave him part in; and his strange disappearance had in 
 itself an element of the romantic that was not unpleasing,
 
 102 SQUAW & LOUISE. 
 
 if only he returned. It was not improbable that she her. 
 self was mentally posing a little because of the sad finale 
 of her quest; and to end it according to all correct rules of 
 her fancy, he must return after all, and her faith be 
 rewarded by a meeting much more interesting than any 
 heretofore chronicled by novelist. 
 
 And so this very petite, very practical romancer gathered 
 plans to herself through her days of outing, and, despite 
 the shakings of several heads, persisted in watching for him, 
 and opened many times a locket she wore and looked at 
 the gay face pictured there a face with laughing eyes and 
 curled lips, and never even a mustache to shadow the correct 
 features. 
 
 "Of course he has changed in three years; so have I a 
 little," she told Mrs. Ewing, who admired the face to Miss 
 Delia's satisfaction. " He wrote me last year he was wear- 
 ing ' mustachios,' but I know no such adornment will change 
 his face much not enough to be mistaken for any other. 
 I should know him if I could see only his eyes peeping 
 through a chink in our cabin; and that's how he will come 
 back, Mrs. Nannie for he will come. And think of his sur- 
 prise when he finds me waiting for him! " 
 
 And Mrs. Nannie said little, but sympathized much with 
 the little stranger, and wished with all her might that the 
 handsome face had never bent above that gambling-table, 
 and had really possessed the godlike attributes Delia 
 believed it did. 
 
 " But if the poor fellow is dead, she might as well be let 
 keep her pleasant thoughts of him," decided her chaperone, 
 and did much maneuvering that truths unpleasant might 
 not mar them. 
 
 Some of the gentlemen of High-Low swore stealthily 
 when they learned from her own candid lips that the man 
 she called cousin was to be her husband some day.
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 103 
 
 "What in time a man leaves luck like that behind him 
 for, / can't see," was the unanimous verdict; " and we'd be 
 doing her a service if we did find him dead and prove it to 
 her. The chump that picks up squaws and leaves a little 
 girl like that to worry don't deserve to be let live, anyway." 
 
 Redney was the one of all the rest who said never a 
 word, and did not seem to think the possession of the young 
 lady for all her dollars was a thing worth fighting for; 
 and it was with a distinct frown on his face that he watched 
 her sauntering away from the others after the sacred fish 
 dinner, to which they all gave wondrous praise. 
 
 "Oh, do come and sit down," called Mrs. Ewing. "You 
 are not really enjoying the delights of this place at all. 
 One must rest and gaze to do that." 
 
 " You are resting enough for two, and I am going on a 
 /0/z^tourof adventure in the meanwhile!" answered the 
 girl; and Mr. Collins, who had arisen from his lounging-place, 
 resumed it at sound of the accented word. 
 
 " I am too comfortable here to risk being made uncom- 
 fortable by Miss Raeforth ordering me back," declared 
 Mr. Ewing; " and if our guide will only be accommodating 
 and tell us some more of this mountain and the fish pre- 
 serve over there, I'll ask no more of the day." 
 
 But their guide had few words for them. His eyes were 
 busier than his tongue, and they were directed to the lone 
 adventuress until she vanished from sight. 
 
 " Is there any danger in her rambling away like that? " 
 asked Mrs. Ewing, suddenly, as she chanced to note Redney 's 
 gaze. 
 
 " Not likely; too high for snakes, and nothing grazes here 
 unless it's mountain sheep." 
 
 But the girl saw neither; not anything living crossed her 
 way, though now and then bird-songs would come up on. 
 the air, and far out an eagle drifted and drifted around
 
 104 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 some unseen eyrie. Its still grace fascinated her, its strength 
 and poise had so serene a beauty. Suddenly across her 
 appreciation a sickening revulsion came the remembrance 
 of having once in the South watched just such a stately 
 circling thing a thing that a moment later had swooped 
 downward to carrion; it brought back to her the thought 
 that the things of air and the beasts of the forest might be 
 even now circling the remains of that handsome face whose 
 picture she wore. 
 
 " Oh, it is horrible horrible! Neil, why don't you come 
 back? " she whispered " whether dead or alive, why don't 
 you come back? " 
 
 She was standing on the great terrace; in watching the 
 eagle she had moved nearer its edge than she knew, and 
 leaning over to look at the great ropes of vine that draped 
 it she barely restrained herself from screaming. It was 
 such an uncouth-looking creature who lay below there, just 
 as she had seen drunken Indians sleeping with the hot sun 
 in their faces. 
 
 But this one, though evidently drunk, was not an Indian. 
 The shaggy beard that covered the most of his red face was 
 brown, and his eyes, as he opened them, were bloodshot. 
 
 She was not aware of uttering a sound, but must have, for 
 his gaze turned directly to her, a strange, frightened look in 
 his eyes. And then she saw him stagger to his feet and 
 toward her, reaching clutchingly upward in a way that 
 filled her with terror. 
 
 She backed away, too frightened to call or to turn her 
 eyes from those horribly eager ones; but when the cliff hid 
 him from view she turned and fled. 
 
 Hearing no footsteps, she halted when in sight of the rest 
 of the party. She had no idea of letting them see she was 
 frightened if she could help it, and rested to gather scattered 
 thoughts and lost breath.
 
 IN THE FORT OF THE UNNAMED NATION. 105 
 
 Should she tell them that their camp of solitude was 
 shared in part by some drunken vagabond, or and this 
 suited much better her little likings for mystery should 
 she keep quiet, if the vagabond did, and astonish them with 
 her adventure when they reached High-Low? 
 
 She rather liked that last idea, and, glancing back, she 
 saw never a sign of a follower, and decided she would say 
 nothing, and then, happening to look directly ahead of her, 
 saw Redney standing perfectly still looking at her. He 
 had surely seen her running, and was evidently waiting for 
 her to speak. Her resolution vanished. 
 
 "Did did you see him? " she asked. 
 
 He shook his head, with a little look of relief on his face. 
 Him? Then it was not filouise. 
 
 " A man? Did he say anything, or scare you? " 
 
 " Well," she acknowledged, " I was a little nervous at 
 sight of him ; he was an unexpected event, you know, sprawled 
 down there in the sun. No, he did not speak, but I thought 
 he was coming up after me, so I ran." 
 
 " What does he look like stranger?" and he took a step 
 or so in the direction she had pointed. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know. Just a very tall man, with brown 
 hair and beard all over his face." 
 
 "Young?" 
 
 " Had not time to determine even that," she smiled. " I 
 left too soon. I think he was drunk, for his eyes were so 
 red-looking; and I know he was bareheaded and had a sort 
 of wide Indian scarf around his shoulders." 
 
 "Oh!" and he turned his face slightly away from her, 
 and seemed debating as to who the man on the mountain 
 could be. But the mention of that wide scarf had started 
 conjectures that for a moment made him forget the girl 
 beside him. 
 
 "Then you don't know the man?" he asked at last.
 
 106 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "I do not," she answered, promptly, "and I don't want 
 to. I don't admire that bloated, red-eyed style of beauty. 
 I've been watching to see him appear above that ledge." 
 
 " Well, what do you want me to do? " 
 
 " Do? Why, nothing. If he does not climb up to 
 bother us, we can afford to leave him alone, can't we ? and 
 then it would disturb Mrs. Ewing if he should prove 
 an unpleasant addition to our picnic. I had intended to 
 say nothing of him until we got away from here; but I 
 scarcely believe that he could scale that wall, it seemed 
 rather high there." 
 
 "At what point?" 
 
 She pointed, and he walked in that direction. Once he 
 looked back and noted that she was looking unconcern- 
 edly across to the Gold Range. The identity of the unknown 
 man troubled her but little. No such swift suspicion hacJ 
 come to her as to him. 
 
 He reached the edge of the terrace and leaned over. No 
 sign there of the man with the scarf. He arose and looked 
 toward the foot of the mountain; plainly there was the 
 slight dip where the stream of the tumwata crept down- 
 ward. He was far above the falls, and it was somewhere 
 near that stream that she must have her hiding-place the 
 place he had tried to lead those strangers away from. Had 
 she really come farther up the height than he supposed? 
 Could it be from the lake of the old nation that she 
 brought those fish, she a girl and alone, when even the 
 more venturesome of the tribes cared little to go alone 
 above the terrace? And that man! 
 
 " A very tall man, with brown hair and beard all over his 
 face," he mused; "and bareheaded, too. Wonder if she's 
 forgotten the man she was looking for? " 
 
 But Miss Delia was looking for a very different order of 
 man for a gay smile and a covert caress of glance; for a
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. 107 
 
 lordly, handsome individual with a mustache; and nothing 
 in the vagabond under the terrace suggested kinship with 
 her ideal. 
 
 " If it is" he debated, as he laid himself prone to look over 
 the cliff " if it is, then lillouise lied like a claim-jumper." 
 
 But nothing human could he see to prove his suspicion. 
 There was the little spring that glided out from under the 
 overhanging rock, and his keen glance noted the woven 
 grass at the edge of it, and a cluster of leaves stripped 
 from a bush near that lay wilting on the warm stones. But 
 the man who had staggered under the hanging rock he did 
 not see, and could not without clambering down, and he 
 did not care enough for that. He had seen enough. Yes, 
 the home of filouise must be there. And the man? 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. 
 
 A DAY later Redney was again at the cascade. His idea 
 that the brain of ISlouise was touched, and that he must 
 not interfere or cross-question her, had vanished. 
 
 "Then it ain't a dead man you have hid here?" he 
 demanded; and she said: 
 
 " I never told he was dead, but I feared much he would 
 be. No, I think he is to live now; and may be, after all, it 
 will be well." 
 
 But her words were not very sure, and her eyes avoided 
 Redney's. She felt a new element in his manner to her, 
 one of disapproval, and she knew not of what.
 
 108 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "May be it will not be long I trouble you," she said at 
 last. " Some day, when there is money enough, we will go, 
 so he says, away far." 
 
 " And I thought you was spunky," he sneered, con- 
 temptuously. " You! and here you are packing traps like 
 a mule for that fellow. Where's your church religion? 
 Don't it tell you better than to live like that? I've a 
 mighty big notion to call for that reward and give him up." 
 
 He scarcely knew how she got to her feet so quickly, but 
 she was there, and close above him. 
 
 "No, you will never tell," she said, grimly "never; if 
 you did it would kill me, but you would die first." 
 
 He looked at her a moment. He could understand her 
 better than he could have done a month before; at the same 
 time, he was impatient with the feelings he comprehended. 
 
 "Don't talk like that, Louise," he said, a little sadly. 
 That night in the cabin he had felt like her guardian, and 
 rather joyed in the fact, and she had swept all that away 
 in one erratic feminine impulse. "Ill help you, just the 
 same. I'll be your friend, but I'm all broke Up myself." 
 
 "So he says," and she nodded understandingly. "His 
 head is queer. He sees things things that are not. But 
 that does not matter; you must never tell never." 
 
 "Loony, is he?" he asked. "Well, that changes things 
 some makes it some harder on you, too; but I'll keep 
 quiet and see that no one tracks you. It was me led them 
 around the other trail yesterday." 
 
 "You? I saw only strangers the man you like, and his 
 woman, and then two other men." 
 
 " Oh, I was on ahead about that time, I reckon, but I 
 was there; and I found your fishing-place, too," he added. 
 " Say, what made you break for that point? " and he pointed 
 upward; "it's out of the world." 
 
 "It is best; it was long ago the place for the hunted; 
 why not now? "
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. 109 
 
 " Only that ' now ' there's no religion to keep people from 
 following anything they trail, even if it goes to the tip- 
 top; and don't Mestina say there used to be?" 
 
 " Yes. So did Henri once. Some ' old medicine ' told 
 him things like that. But their ' church ' (religion) died; 
 only the mountain is left." 
 
 " Yes, and so will you be as soon as that fellow is able to 
 take the trail alone," he said, darkly; but she did not under- 
 stand. She had his word that he would keep her secret. 
 She liked him and believed in him more than in most men; 
 but just then the opinion of the outer world or its peo- 
 ple mattered not all to her. Under the terrace of that 
 ancient refuge was the one atom of earth that dwarfed all 
 the rest in her thoughts. To be sure, she was not possessed 
 of great brain-power, and, to be sure, her views of most 
 things were very narrow ones; for, after all, she was only a 
 little Indian self-ostracized from her gods, fearful of 
 the hell of the Christians, yet stubbornly facing the pros- 
 pect of it for the sake of her human god, and, withal, 
 scarce realizing the meaning of the sentiment that had 
 made her in turn fierce and devoted, proud, and then slave- 
 like. 
 
 Did Redney guess? He showed less impatience toward 
 her decisions, but his eyes followed her sadly as she left 
 him. He had not, in his later visits, spoken of that 
 early plan of his that ISlouise should join him in an 
 exodus from High-Low. In fact, High-Low as a social 
 center was having more of a boom, in his estimation, than 
 it had hitherto enjoyed. The ice had been broken by Miss 
 Delia. He was enrolled as one of her attendant spirits; 
 his suggestions were in all things adopted by her, as the 
 location of their picnic had proven. She had further 
 agreed that they have a secret between them the knowl- 
 edge that the sacred hill had a disreputable-looking tenant
 
 110 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "Only a miner sleeping off a drunk," suggested Redney, 
 glibly, though suspecting strongly that he was telling a lie. 
 " No harm in him, I reckon, but Milt's wife might be some 
 backward about making picnics if she knew we run against 
 such cattle." 
 
 " Then we won't tell her," said Miss Delia, promptly. 
 " I did tell her about seeing your pretty Indian that night, 
 and I wonder why you did not." 
 
 " Had something else to think of," he said, brusquely. 
 
 " Nothing prettier, I'm sure," she retorted, with challeng- 
 ing eyes; "and I should like to know why you don't bring 
 her to see us sometime. Don't you ever intend to?" 
 
 He had avoided answering somehow, but her words 
 started him to thinking that, after all, there was no reason 
 why llouise should keep herself in hiding any longer. If 
 the man were really alive, no question of murder could come 
 up against her, and Redney gave a big sigh of relief at the 
 thought, though not caring the price of a fox-scalp whether 
 Dunbar was living or dead. And since no one had as yet 
 connected her in the slightest way with his disappearance, 
 why should she go to so much trouble to keep out of 
 sight? 
 
 He whistled after her to call her back and speak of that, 
 but she did not answer, and he would not follow her. He 
 knew it would only irritate her, and then he might run 
 against the man she called "master" and be irritated 
 himself. 
 
 And the man was waiting for her with so warm a wel- 
 come in his eyes that her face flushed with gladness at his 
 glance, and, though breathless from her haste, she com- 
 menced at once the preparation of breakfast. She had been 
 up at dawn, and the sun was an hour high, yet she had 
 eaten nothing until he could share it. 
 
 " I have waited hours to hear your step out there," he
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. Ill 
 
 complained; and she smiled that the time of her absence 
 had seemed long. 
 
 "I had the fish to get," she explained; "they are over a 
 mile from here, and they had to be taken to the foot of the 
 mountain." 
 
 " To your friend? " 
 
 " Yes, he sells them; the people think he catches them. 
 He is very good." 
 
 "Church man?" 
 
 She shook her head. " He never says," she admitted, 
 reluctantly, " and he wears no church charm." 
 
 " Oh, well, they don't count for so much, do they? " he 
 asked, carelessly; and she looked at him in a sort of wonder. 
 
 " But you wear one? " 
 
 "I? No;" and then he raised a hand to his breast and 
 understood. " Oh, that is not a church charm, my child, 
 only the picture of a little girl." 
 
 " I saw it," she persisted. " Are you ashamed of your 
 church? Yesterday, when I found you, the lock of it was 
 open, and it is like a face in the church that is like the 
 mother of Christ." 
 
 "What an imagination you have! " he smiled. "Here, 
 look closer; the mother of Christ does not tie back her curls 
 with blue ribbons, and, surely, never looks at you with such 
 roguish eyes." 
 
 She leaned forward, gazing at it with breathless interest. 
 
 "So white," she said at last; "so fine. Does she live, 
 the one who is like that? " 
 
 He drew a quick sigh, passing his hand over his eyes 
 perplexedly. 
 
 " I don't know, filouise. Something is wrong with this 
 brain of mine, or else spirits haunt our mountain, for I 
 thought she came here yesterday a face like hers, yet not 
 the same," and he searched the pictured face closely.
 
 112 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " And if she is still alive, then it must be my head that is 
 wrong, for no living woman but you climbs to this cave.'' 
 
 " None but me. And if she has died?" 
 
 He looked at her moodily, as she knelt by the little fire. 
 Her question suggested the future " if she has died? " 
 
 "It would not make much difference to my life now," he 
 said at last. " If she has not, I have to all the people who 
 ever knew me. I could not go back to them, to her, with 
 an actual murder on my hands. I have died, filouise; I, 
 the man men knew, and the thing you resurrected, is known 
 nowhere. Do you understand? I have not even a name 
 to use. You must find me one. You find everything else 
 I need up here; you must find a name. What is your 
 Indian one? And we must find a trail, and " 
 
 "Hush! " she said, softly, noting that his eyes were losing 
 their steadiness. " Talk no more now. It is best for you 
 to rest much to-day; the sun is to be hot. Yesterday it was 
 so, and burned in your brain. To-day I shall watch; but it 
 reaches even through stone walls if people are sick." 
 
 He smiled assent, and dropped back on the couch of 
 leaves with closed eyes. The most pleasant thing in the 
 whole dreary stay there was the watchful devotion of the 
 girl, and her little ways of command when his welfare was 
 concerned. 
 
 She brought his coffee, his gruel made of oats, and the 
 whitefish crisped on the coals, and then spoke lowly lest 
 his sleep should be disturbed too roughly. 
 
 " You remind me of oriental stories I used to read," he 
 said, looking up at her; " and I never can realize that you 
 are a northern Indian. Where did you learn to take care 
 of sick folks? " 
 
 " I never learned; Indians don't have to learn." 
 
 t( I believe you," he said, and watched her curiously as 
 he drank the coffee and the gruel.
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. 113 
 
 She sat over against the wall, her eyes half-averted, as 
 was usual with her in his presence. He would much 
 rather have seen those dark orbs turned toward him when 
 he spoke; the fact that they sought the floor instead of his 
 face often acted like a barrier to freedom of speech that 
 would have been a boon sometimes. She was devoted in 
 her care for him, but no squaw he had ever seen had 
 impressed him so with the idea that her humility had a 
 certain quality of pride in it; but the only actual outbreak 
 of it had been shown when she left him so abruptly the day 
 before. He felt guilty at times at the remembrance of her 
 words, yet had attempted nothing in his own defense. Her 
 care of him was doubly puzzling as he remembered her angry 
 eyes; but his head was not yet steady enough to reason out 
 such subtleties. He preferred watching her, without any 
 thought whatever in his mind beyond the sense of pleasure 
 in the pictures she made odd, semi-oriental ones they 
 seemed to him, until the fancy would envelop her in 
 meshes of mystery, and imperceptibly strengthened her 
 attraction for him. 
 
 " Since you object to me talking to you, you must talk 
 to me," he decided. " Tell me of yourself not of now, 
 but of long ago; where you lived, who you are, and all 
 won't you? " 
 
 " I lived in the woods; I am Iillouise; that is all," she 
 replied; and he laughed at the briefness of the history. 
 
 " Now listen," he said, looking at her with an affection- 
 ate air of authority. " You are angry with me, and that is 
 natural. But do you intend to remain a stranger to me 
 forever just because I was drunk and silly that one night? 
 Life is too short for hate, filouise." . . 
 
 " Hate! I do not," she began, but he raised his hand. 
 
 "Yet you will not forgive," he said, reproachfully. 
 " Listen. I swear I had no wish to part with you. No; I
 
 114 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 was glad when my luck won you. Will you not believe? It 
 was the drink made me crazy. I scarcely know how it was 
 I put you up in the cursed game. I know I meant to bet 
 this, as it was all the gold I had left," and he pointed to 
 the locket with the angelic face in it. " How it came that 
 I did not I can't tell. Think of it! I meant to trade off 
 the picture of my little cousin, who had been the dearest 
 thing in the world to me. I was crazy, else I never would 
 have done that. Won't you understand? It is not me you 
 should hate. I wanted you. I " 
 
 " I do not hate," she repeated, lowly, and finding it so 
 hard to speak steadily under the feelings of her injury to 
 him, of which he knew nothing to hear him say he 
 wanted her; to ask her forgiveness, when she felt so 
 guilty guilty! 
 
 Did he guess that she did not hate? He looked at her 
 and smiled when she spoke. He would need to be several 
 steps nearer the grave than he was to be untouched by the 
 conscious flush of her young face as she answered him. He 
 gave a little contented sigh, and lay back with closed eyes. 
 
 "You've made me talk myself into a fever to convince 
 you," he complained; "but you have not yet said ' forgive.' 
 You can be very hard-hearted." 
 
 She seemed to hear only the first part of his speech, for 
 she arose and brought him an infusion of aromatic herbs, 
 at which he laughed again. 
 
 "You are always the doctor, never the girl," he said. 
 " No, I will not drink the tea. Sit and talk to me; that 
 will be medicine enough." 
 
 "There is nothing to say," she repeated, quietly. "In 
 the Indian lodges, people never learn to say many things, 
 or talk much about little. It is only the white women who 
 do that, and who laugh laugh like the girl in your 
 charm the girl you say cousin; that is like sister? "
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. US' 
 
 " Like? yes, some like," and he smiled at her. " But 
 I'll tell you, and then we'll never talk of it any more. We 
 changed pictures traded, you know; and that is some- 
 times a love sign with us, you understand. Well, I came 
 west until my little girl would grow up; then I was to go 
 back. We were to be married, and live in luck the rest of 
 our lives. That's all over now, you see. I'll never go 
 back now. Neil Dunbar can't, you know; he's dead. I 
 don't know just who this is that's telling you Neil's story. 
 You must find a name for him, and we'll both try and for- 
 get there ever was such a man; and if the authorities don't 
 catch me, or if some of Clevents' friends don't get on my 
 track, we'll find something better than these rock walls to 
 live in, and we'll forget them, too." 
 
 " I don't want to forget. This has been a good home to 
 me," she answered. " This, the old, old place where the 
 outlaws hid. May be the outlaws loved it, too, for its 
 shelter; and I I will never forget." 
 
 "The outlaws? Tell me of them. I want a story of 
 some sort, since you will tell me none of yourself; and to 
 suit the pictures you make, you ought to be able to tell all 
 sorts of dreamy, mysterious stories of the East." 
 
 She did not understand. The East was to her a place 
 where the tenderfeet grew, and where the white men's 
 mothers and fathers were. But though she knew nothing 
 of that older East, she told the legend of the northern- 
 mountain, that had quite as much of the picturesque about 
 it, and was quite as visionary. 
 
 " Only the old people tell of it now," she said. " It is all 
 of so long ago, like the shadow of things that have been; 
 and with every old one that dies, a little more is forgotten. 
 Soon all will be dead, and strangers who hunt gold will 
 wonder at the great gate cut in the mountain; no one will 
 be left to say why it was cut there."
 
 116 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " For that you need a historian no, a poet," he said, 
 and then looked at her approvingly. " You have seemed 
 almost one as you talk there. Who taught you to speak 
 so beautifully? " 
 
 " Me? You are laughing at me." 
 
 " Indeed I am not. You seem like one of those guardian 
 spirits of the mountain come to life to tell of their past, 
 and to copy them, too, by saving another outlaw. Are you 
 sure, now, you do not belong to that old race? " 
 
 " I am not sure," she answered, quietly. " You will laugh 
 more, may be, when you hear, but even the oldest people 
 say that Mestina was of the old king nation. It has always 
 been said she was the last; and now " 
 
 " And now you are. So that is how the title of princess 
 was given to her ladyship. Well, don't pretend you can't 
 tell stories. You have chased away troublesome memories 
 from my brain, and given me something soothingly roman- 
 tic to think of, though I shall stand in awe of your impor- 
 tance now, and will scarcely dare let you wait on me you, 
 a princess of the unnamed nation! " 
 
 " No," she objected; " the name means nothing now, not 
 so much as elite, for I will work while you need me, and 
 am content to be slave." 
 
 " To be mine? " 
 
 " To serve my master," she said, simply, and he smiled at 
 her absolute refusal to be won to a more familiar attitude 
 or speech. 
 
 Clearly, she was Indian in nature though ready to 
 serve, she could not quite forgive. But her devotion 
 bridged over any estrangement; and after that day when 
 he had told her of a one-time sweetheart that he had given 
 up, as he had all other worldly things except herself 
 JClouise and after she had broken her reserve, and told 
 him of her youthful friend Henri, and then of the forgotten
 
 THE PICTURE IN THE LOCKET. 117 
 
 race whose descendant people said she was well, it all 
 served to narrow the distance between them; and although 
 she never voluntarily touched his hand, and although the 
 dread was always with her that some chance would reveal 
 that he was free to walk away if he chose, yet she held 
 close in her guilty heart the joy of barring out the world 
 from him for a little while longer; that it would be forever 
 she dared not hope. In his strength he might learn the 
 truth, and might turn from her, but he was yet, in his weak- 
 ness, dependent only on her; and she owed him so great a 
 debt. 
 
 Paying it, she worked through the early dawns and odor- 
 ous dusks, doing the work she had seen the trappers do 
 with wolves killed by poisons, curing the pelts for trans- 
 portation when the number had reached the amount 
 needed. From fish and small snared game she could get 
 what was needed for mere living; but to leave and take a 
 long trail money would be needed and if he kept the wish 
 to go to that south-land where the snow never fell? and if 
 he kept the wish that she should go too? Well, she did not 
 dare hope too much, but, nevertheless, set the traps and 
 gathered the harvest that came from them, and but for her 
 hurt to him and her lie to him, would have been utterly 
 happy. 
 
 And her face shone fitfully joyous at times, in spite of the 
 weight of her Manitou's symbol that had driven out her 
 Christianity. When one is young it is not easy to close 
 one's eyes to the blue sky or the star-shine, no matter how 
 dark the clouds are that crouch along the horizon.
 
 118 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 HIGH-LOW REFORMED. 
 
 WHEN the rather distinguished face of Mr. Clevents 
 again responded to the smile of High-Low, it confronted 
 several unlooked-for changes. A month had not elapsed 
 since the night he had pocketed all the winnings, yet dur- 
 ing it two ladies were reputed to have taken up lodgings 
 within the gates of the city to be. Mr. Clevents said 
 "Ah?" when informed of the addition by Antoine, and 
 then added, " I thought you had as many as this hell-hole 
 could support when I was here last time. Did my Indian 
 ever show up again? " 
 
 And then, with scant notice of, and scanter belief in, An- 
 toine's asseverations that these ladies were " most surely 
 another sort," Mr. Clevents continued his inquiries con- 
 cerning the unsolved problem of Dunbar's disappearance. 
 And others than Antoine answered; all the residents gath- 
 ered in for the mail greeted the new-comer, and while 
 they talked he eyed them with flattering attention, noting 
 a certain " dressy " atmosphere about them that had not 
 belonged there when he saw them last. 
 
 Clean shirts were noticeable; best boots were prominent, 
 showing by their unscarred surface that they had not been 
 degraded to work in the diggings that day. Neckties 
 flaunted in the June air, and innovations that a month ago 
 would have docked their wearers for the drinks were, to Mr. 
 Clevents' wonder, noticed by no one but himself; and a 
 couple entering the general store and saloon cast lingering 
 glances down the road ere calling for their liquor.
 
 HIGH-LOW REFORMED. 
 
 "Is this prayer-meeting night?" he asked, mildly curious, 
 and was looked at threateningly by one or two in conse- 
 quence. But as Antoine was busy sorting the mail, and as 
 Collins was distributing drinks, no one had time to answer. 
 He saw Redney spelling over an old newspaper at the post- 
 office corner of the counter, and sauntered over to him. 
 He had rather liked the young fellow since that memorable 
 night, in spite of the idea he had that Redney did not like 
 him, not well enough to let him have that ticket, anyway. 
 
 "Good-evening," he said, civilly; "I was just going to 
 ask for you. I had an idea that you might be able to tell 
 me something about my Indian girl and her mother. They 
 seem to have dropped off the face of the earth au com- 
 pletely as Dunbar." 
 
 " About," agreed Redney. " But I don't happen to have 
 anything to tell you." 
 
 "Ah! Well, I've an interest in the matter, you know, 
 since he was hurt over a game with me a good fellow, too. 
 I've a notion of starting on the hunt myself, but reckon it's 
 too late." 
 
 No answer from Redney, who seemingly had no interest 
 in the subject, and whose gaze wandered again to the paper. 
 
 " By the way," added the stranger, suddenly, "you are a 
 subject for congratulation to-day, ain't you? I heard you- 
 had just been offered the place of boss of the portage and 
 mail gang. That will bring more of an assured salary 
 than digging on your own hook, won't it? Allow me to 
 furnish the drinks for the occasion." 
 
 " Not for me, thank you. I don't drink." 
 
 " With me y you mean? " 
 
 " I don't know that I'd drink with you quicker than with 
 another man, even if I did drink," answered the young fel- 
 low, coolly; "but I don't like the stuff, and don't drink it 
 with anyone."
 
 120 SQUAW ELOUISE. 
 
 Mr. Clevents' eyes traveled over the boyish form and 
 face speculatively, and then laughed a something suffi- 
 ciently rare to be surprising in him, and changed the cool, 
 tired-looking face into one much more pleasing. 
 
 "I don't know but what I like that speech of yours 
 almost as much as I did your refusal to let me have 
 that ticket, young fellow," he said, frankly, "and I like 
 your pluck as well as both; taking them all together, they 
 map you out square. Will you shake? " 
 
 So taken back was Redney by the words that, in stupid 
 surprise, he did meet the other man's hand with his, though 
 not saying a word. 
 
 "I saw some of the ideas you had," went on Mr. Clev- 
 ents," especially about the girl; but you were wrong. I've 
 a daughter of my own near that girl's age; something of a 
 likeness seemed to strike me as I got a square look at this 
 one's face that night. My little girl is half Spanish, and if 
 I'd won the young squaw, she would have been posted 
 right down to Santa Barbara, and had a home where my 
 own girl has one. That looked to me a better deal for her 
 than to belong to any man I saw in this shebang. There! 
 I don't often trouble myself to explain things, but I 
 didn't like the thoughts you had." 
 
 " How did you know I had them? " 
 
 "Not from your conversation, anyway," acknowledged 
 the older man. " But I was rather glad when I heard you 
 had been picked for the canoe-line; it's a responsible thing 
 to be offered a boy, but I suppose the fact that you let 
 whisky alone is one reason you're elected." 
 
 "Well, they did say something of that sort," he an- 
 swered, with a conscious flush at the self-praise in the 
 admission. " But I've an idea my partner, Ewing, spoke 
 to Raeforth for me. Ewing is in Dunbar's place now." 
 
 "Raeforth? Oh, yes. He's been here since I've been
 
 HIGH-LOW REFORMED. 121 
 
 gone. Well, has stock in the Little Hell had a boom in 
 consequence? " 
 
 Not getting an answer, he looked up to meet the threat- 
 ening glance of Redney and the glowering eyes of some of 
 the other gentry, while close to his elbow a girlish contralto 
 said: 
 
 " I beg your pardon, but will you please move a little?" 
 
 And suddenly straightening from the position that had 
 barred all access to the " post-office," he faced about and 
 met a vision to which he lifted his hat with rather more 
 grace than any of the hatless inhabitants of the room; 
 for as he stepped back he came in range of all masculine 
 eligible High-Low with a smirk on its face and its whisky 
 forgotten. 
 
 The vision was not alone. There were two of them; 
 one at the door, with a white mite of babyhood in her arms, 
 and an expression of disapproval and consternation on her 
 face, and Redney, seeing it, walked straight to her. 
 
 " I had no idea she meant to go in there alone" she 
 gasped; "but she was gone before I could stop her. What 
 would her uncle say?" 
 
 " You both went in the other day with Milt," said Red- 
 ney, crossly. 
 
 " Oh, but that was different. He told them beforehand, 
 and they were looking for us and all," explained Mrs. 
 Ewing, bravely; "but to-day " 
 
 Clevents was near enough to hear the words, and to bow 
 again, as the owner of the contralto passed out with her 
 letters, after nodding graciously to several of the smirking 
 ones; and as the last flutter of skirts disappeared, as if 
 wafted away on the long breath of the man who had glared at 
 him, Mr. Clevents understood that the event of the day had 
 just occurred, and also understood the change in dress and 
 deportment that had puzzled him before.
 
 122 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 But part of the polite cloak was dropped as Redney 
 re-entered and glanced at the gambler. 
 
 " I just came back to mention something before I forget 
 it," he said, darkly, "and this is what it is: There's ladies 
 in this here settlement now, and Raeforth's mine is named 
 after one of them, and her name ain't Little Hell, either! 
 So, not wanting to give offense, but it's been decided that 
 nicknames for that mine don't go down with this camp any 
 longer." 
 
 "That's the talk!" "Them's my sentiments, gentle- 
 men! " " D d if Redney can't find the right words, and 
 
 we're back of him! " were several of the expressions that 
 astonished the stranger, who looked from one to the other 
 with his slight, cool smile. 
 
 " So? Well, a change seems to have fallen over the spirit 
 of yoor dreams since I struck the town last, and a man might 
 be excusable, I think, for using the name by which the 
 mine was known not a month ago; and I've heard half of 
 you using it yourselves." . 
 
 None of the party denied that; even Redney nodded 
 assent in the cause of truth. 
 
 " But we've reformed," explained Collins, " and whoever 
 locates here has to reform with us, unless he's a godly 
 product when he strikes camp. It's all out o' respect for 
 the ladies, you know." 
 
 " And I'm with you, so you can't pick a quarrel on that 
 question," said Clevents to Redney; "only it's apt to knock 
 anyone dizzy when a reform like that strikes one unpre- 
 pared. Drink? " 
 
 And over the glasses he heard the story of High-Low's 
 reformation, all because of two pretty young women and a 
 baby. He also heard of the attempts made to obliterate, 
 or rather veil, the older feminine occupancy, and the failure 
 thereof. Just one concession had been secured from
 
 HIGH-LOW REFORMED. 
 
 them, and that was no loafing at Antoine's, no drinks 
 handed out to women over the bar; for, after the visit of 
 the new divinities on a mail-day, some rule had to be laid 
 down by these modern knights, even if they had to boycott 
 Antoine to get his vote. But from the numberless flasks 
 that were carried as bribes down the road, it is safe to say 
 that Antoine's purse suffered little from the change. 
 
 So with explanations and polite assurances came har- 
 mony, and the new-comer absorbed considerable of it in 
 quiet appreciation of High-Low's reformation, a reform, 
 however, that affected neither liquid consolation nor games 
 of chance. 
 
 But Clevents did not play. To the banter of some he 
 replied that he had not yet got the stake for his last 
 game there, and was waiting for it. But he stopped Redney, 
 as he was leaving, and asked when he was to start for 
 Farwell. 
 
 "Early in the morning; before you're out, I reckon." 
 
 " Well, I just thought I'd mention that I've some friends 
 down there who might be of use if you want anything; so, 
 if you do, young fellow, sing your little song! " 
 
 " I'll be back in a week," answered Redney, in spite of 
 himself kindly impressed by the persistent courtesy of the 
 man. " I'm not likely to need anything in that time; but 
 obliged to you, just the same." 
 
 "Well, good luck to you! " 
 
 " Same to you," returned the other, mechanically, and 
 then, as he walked thoughtfully up the hill, took himself to 
 account for the speech. 
 
 " If he has a notion of trailing filouise or that other 
 duffer, I don't know as I do wish him luck, either. It's all 
 a cursed tangle, anyway. Sometimes I feel as if I've got 
 to tell the truth to her, or else skip the country; then again, 
 I've a notion that if she cared such a heap about him she
 
 124 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 wouldn't be forever laughing, and satisfied with other 
 folks, ^louise wouldn't be, not much. But then filouise 
 is a fool. She'd rather keep him up there a gawky idiot, 
 and work for him like a slave, sooner than let his relations, 
 that have the right, take care of him. That's just a fool 
 woman; and she ain't so much of a woman as the other 
 girl, either, not in years, though I reckon Indian blood ages 
 folks girls, anyway." 
 
 He had duly conferred with the " fool woman " about 
 his weekly trip from High-Low, and the possible necessity of 
 her going herself for provisions if any quick need should arise. 
 
 "And you are safe enough, too," he insisted. " No one 
 will trouble or follow you, for no one has an idea but what 
 you have gone with the princess, or back to some of the 
 tribe; and if any one bothers you, just tell me when I get 
 back, that's all." 
 
 He had at last persuaded her that no trace of suspicion 
 regarding Dunbar's disappearance led to her, and that 
 when High-Low sobered up no one had much to say 
 against her use of the knife, except that they were sorry it 
 happened to be Dunbar. 
 
 " And it's a heap better for you to walk right in there 
 <ind let anyone see you that wants to than for you to run 
 chances of having some one spy you accidental, and think 
 you're layin' low around here. They'll drop to it then that 
 you have a good reason. Catch on? " 
 
 She understood, and saw the wisdom of his plan. 
 
 " Your head thinks well for me," she said, gratefully, 
 "though sometimes it makes you a heap cross much; or 
 may be it is the other, the white one of whom you speak 
 no more she who is proud, and angers you. Is it that? 
 and does it make you glad to go? " 
 
 " Now where do you get your notions, ^Ilouise? " he 
 demanded; "she ain't bothering me any."
 
 HIGH-LOW REFORMED. 125 
 
 " Oh! " and the girl's face had a fleeting smile of the 
 care-free, mischievous days when Redney had seen her first. 
 " But since she is so ugly, I thought " 
 
 " Ugly? " 
 
 " Yes; the little Mrs. Mrs. Freshy, the one with the 
 crooked nose so you said. You forget? " 
 
 " Oh, let up on the noses, can't you? I guess she's about 
 as much for looks as that crazy coyote you've got corraled 
 up there in the ledge;" and then, relenting somewhat, he 
 added, more kindly: " Is he hard to take care of? I mean, 
 does he still see things that ain't there? " 
 
 " Never now; but the fever comes back many days," she 
 answered, sadly; " when it comes no more, then he will 
 get strong." 
 
 " And then he wants to cut the diggin's, does he? Well, 
 I may be owner of a portage outfit by that time, and can 
 give him a lift. Say, when are you to break ice by showing 
 at the camp? " 
 
 " May be I will go now, this night, while you are yet 
 there," she said, suddenly; " it might be better if you were 
 there." 
 
 "Sure," he assented; " you come." 
 
 And after he exchanged words with Clevents, and turned 
 toward the home path, he scanned road and clearing in every 
 direction for some sign that she had kept the half promise, but 
 nowhere could he see her; and with a mighty wish that the 
 tangled lines suddenly centered in High-Low would pro- 
 ceed to untangle, and would let him out of the loops, he 
 proceeded up the slope to the house, where the family of 
 Ewing had prepared a sort of impromptu feast in honor of 
 their one member whom Miss Delia called the captain 
 since the word of his appointment had come. 
 
 It was Miss Delia herself, with the heir of the Ewings in 
 her arms, who met him at the top of the slope, where she
 
 126 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 had been watching the flickering glow of the sun flame and 
 fade until only the warm ashes lay banked up against the 
 western sky. 
 
 " Have you forgotten that Mrs. Ewing told you to come 
 straight home? " she asked. " She sent baby and me out 
 to whistle for you, but as whistlers we are failures." 
 
 " I had to stop and talk with some fellows, or else bring 
 them along, and I allowed you had seen as many as you 
 wanted for one evening," he remarked, with boyish sulkiness, 
 at which she laughed. 
 
 " Mrs. Ewing said she knew you were cross because we 
 stopped there, I declare, you are too ridiculous, though it 
 is very good of you to care at all. But I see nothing 
 wrong about the post-office; the men were very civil." 
 
 " For once," he agreed. 
 
 " Well," she said, after a little deliberation, " it may be 
 because no lady has ever gone there that they have grown 
 rough. Now, no place has a right to be such that a lady 
 can not enter if she choose, and I am going to educate the 
 High-Lowites to that idea." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Why, by going at all times and seasons," she laughed, 
 "and keeping them perpetually on their good behavior." 
 
 "No, you won't," he contradicted; and she laughed again 
 at his angry interest. 
 
 "Oh, but I will! So you may look for me at the door 
 when you come up on that new outfit." 
 
 "If you don't take that back I'll not move an inch 
 toward Farwell, or run the boats, either." 
 
 " You " she began, in amazement. 
 
 " I've said it," he returned, briefly, without looking at 
 her. But she looked at him, and the set, boyish face, that 
 was more colorless than usual, checked her own laughter, 
 in fact sent a little conscious flush over her own cheeks,
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 127 
 
 and an embarrassed silence fell over them, broken only, as 
 they neared the house, by her saying: 
 
 " You should have known I was only jesting. I will 
 never go in there alone again of course not." 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 MR. CLEYENTS TAKES NOTES. 
 
 IT was by merest chance that Mr. Clevents should have 
 indulged in a saunter down the stage-road directly after 
 breakfast a breakfast prepared by Antoine, and by no 
 means irreproachable. And his guest, while walking, was 
 inwardly debating the advisability of bringing up a China- 
 man he knew and locating a cook-house, with the idea of 
 feeding High-Low for a consideration. 
 
 In fact, Mr. Clevents did several things besides play a 
 scientific game. Few of the floating population of the 
 mining country noticed more closely than he did the ebb 
 and flow of prosperity and the signs that prophesied that 
 state. And High-Low, though but in its infancy, seemed 
 promising enough to come back to. Somebody would 
 come in there with a boom some day and locate a gambling- 
 house, and Mr. Clevents had an idea of forestalling any 
 such ambitious one. Some men he knew had bought up 
 shares in the " Dell " mine, and enough promising stuff had 
 been found in it to warrant more extensive operations. 
 Mr. Raeforth had perceived that fact, had been advised of 
 it by Dunbar for months past, and, when once he took time 
 to give it his personal attention, he immediately took steps to
 
 128 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 give it a show, if it had metal in it worth showing. Unlimited, 
 supplies for energetic work had been secured at Farwell, 
 also other laborers who were to follow; and wherever a 
 corporation made a show of that sort, Clevents knew that 
 the independent workers were not long in following, and 
 securing their own little claims as near the town as possi- 
 ble. And so Mr. Clevents came ahead of the boom, and 
 was somewhat surprised to find that a couple of ladies had 
 arrived ahead of him. 
 
 He had not yet spoken to them, as their abode was some- 
 what removed from the town proper or improper; but 
 he had met Ewing, and got on friendly footing with him 
 easier than with Ewing's partner. 
 
 He smiled to himself as he thought of the partner's un- 
 compromising attitude and boyish cheek. He rather liked 
 it, just as he had liked the youthfulness in that other part 
 Indian thing who had used the knife so ruthlessly. 
 
 " If there were any process by which one could keep them 
 always young, they would make a good-looking pair," he 
 decided; "but the squaws get so infernally ugly as they get 
 old. Five years from now she'll be a good deal of a beast, 
 I suppose, and he'll be a quarrelsome tough, with some of 
 his fine features battered up by fights." 
 
 He stopped and looked down at the straggly settlement 
 with something of disgust on his face. Perhaps, remem- 
 bering the associations of it and like places, he was won- 
 dering how so many men as do happened to emerge from 
 such surroundings and walk again with the luckier children 
 of the earth. 
 
 And yet it all looked so much a picture of peace and the 
 atmosphere surrounding it so entirely sylvan the tiny 
 houses of new spruce, touched here and there with the 
 green of mosses, and farther along the road the white tents 
 of those who had no time for building, and, high above, the
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 129 
 
 green-draped rise of the range, with the western slope yet 
 vaguely tender in tone from the mists of the morning. 
 
 " Looks like a camp-meeting site," he thought, grimly. " A 
 camp-meeting, without the disturbing commotion a sky-pilot 
 stirs up later in the day, looks better in the morning; and 
 I wonder if the worms of earth down there were weighed in 
 the godly scales of civilization which element would get the 
 heft of the crowns and wings the degraded half-breeds, or 
 the white men who have made them what they are? " 
 
 Mr. Clevents happened to be able to view this moral 
 question from an entirely impersonal standpoint, as half- 
 breeds had never appealed to his rather fastidious tastes, and 
 those of the mixed blood and many-tinted tendencies who 
 dwelt in the sacred-looking valley seemed to his mind a little 
 nearer the brotherhood of Beelzebub than the usual hordes. 
 
 Except, of course, the two young people who had been 
 fortunate enough to impress him differently; and it was hard 
 to realize that they belonged to the scrubs, though both wore 
 more of the Indian dress than half the full-blooded reds, 
 and neither seemed to care about admitting relationship 
 with their more noble white ancestry. It may have been 
 that very isolation of the two from any bonds of family 
 that moved the gambler to an impulse of interest in them, 
 that and their youth and the way they had managed to 
 keep clear of the moral disease that was bred in the air 
 about them. He had in his mind an ideal ranch down near 
 the Santa Clara Range on which he intended locating some 
 day, and forever after be counted among the landmarks 
 of respectability; and he had an idea that it would be a 
 good place for those two young nomads, if they could be 
 tempted away from the more hazardous life of the hills. In 
 fact, Mr. Clevents grew amusingly philanthropic in his idle- 
 ness for there was no chance of getting up a game at thac 
 early hour of the day. 
 9
 
 130 SQUAW jgLOUISE. 
 
 It was the day the new portage gang was to come in. 
 He remembered that, because the present object of his 
 existence was simply to wait for some letters he expected 
 on it. He was wondering how the young cub would like 
 his new work, when he heard a body pressing through the 
 thick undergrowth near, and then he saw the dark eyes 
 and intense face of the " other cub " close beside him. 
 
 She looked startled, but made no attempt to avoid him, 
 and looked at him without speaking as she stepped into the 
 road. But he saw her hand raised quickly to her bosom. 
 He had seen a knife flash from that covert once, and smiled 
 at her thoughts, which he understood. 
 
 " Never mind that," he suggested, and reached out his 
 hand to her. " When you want to come to me, my girl, I'll 
 take care of you, otherwise you belong to yourself." 
 
 She did not touch his hand, but looked embarrassed at his 
 words. They were rather kindly, even pitiful, for he noticed 
 that her face was more tired, her garments more torn and 
 shabby, than when he had seen her last, and even then they 
 were poor. 
 
 "Well, you've had a hard time of it, wherever you've been 
 tramping," he decided. "You look all broke up." 
 
 " He that digs his food from the mountain can not look 
 fine," she answered. " But I ask nothing of the whites." 
 
 " You say that as if you were not almost white yourself, 
 you poor young outcast," he said, looking at her more 
 deliberately than he had ever done before, and recognizing 
 some elusive change from the black-eyed young creature of 
 rage who had made the sensation of a night at High-Low. 
 "Where have you been? where are you bound for?" 
 
 " To the camp Antoine's," she answered, and then added 
 doubtfully, " The minds there are not against me because " 
 
 " Because you knifed Dunbar? " he added, easily. " Well, 
 no. Law and order are neglected to a distressing degree
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 131 
 
 up here, so there is nothing on the dockets against you. It 
 might have been different if it had been me you used the 
 knife on, as I couldn't have been spared. By the way, 
 ^Ilouise, daughter of La Mestina, why wasn't it me you tried 
 to do for instead of Neil Dunbar? He was much the best 
 fellow of the two." 
 
 " Yes," she agreed in all seriousness, and moved as if to 
 pass him; but he turned too, with an amused grimace at her 
 frankness. 
 
 "Reckon I'll go along," he remarked. " I may not be a 
 winner of any moral medals or that sort of thing, but 
 might serve as an escort along the boulevards of High-Low, 
 supposing some energetic Christian should want to waylay 
 you with Sabbath-school questions." 
 
 She did not answer, not understanding very well his 
 manner of speech, but feeling from his tone that his mean- 
 ing was kind; and then it might have been a relief to learn 
 that there was really never a one to contest her chosen 
 master's right to her. Anyway, she walked beside him, 
 glancing stealthily every now and then into the cool, non- 
 chalant face of the man, and seeing by the morning light 
 that he was not so youthful as she had thought that night 
 at Antoine's. The fact, however, gave her no added confi- 
 dence in him. The worst of the white men she had ever 
 seen were the older ones, and some who were very wicked 
 could speak gently as this one. 
 
 " Have you brought your mother, the princess, back with 
 you? " he queried, not thinking but what they were 
 together. 
 
 But the girl raised her hand with a little un-Indian 
 gesture of protest. 
 
 " Nah! there is no mother to me. I claim no people; 
 none." 
 < "Oh! so you've got that sort of spunk, have you?
 
 132 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Good enough! And now look here, my girl, I'm going to 
 talk to you like a Dutch uncle, or any other patriarch. 
 How would you like to live in a good home, where you 
 wouldn't need to dig your feed from the mountains; where 
 you could learn in schools like white girls; have good 
 clothes all your life, and no one to boss you but a little 
 girl, who is kind as an angel to everyone? What do you 
 say? " 
 
 " I, "Louise, go to no man's house," she answered, curtly; 
 " I want only to be let alone." 
 
 In her thoughts were memories of other Indian girls and 
 women whom she had. seen in white men's houses. Some 
 lived now in the cabins of High-Low. All of the life the 
 girl had seen she feared. 
 
 ".What have you been drinking, ^louise?" he asked, 
 impatiently. " Can't you understand what I mean? It's a 
 chum for a little white girl I want, not one for myself." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "No! no white woman; the ice and the wolves are 
 better. If I live, well; if I starve, there is room on the 
 mountains. I will fall across no man's path." 
 
 " Someone told me you had a friend in a half-breed 
 priest of this country," he said, suddenly; " what is his 
 name? " 
 
 " Brother Henri? Oh, he is away over there," and she 
 pointed back over the mountains to the west. " Yes, he 
 was good; but he will not care now, may be. I am out 
 of the church. I have been evil in heart," and her 
 head bent humbly in the confession. 
 
 He thought she meant the hurt to Dunbar. 
 
 "Well, I wouldn't let go my pew in church on that 
 account," he said, cheerfully. " We're a long time dead, 
 young lady, and while we have our stop-over checks for a 
 picnic on earth, don't spoil your day's sport by sighs or
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 133 
 
 snivels. Understand? And if you've any friends to ask 
 advice of, just tell them I've offered you a healthy home, 
 when you want to strike the trail to it. Where do you live, 
 anyway? " 
 
 " Konaway kah" (everywhere), she answered, curtly, and 
 not another word could he get from her in King George 
 wau-wau (English talk). She would reply when he 
 addressed her, but the replies were in Chinook, which he 
 might understand if he could, and he generally couldn't. 
 And to his amusement and impatience ^llouise would coun- 
 tenance questioning no further. 
 
 But he nevertheless walked nonchalantly beside her 
 along the road, seeming not to notice the curiosity of the 
 inhabitants. All recognized the Indian girl, and seeing her 
 thus in company with the man who had won her, High-Low 
 grinned a little, and formed conclusions in keeping with its 
 general tendencies. 
 
 But her escort might have had a real princess royal in 
 charge from the superior manner by which he ignored the 
 ordinary public. 
 
 " Give her some breakfast to begin with, Antoine," he sug- 
 gested, as the girl halted at the plank counter; " she looks 
 as though she needed a bracer, and not a bottled one, either." 
 
 filouise shook her head. 
 
 " But it is the bottle I want filled," she said, and laid the 
 flask Redney had given her on the bar. Antoine picked it 
 up and looked at it. 
 
 "Ah! who is it for that you carry the drink?" he asked, 
 teasingly; " not La Mestina this never hold enough. This 
 bottle did come from me, yes; but not to you. Some 
 trapper lover, is it? Ah! yes, yes. But pick some other 
 man's house to use the knife in when his time comes. 
 Promise, and I fill the flask and charge you never anything. 
 It is so; promise.
 
 134 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 She hesitated. The few little coins might mean so much, 
 yet the smiling Antoine had never been liked much by her, 
 and to take his favors 
 
 "No, she won't promise," interrupted Mr. Clevents. 
 " Under the same provocation she is liable to cut a half- 
 dozen instead of one. Give her what she wants; I'm 
 responsible this morning." 
 
 " Most sure. I joke with the child, that is all. So many 
 years have I been acquaint with her yes, even when the 
 hunters did carry her, and Henri did lead her her, the 
 * little eagle,' they did call her then, and it is not sc long 
 ago. No, ^louise is yet the child, though not the friendly 
 child no, no. She forgets her friends." 
 
 "You are one man's friend, that is all," she answered. 
 
 " Oh! you say so? and the man? " 
 
 "Antoine." 
 
 She did not care that a couple of miners who had 
 lounged in were laughing, to the chagrin of the courteous 
 Frenchman. She had so many memories of him when he 
 was not courteous, when she, a half-starved little thing, 
 had been driven from the door where she had watched his 
 guests eat. She knew it was but to stand well in the graces 
 of a good customer that he was so kind now, and though 
 she could ill afford to win enemies, her irritation prompted 
 the curt speech. 
 
 " Hello! it's the little squaw," and one of the men, catch- 
 ing sight of her face, came forward. " She's wanted at the 
 court-house, ain't she?" 
 
 He only said it to scare the girl a little; but again 
 Clevents stood between her and the words of the others by 
 saying: 
 
 "Well, when Dunbar comes back and makes a charge 
 will be time enough to settle that, if it needs any settling; 
 so just let the young one alone, can't you? Sit down, you
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 135 
 
 young eagle, or raven, or whatever it was they named you 
 a raven, I guess, as you are so thin; and Elijah seems to 
 have given you the go-by." 
 
 He himself filled a plate with the least repelling portions 
 of the breakfast remains and offered it to her. She drew 
 back, looking at him curiously. He seemed to her unlike 
 any of the white men she ever had seen, and his manner 
 that morning had been a puzzle. She had hated him that 
 night of the gambling, yet he surely was trying to be kind. 
 
 " Eat, so I can know you have no grudge against me," 
 he said; " I don't like to have the grudge of a woman." 
 
 " The grudge? " she asked, not understanding; and the 
 vivacious Antoine interpreted. 
 
 "The grudge; yes, the pittuck mesahchie (wicked 
 thoughts) you see? Now you must show to the stranger 
 that you are not his enemy. You only empty the dish it 
 is easy and no more grudge is thought." 
 
 She turned curtly from the interpreter and took the plate. 
 
 t<f Mahsie" she said, quietly; and asClevents happened to 
 understand the Indian word of thanks, he knew she was at 
 least reachable by assured kindness, though her words were 
 brief. And she would speak no more English, possibly 
 because of the other two men who were looking at her so. 
 She was growing afraid of men's eyes and ears. Glances 
 unnoticed by her so short a time before, now seemed full 
 of significance, and a sort of terror suddenly took posses- 
 sion of her, lest any suspicion might detain her, or cause 
 trouble and loss of time in her return to her hiding-place. 
 
 The courage needed for going back to High-Low did not 
 seem to her great. It had to be done, that was all. Of 
 the personal danger she thought not at all. But the words 
 of the miner, and the curious glances she met, filled her 
 with tremulous fear; a fear not of harm to herself, but of 
 following feet, and of eyes that might find her retreat.
 
 136 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 She arose quickly at the thought and reached for the little 
 flask, the paper of crackers, and the bit of quinine that had 
 formed one of the strongest reasons for her trip to the store. 
 
 "Some of your people sick?" asked Clevents, noting that 
 purchase; but she did not answer, only held out her hand to 
 Antoine, offering the few little coins in payment. And the 
 gambler, with a grunt of impatience, laid his hand over 
 hers, closing her fingers on the money, and handing a 
 dollar to Antoine instead. 
 
 "I stand treat this morning," he reminded her; "put 
 your wealth in your pocket, Elouise. And now will you 
 tell me where you are going? " 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Nor when you come back? " 
 
 She hesitated at that, and then, thinking to stay pursuit 
 if any was thought of, she answered in English that the 
 others might hear. 
 
 " May be soon, few days; may be not. You see me when 
 I come." 
 
 And, with a look and gesture of farewell, she passed him 
 quickly and walked swiftly along the road, back over the 
 way she had come. There was a much nearer way past the 
 cabin of Ewing, but it was a way not to be taken under the 
 eyes of half High-Low. 
 
 Once she turned around and saw the gambler standing in 
 front of Antoine's and looking after her; the sight hastened 
 her steps and made her indifferent to the eyes of the others 
 whose doors she passed. Had she noticed carefully, she> 
 would have seen that his watching lasted only until she had 
 passed those doors. 
 
 "Poor little devil!" he thought, as he saw her walk 
 through the territory that someone should have the right 
 to shield her from knowledge of. " Poor little stubborn 
 imp! But what can a gentleman do?"
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 137 
 
 Then he heard Antoine decide that the girl was crazy. 
 It was the only way to explain her late fierceness and sullen 
 ingratitude. 
 
 "Think! not one little woman's look of thanks for that 
 good gentleman's generosity to her," and the speaker knew 
 well that the " good gentleman " was yet within hearing. 
 " But it is the head is wrong; yes, that is sure, and there is 
 no wonder in that. The holy church says that the sins of 
 the parents must be answered for by the children. Yes; 
 and the mother of this one did spit upon the cross, and 
 scratched the good father who made offer of it to her. 
 Yes, she did that long ago, and turned back to the Indian 
 faith that dances in pride among serpents. That day is yet 
 counted a day of disgrace among the tribe, for that day she 
 was banished, she and her blood. Yes, that is the story 
 they tell; and what is there to be expected of the child of 
 such a mother struck the father till the prints of her 
 nails were left in the sanctified flesh! And the child was 
 always more heathen than Christian; and now she turns 
 strange in her head, and looks fierce as a tiger's whelp that 
 has just smelled blood, and will not even tell who is the 
 man she lives with." 
 
 "Here! here! ain't you coming it rather strong, my 
 Christian friend? " asked the gambler, who had listened to 
 the bit of history Antoine was chattering as he washed the 
 breakfast-pans and whisky-glasses. " Who has mentioned 
 a man as being with her? " 
 
 " But what child that is a girl would live alone in these 
 mountains?" asked his host in return. "No, not even the 
 oldest squaws would do that. This one once before 
 went away like that yes, and because she was so young 
 all were afraid she was eaten by the wild things; but 
 no," and his smile was not a charitable one, "nothing she 
 feared had troubled her, though we never learned who it
 
 138 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 was kept her company. And then Brother Henri our 
 priest, you know he happens here after a week had gone 
 by. All tell to him that the child filouise is lost is, may 
 be, food for the beasts; and what does he do? He but asks 
 some little questions, and departs quickly, and when the 
 night come Priest Henri comes too with filouise. He 
 had found her, though none knows where, nor with whom. 
 That is but a year ago, and she promised then to be wicked 
 no more promised the priest; but that is a year, and the 
 priest is beyond the range, where the people are dying like 
 cattle with a strange fever. So it is, you see, whoever she 
 went with before has come back, and they hide together 
 somewhere in the forest. It is as one might expect from 
 old Mestina's child." 
 
 Clevents again felt that wave of disgust at the evidence 
 that not even the child he had thought well of was above 
 suspicion. 
 
 " And has this man, this priest, any real control over her 
 when he is here? " he asked at last, after the others had 
 changed the conversation, and looked up puzzled when he 
 spoke. 
 
 "Gone on yer little squaw yourself, ain't ye?" asked one 
 of the miners good-humoredly; but Antoine again came 
 forward with his ever-ready knowledge of things. 
 
 "What Brother Henri? Oh, to be sure; when La Mes- 
 tina could do nothing with the whip, a word from him would 
 control filouise always, even before he was of the priests. 
 For he lived with the tribe before the school days. He 
 went with the hunters, and knew every peak and every 
 stream. Yes, it is so; and it was he who climbed once to 
 the nest of an eagle and brought down the squaw filouise, 
 when she was but a babe. Ah, the chiefs praised him for 
 that; it was very brave, they said, for when he started he did 
 not think to return alive. But it was he who had carried the
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 139 
 
 child away from the camp, so his was the blame; he must 
 find her or else never return himself to the tribe. So he 
 thought, and so he saved her, crippling the mother-bird and 
 bearing from her nest the child. It was great for a boy to 
 do so they said; and the child was Henri's young eagle 
 after that. He was always the master she would always 
 obey, though for no one else, no, not one; and so it has 
 always been. He brought her back from her hiding-place 
 last year. He would make her return now if he was here. 
 Yes, surely. I knew him well, and his father before him. 
 His father was a voyageur of the old company. Yes, a 
 worthy soul ; married in holy church to the squaw he picked. 
 She died so soon he had never time to get tired of her, and 
 to the last day he did praise his Belle Marie; and the boy 
 he was proud of ah, much! And the boy himself kept 
 pride; yes, though a priest; proud though he goes hungry 
 many a day in the winter-time over there among the "scrub 
 reds " so the hunters call them. But he is most devotional, 
 yes. I know, you see, when he was but small " 
 
 But the restless stranger again left the interesting Antoine 
 to the other miners and betook himself to the thoroughfare. 
 The veils of mist were wrapping themselves into fleecy 
 clouds and sailing away on the high seas of air over the 
 ranges. Fair nature had grown several degrees less fair in 
 the eyes of the gambling humanitarian. He wished mightily 
 that the portage gang would arrive, and the stagnation of 
 High-Low give place to enterprise. 
 
 Of course the mere telling of so usual a story as Antoine's 
 was a trifling thing in that region. Why should not the 
 young Indian have a lover? Other girls had other squaws. 
 Yet he felt angered and indignant at the idea. He wanted 
 to follow, and hear her say it was not true, but did not 
 know the direction she had taken. 
 
 He did, however, walk in her tracks until he came where
 
 140 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 the trail left the "boulevard" and crept up mountain ward; 
 and a little straggling section of it crept down to Cascade 
 Creek, and the waters of the cascade were engulfed a little 
 below by the alluring swiftness of the great river and car- 
 ried in triumph to the oceans. 
 
 And it was along the lines of the river the new conveyors 
 were to come; and the stranger, bored and impatient, fol- 
 lowed its downward race aimlessly, not guessing that the 
 whispering waters could have led him upward straight to 
 the nest of the wild child whose abode was just then the 
 one interesting puzzle of the place to him that and the 
 financial future of High-Low. 
 
 But a man must be very deeply engaged in financial 
 problems especially in the north Selkirk country if the 
 soft laughter of womankind fails to attract his attention, 
 and the sound of it floating up the stream was so girlish, 
 so charming a note in the music of the landscape; and Mr. 
 Clevents was just susceptible enough to sweet sounds to be 
 drawn down the stream by them, and with a pretty clear 
 idea that the voice must belong to the girl High-Low had 
 reformed for. 
 
 It did. She and Joseph Dyce Ewing and Jo Dyce's 
 mamma were trying to navigate a wide, still pool of the 
 cascade by means of a dug-out and one paddle. That is, 
 Miss Delia was doing the navigating, and Mrs. Ewing and 
 the baby were watching her from a safe nook on the shore, 
 and all of them laughing at the stubborn circles the dug- 
 out persisted in describing. 
 
 " I'm sure Chief Simon did not have to work so hard as 
 this," panted the amateur canoeist, " and he moved in a beau- 
 tiful straight line, while this vessel seems to be going 
 around on a pivot." 
 
 " May be you are in the clutches of some marine mon- 
 ster," laughed Mrs. Ewing. " It's the first time I ever saw 
 you look helpless and funny."
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 141 
 
 " Well, I don't feel funny," declared the girl." Just stop 
 laughing and look at the thing; right around in a circle. I 
 suppose I'll have to go whirling on down to Farwell like 
 this. I can't even get the bewitched thing in to shore." 
 
 And then Mrs. Ewing almost screamed as Mr. Clevents 
 spoke just back of her, advising the captain of the canoe 
 to ship her paddle for a moment, and see what the dug-out 
 would do if left to itself. 
 
 The thing it did was to swing itself around once more 
 and take lodging in the roots of a tree that had been swept 
 from its moorings by some freshet; and from that point of 
 vantage Miss Delia met again the eyes that had drifted 
 past her in the dark of the narrows. 
 
 " This is all very well, so far as it goes," she agreed, "but 
 I can't see that I'm making much headway." 
 
 " If you will accept me as pilot " 
 
 " I don't know," she deliberated. " There is a heartless 
 creature on the shore there who has been jubilant over my 
 danger; now if you could only inveigle her on board, and 
 make her share the delights of canoeing, as a penance " 
 
 But Mrs. Ewing retreated at the suggestion. 
 
 " I would not risk my life on one of those logs for the 
 world," she declared; " and if you, sir, can only get her on 
 dry land once more I'll manage to keep her here if I have 
 to use ropes." 
 
 And as the stranger smiled at her vehemence, Mrs. 
 Ewing decided that the smile made him almost handsome; 
 and the way in which he drifted a log down to the sub- 
 merged roots and made a bridge from it to the shore won 
 her admiration entirely. It really made the little episode 
 seem like a real adventure; and Miss Delia was a pretty 
 picture of a maid forlorn as she was towed meekly along 
 the log in her tipsy dug-out, a failure as a canoeist. 
 
 " I had an idea it was a trade, but it is an art," she com- 
 plained, " and I am not one of the artists. One has to be
 
 142 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 born to it, I suppose, just as that royal Simon was, and 
 your boatman who took your canoe like an arrow down the 
 narrows that evening." 
 
 " Then you remember me? That is something unlooked 
 for." 
 
 " I remember your face now quite well," said Mrs. 
 Ewing, with a belated idea of the conventional. " We met 
 too few travelers to forget any; and I think my husband 
 knows you. I am Mrs. Ewing." 
 
 "And this the future governor-general of High-Low," 
 added the girl, introducing Jo Dyce, who blinked know- 
 ingly from one to the other, and clinging to Mr. Clevents' 
 offered finger cemented at once an acquaintance entertain- 
 ing on both sides. 
 
 " Oh, did you come down that path? " asked Miss Rae- 
 forth, with sudden remembrance, pointing up where the 
 mountain trail led. " We saw a picture up there a little 
 while ago and are curious about it." 
 
 " Yes, a pretty girl in Indian dress, who fairly ran up 
 that cliff," said Mrs. Ewing, " and halted there, looking 
 back as if someone were following; but no one seemed to 
 be, and then she ran on, never seeing us along the shore in 
 the bushes. She was so pretty. I have seen no girls about 
 here who look like her." 
 
 Mr. Clevents favored her with a close glance of scrutiny. 
 How much did she know? Did either of them know of the 
 Indian girl's history? He hesitated thoughtfully, and was 
 released from the dilemma by Miss Raeforth remarking: 
 
 " I think she is the one called Elouise, a daughter of a 
 legendary and drunken princess, of whom we hear rumors. 
 I thought you might be able to decide the question." 
 
 " You are right," agreed Mr. Clevents, with a sudden 
 return of memory. " That is just who it is. I noticed her 
 in camp this morning; but she is too wild for the settle- 
 ments, and has gone back to the hills, I suppose."
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 143 
 
 "Mr. Redney told me of her and of her interesting 
 mamma, and I should like to see her within speaking dis- 
 tance, but have so far failed." 
 
 Mr. Clevents noticed that Mrs. Ewing gave him a quick 
 little appealing glance as the girl filouise was mentioned. 
 He felt ashamed, and instinctively raised his hat in 
 acknowledgment of her trust, and wished he had never 
 seen the perplexing little half-breed. He was sure from 
 Mrs. Ewing's conscious manner that she had heard of that 
 troublesome game of chance at Antoine's, just as he was 
 certain from Miss Raeforth's outspoken interest that she 
 had not. 
 
 " Oh, yes, she's an independent oddity up here; more 
 like a boy than a girl, only the boys won't work as a gen- 
 eral thing, and this one does makes moccasins and all 
 sorts of beaded stuff, and sells them at the trading-posts." 
 
 " Then I, for one, intend to invest in a complete outfit 
 of beaded deer-skin," declared the girl; "and I shall 
 endeavor to see her the next time she comes to the 
 settlement." 
 
 "But that is most indefinite," explained Mr. Clevents, as 
 he finished his work of dragging the dug-out up on shore 
 for the next canoeist to wrestle with. " Her visits to High- 
 Low are far between, and where she camps no one knows; 
 civilization knows little about her." 
 
 "Just the reason she arouses my interest," said Miss 
 Raeforth. " She must be an original to live alone in the 
 wildness of these mountains. Why, it is appalling to think 
 of! among wild beasts and serpents and occasional out- 
 laws of humanity." 
 
 "Oh, there are few of those up here," returned Mr. 
 Clevents. " We may be outcasts from the rest of the world, 
 but so long as we are alive we are accepted citizens in this 
 territory. When we get too bad to live, they make angels
 
 144 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 of us, with the aid of a rope; so, you see, the imperfect 
 among us are not allowed to live long." 
 
 " Of course that tends toward giving us an exalted idea 
 of those yet in the flesh," laughed the girl; " but, say what 
 you will, we have seen some specimens very much alive 
 who looked more impish than angelic." 
 
 " Notably your delirium tremens character," said Mrs. 
 Ewing, and Mr. Clevents looked his inquiry. "We don't 
 quite know who was delirious in this case," she continued, 
 teasingly. " It may have been Miss Raeforth instead of 
 the individual she thought she saw on the sacred corner of 
 Thunder Mountain. She has only to-day divulged to me 
 the extent of her imaginings up there." 
 
 "On a promise that my audience would abstain from 
 ridicule or gossip of the adventure," interpolated the 
 accused; " and this is how she keeps her word." 
 
 " Well, really, I don't see your reason for secrecy in the 
 matter, even if you did stumble on some unknown up 
 there," said Mrs. Ewing, in defense of her gossiping. 
 
 "7/1 saw him! And, so please you, I had not a reason 
 in the world against proclaiming the fact; the reason, if 
 there were any, was Mr. Re'dney's." 
 
 Mr. Clevents suddenly picked up his ears. " Was your 
 unknown specimen a chum of Redney's?" 
 
 " Redney could not say, as the apparition was only visi- 
 ble to my own eyes. Oh, it was only a drunken man, I 
 suppose, sleeping in the sun up there near the summit. I 
 only got a glimpse of him, and when I sent our guide back 
 he had vanished. To save the nerves of the others, we 
 agreed not to mention it; and now this doubting Thomasa 
 does not believe I had that adventure at all. She'll be 
 trying to lessen the importance of my canoe adventure next 
 thing." 
 
 " If so, call on me," he said, with a shade of flattering
 
 MR. CLEVENTS TAKES NOTES. 145 
 
 seriousness back of his jesting words; " the importance of 
 it will be remembered for the rest my vacation on this 
 globe its importance to me." 
 
 The two ladies smiled a little. They both rather liked 
 him; he could say such common things with such an un- 
 common air, while compared with the average citizen of 
 High-Low, he shone forth as a gem of purest ray serene, 
 and the romanticism of their first meeting still clung with 
 a little air of mystery about him. He had been another 
 shadowy problem of the Selkirks for the girl to guess at; an 
 attractive one, too, and, to her delight, as much interested 
 in the complex character of the country as herself, lend- 
 ing a most respectful ear to her tale of the day on Thunder 
 Mountain and the legendary history she had gathered from 
 Redney. Not even a dubious smile touched his lips as she 
 described the bearded apparition that haunted the sacred 
 highlands, and after Mrs. Ewing's skepticisms, his belief was 
 a balm to her feelings; and Mr. Clevents, gambler, pros- 
 pector, and gentleman of leisure, found himself walking 
 home with two of the most thorough ladies he had been on 
 speaking terms with, and was treated with decided gracious- 
 ness by the prettiest, most bewitching little girl he had 
 known in the whole course of his life. But all the charm of 
 his unusual luck did not deter him from making mental notes 
 notes he hoped to use for the saving of the girl so unlike 
 this childish beauty for the girl who lived somewhere 
 among the phantoms of the walled-in highlands. 
 
 10
 
 146 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 
 
 AND up there, with the phantoms of her past people about 
 her, the young squaw was growing into the most capricious, 
 though devoted, of guardians. As Dunbar grew stronger, 
 she grew more boyish, more distant and defiant, trying to 
 gather up scattered bits of pride, that always fled from her 
 at a note of pain in his voice, or the sight of feeble, 
 dragging steps with which he followed her at times to the 
 fishing-place. 
 
 " You are like several different people," he complained, 
 " yet not like any woman, filouise. You are as changea- 
 ble as an Indian witch. Are you one?" 
 
 She smiled, for there were notes of content in his speech 
 despite his words, and his content meant all of happiness 
 to her. 
 
 " No witch; just ^louise. The change is in your eyes. 
 I am the same, while you grow stronger. The sickness will 
 soon be gone." 
 
 "And then?" 
 
 Moodiness like a cloud of April fell over her face, but 
 she said: 
 
 " There are already many moccasins made for the post; 
 when Redney comes again he will take them. Then there 
 will be dollars for you." 
 
 " And then we will say good-by to this," and he pointed 
 to the refuge that had been also a prison. But she only 
 looked at him sadly; he seemed so glad at the thought of 
 going.
 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 147 
 
 "May be, may be not," she answered at last. "The 
 mountain is the best home for the Indian." 
 
 " But you are not even half Indian," he protested. " Do 
 you dislike so much the white blood in you?" 
 
 " Yes," she said, " it is true. I have never liked well the 
 white people." 
 
 " Oh! " and he looked at her with the soft protest in eyes 
 and voice. " Then why have you liked me well enough to 
 hide me and nurse me?" 
 
 " I know not," she said, lowly; but the slow red crept up 
 to her brow, and he, seeing it, smiled and reached his hand 
 toward her. 
 
 " Yet you will not come near," he complained, as if her 
 blush had been an audible avowal of affection. "You 
 make me miserable; don't you see that? You might better 
 have let me die than to never forgive me. Your reproach 
 hurts me, for your silence is reproach. Are you going to 
 hurt me always? " 
 
 Her troubled, pained gaze made him drop his own eyes; 
 it disconcerted him with a wistfulness, a devotion so beyond 
 him, though she could only repeat, confusedly, " I know 
 not." 
 
 And she spoke truly she knew not. The pain and the 
 pleasure dealt her by his words were as shrouded meanings 
 from an unknown world. 
 
 The warm, quick throbs of her heart answered to every 
 tone of his voice; but the heart beat against such bars of 
 pain, bars that kept her prisoned from the joy of his com- 
 plete approval, though all the young, wild soul of her was 
 already bartered to Manitou for the mere silence and 
 secrecy of life with him. 
 
 At first, when he had said " we will go away," she had 
 grasped at the hope that was when he was weak as a child 
 and wholly dependent on her. But he was not quite the
 
 148 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 same. She scarcely knew what boon to ask of her Indian 
 god now; but she was growing afraid afraid." 
 
 "If you are so cold, so unforgiving, you will kill me yet/' 
 he persisted, through sheer lack of any excitement but that 
 of making love to the odd, boyish nature that looked her 
 devotion, but locked her lips from fond speech. Even her 
 hands she would draw from him angrily if he clasped them, 
 the hands guilty of that murderous knife-thrust. 
 
 " Did you nurse me back to life only to make me un- 
 happy? " he would ask; and the young heathen heart would 
 ache anew at his fancied misery. 
 
 " I do what I can; I am only poor," she would answer, 
 and work harder and longer to gain the luxuries needed 
 for his content, never daring to quite believe that she her- 
 self was one of the wished-for things of his present. 
 
 The past was gone. It had held pleasures and hopes, 
 but they seemed now to have belonged to some other man. 
 He was cut off from the rest of life in the world; he could 
 see no future yet, nothing beyond the walls on the heights 
 and the girl who seemed the guardian angel of them. 
 
 But his sick fancies turned with longing to dreams of 
 carpeted floors and lace-draped windows, to luxuries un- 
 cared for for years that suddenly awoke in him; to the 
 restful, esthetic atmosphere of some libraries and studios 
 remembered by the man he had been; a desire to hear 
 again the cultured tones of the world left behind; to revel 
 again in the alluring surroundings of dramatic or musical 
 life; to come in touch once more with the spirit of a 
 fastidious civilization from which he had drifted. 
 
 But all that was of the past. The present had moored 
 him to a cliff dwelling and a young savage whom he might 
 have loved if he had not seen in her merely a slave who 
 was devoted. It is not devotion men love, but change. 
 
 And his own moods, now fondly content with sylvan
 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 149 
 
 beauties, and again moodily at war with his prison, would 
 communicate themselves to the girl. 
 
 And the girl, watching his face and the lights and 
 shadows in it, said suddenly one day as he lay listless: 
 
 "You think of her, the girl in the picture? Is it that you 
 look sorry for? " 
 
 "You are an Indian witch, ^llouise," he returned. " How 
 did you know that?" 
 
 " You want her so much you love the thoughts of her? " 
 she persisted; and he smiled at her tone, and tried to kiss 
 the hand nearest him, but she lifted it and drew back. 
 
 " Do you? " she said. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," he answered, after a moment of 
 thought. " I long for the things she is a part of, the things 
 you do not understand yet, filouise the refined life, the 
 gentle speech " 
 
 " Does speech ungentle ever come to you here? " was all 
 she said. 
 
 "Here?" and her sad tones touched him with self- 
 reproach. " Never, filouise; your kindness is too great. 
 But you do not understand; this place, that would be 
 beautiful from choice, is growing like a prison." 
 
 " You are not alone in it; I live the life too." 
 
 " But you are free; you go as you will, and see other 
 faces, talk to other men." 
 
 " It is that I have to; their faces are nothing to me." 
 
 " Sure?" and he smiled at her disdain. ' Is there never 
 a face you remember kindly on your way back to me 
 never a voice whose words you carry in your thoughts?" 
 
 She might have answered, truthfully, "Yes, yours;" it 
 seemed the confession his eyes were wooing. But she 
 looked away from him, and felt remorsefully that she had 
 thought many times through the day of the man who had 
 offered her a home away beyond the hills.
 
 150 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "It is true," she said at last, "of one man I have thought, 
 but he is not young; he is only kind, and he offered me 
 schools and a warm home where his daughter is." 
 
 " Who is it? " he demanded, with a sudden spirit of antag- 
 onism, and her truthfulness was ended as she answered, 
 "A stranger many are coming up the river now; but I 
 never think of them." 
 
 "When did you see him?" 
 
 " It was when I went to the camp for the medicine. He 
 made them be kind to me at Antoine's, and that is all." 
 
 " Yet it is enough to give you other words than mine to 
 think of ; it is enough to show you are free, while I am in 
 prison," he complained. " How do you suppose I feel shut 
 up here and knowing that other men are looking at you, 
 wanting you, offering you homes " 
 
 He stopped, half-choked by the feelings his own words 
 had stirred in him. The regret for it all, the pity of it all, 
 and prophecies of ostracism he had evoked, made his voice 
 falter. She saw the tears shine in his eyes and heard the 
 tremble in his voice for her or for himself ? Woman-like, 
 she credited him with the unselfishness that was her own. 
 
 "What difference what men say? In my heart is no pict- 
 ure of them. I think only of you when they talk; I run 
 to you when away from their eyes; I " 
 
 He caught her hand and kissed it, pressing his face rapt- 
 urously against the poor skirt of her dress. 
 
 " You think only of me? " he whispered, looking up at 
 her. " Ah, my wild bird of the mountain, why have you 
 waited so long before telling me? You must never be cold 
 to me again; of what use is it when you have said you 
 think only of me? Do you not know I will remember that 
 always? " 
 
 The hands he had kissed were crossed on her breast, 
 tight tight. The cross of the church she had thrown
 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 151 
 
 away, but that of a new religion had fallen on her; its 
 weight had forced words to her lips that were not to be 
 recalled. "Always, always," she said, under her breath, 
 but the vow, if it was that, seemed less to him than to some 
 invisible thing beyond and above, to which she flung out 
 her arms in an expressive gesture; and then, covering her 
 face, she walked away, not turning or halting once at sound 
 of his pleading voice that called to her. 
 
 The sun was going down, and the shadow of the mount- 
 ain already fell on the lower hills. He waited until the 
 fever of gladness and wonder would let him wait no longer. 
 Was there ever such a wild, serious sweetheart as this 
 mountain girl? It even seemed a bit of a pity to tame her; 
 he had never found tame squaws interesting. That thought 
 checked him a moment just as the very beauty of a blos- 
 som will at times stay the hand stretched for its possession, 
 and one passes on with a little sense of strength and con- 
 tent in the thought that its sweetness is untarnished by 
 your temptation. 
 
 Some such restraint of conscience or sense of esthetic 
 fitness made him halt just so at the thought of filouise 
 ''civilized," and living the life of the average " white man's 
 squaw." 
 
 But was he an average man ? Surely not. The circum- 
 stances were exceptional. Fate had set them aside from 
 the rest of humanity. He had only her, she had only him, 
 in the whole world. 
 
 Is not one's own case always exceptionable? It is only ' 
 the other fellow for whom there are no extenuating circum- 
 stances. 
 
 He was tired and breathless ere he reached her, though 
 he was sure she had not gone far. A grotto near the top 
 of the cliff, with a low bench of stone half across it, was a 
 retreat she had led him to once. From it one could look
 
 152 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 as the eagle looks on the earth below; and the young sav- 
 age was like one, he thought, as he climbed up the waver- 
 ing, uncertain way to her nest. 
 
 But something besides the eagle heart beat in the young 
 breast under the sign of Manitou, for she knelt at the stone 
 bench as at an altar, and her hands, flung out before her, 
 were clasped in a rigid manner of silent supplication. 
 
 She seemed for the first time helpless and appealing to 
 him, and a virtuous sense of chivalry rose above his weak- 
 ness. To draw her close to him and protect her from the 
 world and the evil of it to keep her just this childish, 
 devotional pagan some such thought was with him as he 
 dropped beside her. He even thought of his mother 
 long dead by whose side he had knelt as he was kneeling 
 now. But at his touch the girl broke away, leaving the 
 bench, or altar, between them, and leaning, tearful and defi- 
 ant, against the far wall. 
 
 "Nah!" she said, with her expressive hands Indian 
 hands reached toward him. "It is wrong to follow. I 
 am your slave to work, if you want always; but the words 
 that white men say to Indian women must not be heard 
 with us. They bring the curses of the spirits we have 
 enough." 
 
 "filouise!" He saw her mouth tremble at the mere 
 sound of his voice. " Listen, ^louise. I will guard pro- 
 tect" 
 
 " I can guard," she answered, briefly, with averted eyes, 
 but relaxing nothing of her attitude. To look in his eyes 
 and hear him plead was more than she could bear without 
 confessing to the thing that might make him hate her. 
 Her life seemed very hard to her, poor child! She was 
 happy, miserable, and bewildered, and afraid afraid of the 
 net that had been thrown, with a sort of magic, about her. 
 " I can guard," she repeated, mechanically, " from enemies, 
 from"
 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 153 
 
 " But I can never be your enemy," he protested, softly, 
 "^louise, come to me! You are mine. We are " 
 
 "We are different not the same," she said, with a sort 
 of passion in her tones. " You are of the white blood that 
 laughs at my people. I am the outlawed blood you would 
 grow ashamed of some day, if I listened to you long. I 
 know I have seen the white men and the half-breed chil- 
 dren they swear at. My father was one of them." 
 
 "Your mother was not so cold," he began, but she 
 interrupted him with a short, bitter laugh. 
 
 "You do well," she said, with unconscious irony "well, 
 my master, to tell me of that. Listen!" and for the first 
 time she raised her eyes levelly to his. " Did you ever 
 hear what La Mestina was once in the years that are gone? 
 She was princess. In council she was the one woman; the 
 old people took herbs from her hands as charms; the young 
 were taught to do reverence to her name as they do now to 
 the priests. In the time of planting and the harvest, 
 in the time of the fish and the going away of the hunters, 
 it was Mestina who laid in the face of Manitou the 
 prayer for plenty. She was called wise and of the old king 
 tribe that is never named in this day. She was to live in 
 holiness and to be sung as a lesson to the children born 
 in the years when we are dead. That was La Mestina, the 
 wise woman. But one squaw had ever been loved so in 
 the tribes of the great river, and that other was Louise 
 Ligonin, whom the priests call sainted. 
 
 "To-day," she continued, as he did not speak only 
 looked at her in amaze at the swift speech and graphic pict- 
 uring of the past " to-day you can find the wise woman 
 the squaw king drunk somewhere among the streets of the 
 white people. She is outlawed by her tribe. She sees not 
 right from wrong. She offered her daughter for a handful 
 of dollars to any man who would take her. And all that
 
 154 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 evil and sin has grown in her, a little at a time, just because 
 she was not cold. She chose to be wife to a white man a 
 good wife, so the hunters have said to me; and where is the 
 white man who remembers the squaw wife when the mount- 
 ains and the villages of the whites are between them? He 
 was like the others he never came back." 
 
 "And you would judge me by such a man?" he asked, 
 hurt and reproachful. "Ah, child, you do not understand. 
 Trust me." 
 
 " Wait," she said, closing her eyes for a moment. " I was 
 little, but I remember when I saw him last, and the words 
 he said; it was of going, and La Mestina was bowed like a 
 slave before him, but he would not take her. He said he 
 said " and her words grew slower, as if striving for the 
 half-forgotten words " that a man who was white had 
 better be dead than tied to one of the red race; that when 
 he goes where the whites live he grows ashamed; that it 
 made no difference whether the squaw was good or bad, 
 the man was ashamed anyway. His heart grows weak in 
 the tents of his friends. His courage dies in shame, and 
 the youth in his spirit grows pale as old age in sorrow. 
 He was ashamed of his life, as the white blood made him 
 makes all men. Then he left some dollars, and told her not 
 to follow. He did not strike her, but she fell as if he had; 
 and La Mestina was never called the wise squaw again. 
 He was evil I know though he laughed often. But he 
 told the truth of his heart about the shame. I have heard 
 the hunters talk I know, and you must never be ashamed 
 so in the eyes of your people. No, never at all. Shame 
 bites deepest in the bravest hearts, and La Mestina's 
 daughter would be a shame for any man's tent." 
 
 "It is not the Indian blood in you that talks," he pro- 
 tested. " Indian women do not think as you are thinking. 
 You are more white than red. You are more of my race
 
 HER MOTHER'S STORY. 155 
 
 than your mother's. Don't your own heart tell you that, 
 child?" 
 
 He was closer to her, leaning, tired, on the stone bench, 
 his face pale from fatigue, and earnest in its pleading. She 
 was so dear so much to be desired! Just then the rest of 
 the world was as nothing compared with his wish for the 
 proud heart of the little squaw who trembled at every 
 tender word of his. Would she never reach her hands 
 willingly to meet his? What was the secret of her strength? 
 Even in the midst of his pleading that query came to him. 
 He saw her lay her hand on the eagle-claw on her breast, 
 but the beak or the talons pressed against her flesh told 
 him nothing, and he knew nothing, of the vow of her life, 
 for his sake, to her Indian god. 
 
 " I hear your words," she said, looking away from him. 
 " Both the white and the red blood of my heart answers; 
 but " and she evaded his hand and reached the edge of 
 the cliff "below there is a quick way to die see! Just 
 one fall and the bones would break, and the hands of ^louise 
 could work for you never again. Listen for I tell you! 
 When the day comes that I help you to be ashamed of the 
 Indian girl, the night will find me there for the wolves to 
 eat. I have said it to Manitou I say it! " 
 
 He shivered as though the south wind had really swept 
 to him across her dead face. In that moment, at the thought 
 of losing her, he loved her. 
 
 " What can I say to you? " he whispered. " I would not 
 want you different from what you are, my wild eagle of 
 the heights. It is the thought of others seeing you and 
 wanting you that puts me crazy. Your life shall be sacred 
 to me believe me. If I should lose you " 
 
 She smiled as one wise in years would smile at the cause- 
 less dread of a child. The very spirit of motherhood, that 
 is a part of every womanly love, shone in her softened eyes 
 as she bent toward him.
 
 156 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "Come," she said; "too many words have been spoken. 
 The day dies while we talk, and the air of the night is poison 
 to sick bodies. When ^louise is faithless, you can treat 
 her as the Indians treat their faithless squaws. Come; the 
 way is long for your feet, and your face looks tired already. 
 To rest on your bed of pine is best. Come! " 
 
 And in the gloaming, tender with promises of repose, 
 they walked in quiet to their rock dwelling. The cool 
 shadows were moist with the kiss of the dew, and sweet 
 silences surrounded them. In an odd way he felt glad that 
 she had triumphed that she was still the untamed creature 
 who had fled from his whispers; and though she walked 
 beside him, he felt it was as a bird that perches on one's 
 hand only so long as the fingers make no attempt to im- 
 prison it. 
 
 There is a wondrous fascination to some natures in snar- 
 ing game like that; not an ethereal phase of love, perhaps, 
 but nevertheless a true one, and it left its impress on the 
 two lives under the cliff for all the days that followed. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 HER SONGS. 
 
 AFTER that one passionate outbreak in the gloaming, no 
 word was uttered of the thought that filled 'each heart. 
 They worked together in the days as he grew stronger, and 
 he learned, from sheer ennui, to cut the fringe of cariboo- 
 skin as it was wanted for hunting-shirts, or select the colors 
 of beads with which to make moccasins and collars gay. In
 
 HER SONGS. 157 
 
 their speech they were more like boyish companions than 
 ever before; and her visits were few and very short to the 
 settlement at High-Low. Luxuries for the sick man were 
 not needed so often, and she would sell nothing to Antoine 
 that she could trade through Redney's hands Redney, who 
 was drifting so far from her of late, and whose impatience 
 at her life in the forest increased with every visit he made 
 down the river, where civilization was supposed to exist. 
 
 But he bought the cariboo-skin for her work, and carried 
 to Farwell the beaded garments she made, and seemed to 
 have little time for questions or answers when he did come, 
 only that he was more prosperous; he would help her with 
 money if she chose. 
 
 But Dunbar objected. 
 
 " It is hard enough for me to know you see and talk to 
 men," he said, jealously, "without knowing that you take 
 money from them; and then," he added, more lightly, "on 
 this plantation it is the ' sultana who goes to Ispahan,' and 
 the poor sultan, left in his cave, has nothing to do but 
 think angry, jealous things until she comes back, and never 
 a dancing-girl to help the time pass." 
 
 And then he had to repeat for her the poem, as he had 
 many another, in the summer evenings; but her eyes 
 darkened at the unfaithfulness in this one. 
 
 " Men may laugh at it in the song, and it sounds pretty," 
 she said, "but if the woman was an Indian wife they would 
 tie her hands and her feet to unbroken colts and rend her 
 to pieces. That is better than making songs about her, or 
 making her pay a few dollars to the white men's chief 
 (judge), like I hear of. I hear that in the white men's 
 country their dollars can pay for all things." 
 
 But he did not care to discuss white men's laws and 
 their many-sided exits in the face of her primitive and 
 decided ideas of justice.
 
 158 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 "I wonder your people have so few songs, when they 
 have so much to make songs about," he remarked. " Your 
 race should have a poet." 
 
 "Our words are not singing words," she answered; " not 
 now. May be once it was all different; may be they made 
 songs, and laughed, and wept. But they have nearly all 
 forgotten. Their hearts have been touched with pains, and 
 the old nations are dead. They will sing laughing songs 
 never any more." 
 
 "But you sing," he persisted. "I have heard you of 
 late, in the morning, sometimes, when you thought me still 
 sleeping; and some of the songs seemed pretty, though the 
 words were not plain to me, and the airs are a little too 
 sad. Where did you learn? " 
 
 "Where do the birds learn?" she answered. "The 
 Indian learns as they learn, unless it is the Indian of the 
 church who sings for the priest. Ah! it is pretty when 
 they sing like that. Henri did sing greatest of all, so they 
 said. I loved singing when I listened to his words." 
 
 " Come here," he said, surlily, but with laughing eyes. 
 She did not obey, but did cease her work and look up in 
 wonder. 
 
 " Do you know I am jealous of that priest you used to 
 sing with and like so well? Do you know what he will do? 
 He will find you again some day and take you away from 
 me." 
 
 " Not from you, no," she contradicted. " But if it is 
 because he sings well, why do not you too? May be you 
 sing better still; then you can be jealous no more. So 
 try." 
 
 When she entered into the spirit of a jest he found her 
 adorable; the only thing that bored him was her serious- 
 ness that was so seldom lightened. But she almost laughed 
 as she looked at him and bantered him to sing.
 
 HER SONGS. 159 
 
 "What song, then what kind of a song?" he asked; and 
 she smiled again. 
 
 " The kind of a song comes from the kind of a mind the 
 singer has. That is how it is with the Indian, if the 
 Indian is a true singer. I hear no true singers among the 
 whites." 
 
 " A true singer! Now what do you mean by that?" 
 
 She shook her head. " If you do not know, there is no 
 other name to tell you by. A true singer, that is all. He 
 that is one makes music of the thoughts in his heart. If 
 they are glad, then he sings proudly; and if they are of 
 sorrow, he has no laughing music to sing; and the same 
 song is not sung twice by the true singer. Long ago, it is 
 said that when the dead came back they spoke often 
 through the words of the true singers and told of things to 
 be, but that is no more. May be it is because the Indian is 
 not so good as he was, and the good dead keep far away, 
 like the angels of the white man, who did walk on the 
 ground once, but who hide in the white clouds now. 
 May be, I do not know; but the dead speak but little now, 
 though the true singers themselves are of them, for few live." 
 
 "Then your people have poets?" he said, after listening 
 to her soft, slow history of the true singers, of whom he had 
 never before heard. " Poets? Yes, that is what we call 
 the song-makers, and the prophets who give us new thoughts 
 and tell them in music. And your people have the same, 
 but no books to keep their words in." 
 
 " No, only the rocks of Arrow Lake, and the marks were 
 made on them before the white men ever looked on our 
 lands. The old people say there are more of the pictured 
 rocks toward the big sea, but their meaning is lost for- 
 gotten, like the words of the true singers." 
 
 "Surely, all their words are not forgotten. Have you 
 no memory of a lullaby or a war-song you can tell me of?"
 
 160 SQUAW 
 
 " I? No. I did remember some Henri sung yes, for a 
 long time; but they are gone, and he sings only the church 
 thoughts now no eagle-songs, no song for the sun that 
 rises." 
 
 "Always Henri! Have you no memory of the past but 
 of him?" 
 
 " No good ones, and none of songs, for our singing was 
 always together, when I was yet little. The days were 
 good then, and the old people would look glad and listen 
 when our songs were said. Yes, the days were good days. 
 All the world was happy then, so I thought." 
 
 "You must sing for me as you sung for him," he said, 
 pleadingly. " And why should you not? I care for you 
 most. No church would be strong enough to take me 
 from you." 
 
 " May be," she answered, musingly. " The church might 
 not be strong in your heart it is not with the white men; 
 but other things are strong the thoughts of their kindred 
 and the world on the other side of the mountains." 
 
 " But if I should never go back there if the charm of 
 these peaks grows too great then what?" 
 
 "Oh-h!" she breathed, with a great flush of gladness 
 creeping over her face. " If that should be, the songs could 
 be sung again on this hill of the hunted, for they would 
 sing in my heart." 
 
 " You are so glad you would hide me always here? Sing 
 me a song, then, if you want me to believe that." 
 
 "You believe you know," she said, simply; " but I will 
 sing if the words will come." 
 
 The stars, like picket-fires along the line of night, were 
 one by one flashing signals of serenity to each other, and 
 all the earth seemed lying there below in a misty cloak of 
 repose that shone dusk and blue in the faint light. It was 
 the hour of all others in which they were apt to talk at
 
 HER SONGS. 161 
 
 ease; the hour when the light grew too dim for work, and 
 dreams crowd close in the silence. 
 
 She leaned forward, looking across the measureless dis- 
 tances, a faint little smile about her lips. After a little he 
 saw her rest her chin on her hands, and saw her head nod 
 as if keeping time to a low murmur of sound that came 
 from her lips. As it grew louder she glanced around at 
 him in a half-pleased way, as if at her own success, and then 
 the murmur grew into a chant, never loud, the very whis- 
 per of a song, but sunp- to a wild, strange rhythm of sound, 
 unlike any he had ever heard. As near as the translation 
 can give it in English, her words were: 
 
 " High on the brow of the mountain, 
 Up where the sun loves to linger, 
 There hide I the best of my treasures; 
 There guard I, and all the dead help me! 
 They speak through the leaves in the sunshine, 
 They look from the stars in the night-time, 
 They talk low and tell me of gladness, 
 They cry loud and tell me of sorrow; 
 Yet I am their child, and they hold me- 
 The eagle, the last of their king blood. 
 The heart that I love they will strengthen- 
 Believe it, for all the dead whisper ! 
 Believe it and rest, oh, my stranger ! 
 Sleep sweet in the nest of the eagle, 
 Sleep soft as a babe " 
 
 She broke off abruptly, and, after a little, faltering 
 attempt to laugh, bent her head in her hands, and, despite 
 his words of praise, or encouragement, shook her head. 
 
 " ^llouise is not of the true singers," she insisted; "she 
 can not sing far, and the clouds drop over the trail of her 
 thoughts; she is lost in the song, as the strange hunter is 
 lost in the snow-fields. She can not see far, as the true 
 singers see." 
 
 " That is because you choose music so sad, though the 
 11
 
 162 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 words are sweet. Sing something bright, gay, like the 
 French hunters sing as they pass along the rivers. Have 
 you never heard their boat-songs? There is the quick 
 swing as of a dance in their music. You understand? 
 Have you no such songs of the boats in your store? " 
 
 "The boat, the boat?" she said, and covered her eyes; 
 " yes, the boat that springs over the lakes as the deer 
 through the woodland. They carry light hearts, the boats. 
 I have seen the gold-hunters go laughing down the rapids 
 in them, glad to go back to the work: You will go, laugh- 
 ing, some day, may be." 
 
 " If I do, you will laugh with me," he said, and smiled at 
 the thought. " Sing for me again, and tell me of the boat 
 that will carry us." 
 
 She looked at him strangely in the half-light. 
 
 " Is the tree yet grown for the boat that will carry us? " 
 she asked; and then, as if answering her own words, she 
 sung, in the same low, sweet semitones, with the beat of the 
 oars through the rhythm: 
 
 " The boat is built, 
 
 And the water sings 
 To you. Dear heart, good-by! 
 It will bear you far, 
 
 On its tireless wings, 
 From me. Good-by! good-by!" 
 
 He reached over and touched her hand. 
 
 "Do not sing any more," he said, moved in a strange 
 way by her words ; " that ' good-by ' is like a knife in the 
 neart when you say it like that." 
 
 She shuddered at the mention of the knife; the ghost of 
 a blade that flashed in the lamp-light seemed ever at her 
 side. 
 
 " Mine will be the heart, then, that the knife touches," 
 she said, and arose. " But I will sing no more. The night
 
 HER SONGS. 165 
 
 is a night so much of beauty that it makes the heart ache r 
 and sad thoughts come because all life can not be like it 
 of quiet and peace, like a child that sleeps innocent under 
 the eyes of its mother. That is how the mountains look 
 to-night, under the sky and the stars ; but to-morrow 
 storms may come, the sleep of peace will not last; and the 
 ways of the earth are the ways of our spirits, and the tears 
 will come to the eyes because of the days when the beauty 
 and innocence will not be." 
 
 He caught her dress, and laid his head on her moccasined 
 feet as she passed where he lay. 
 
 " Never say that you are of Indian thought or blood," he 
 commanded, tenderly. " What you are I don't know, for 
 you seem so many things. No Indian is like you. You 
 make me wish I had known no school but that of the 
 mountains, and had never a memory beyond them. If I 
 had not, this life and you near me would be like heaven. 
 You are nobler than anything I have known. Your good- 
 ness has made me ashamed many times. I think it will do- 
 me good to confess it like this at your feet, my little Indian 
 priestess and poet. Only the memory of the world creeps 
 back sometimes, like the serpent that crept between the 
 first lovers, and I grow unreasonable and sad. Have you 
 no songs that will drive away the devil when he comes to 
 men? " 
 
 " I believed there was a devil when I was very little," 
 she answered; " not now. I think now the devil is only 
 the evil in men's spirits. They can drive it away them- 
 selves if they want to. Many never try." 
 
 But she must have tried after that, for he heard gayer 
 songs from her for many days songs of the chase, and 
 quaint conceits of the spirits that guard the different game 
 of the hills and hold it in reserve for the true hunter when he 
 comes. Other songs of the stars above, and the blossoms
 
 164 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 that open their lips only when certain of the twinkling 
 eyes shine brightly on the earth; songs of the birds, and 
 the messages they bear north and south in the different 
 seasons. 
 
 He had lived among the frontier people for many, many 
 moons, and sat at the camp-fire of Indian hunters, but in 
 all their tales and legends had learned nothing of the spir- 
 itual or sentimental side of their nature that suggested the 
 wealth of discernment that he found expressed in the 
 chants or untrammeled songs uttered by the girl who 
 seemed to him a fit poet for the writing of her people's 
 history. 
 
 What was there she did not seem to him in these days? 
 a boyish hunter in the early morning, snaring the fish or 
 the small game for their larder, or kneeling like any other 
 little squaw to bake her bread in the ashes, or bend her 
 dark head over the fashioning of garments from the skin 
 of the cariboo. He could talk to her then freely and easily. 
 She was as a little slave; he was the one master she 
 served. 
 
 But when the night fell, the darkness drew her, some way, 
 above the squaw who cooked his food. He grew to have 
 fascinating, superstitious fancies about her in the night- 
 time. She was as a voice that spoke of strange things from 
 the darkness; weird, impossible things, that yet seemed 
 natural enough to hear up there on the heights sacred of 
 old to the outcasts of her race. 
 
 Was she enough of an Indian witch to know that she 
 was winning a higher place in his thoughts than before? 
 Anyway, her songs grew gladder, and held little notes of 
 joy unshadowed in them. Some of them he caught and 
 wrote down in a little pocket-book he carried, and days 
 after surprised her by repeating her thoughts set to music. 
 Ah, those happy days! too happy.
 
 HER SONGS. 165- 
 
 One night she came home with softened, tender eyes and 
 sung an odd lullaby with a caressing rhythm through it, 
 and laughed when he asked her what bird had taught it to 
 her. 
 
 "No bird; but I did a strange thing at dusk when I left 
 the store. Some men were along the broad path, and I 
 came by the cabin of the new family. I saw through the 
 door the woman with the little one. It laughed as she 
 sung a song that was so sweet. The mother and the child 
 were like a song themselves a happy song that makes the 
 heart warm. Another woman was there, but she sat in the 
 shadow, and her face was not seen. The child and the 
 gladness in the mother's eyes came with me in my thoughts 
 up the mountain. I wanted to touch the little one once 
 and feel the softness of its hands, but I came away quickly, 
 so that none would see or follow." 
 
 And though he laughed at her, she would talk of the 
 child many times, and in her songs grew the tender notes 
 of mother-birds, for the little home picture of the man and 
 woman and their love gift was a revelation to her of a new 
 life. 
 
 "You will miss the broad path again and pass the cabin," 
 he said, as she left for the trading-post next time; but she 
 only smiled, and left him, loath to go, yet eager to cover the 
 distance that her return might be quick. 
 
 He watched her so long as a glimpse of her could be 
 caught as she descended the mountain. The hours were 
 so long to him alone there. Her presence was all that 
 made life supportable to him in that place. But even their 
 brief partings were worth enduring for the sake of the 
 gladness in her eyes as she came back. 
 
 She was long coming back that evening. Time and 
 again did he go down the hidden way, thinking to please 
 her by going to meet her; but each time, after troubled
 
 166 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 waiting, he returned, thinking she had come back on some 
 other trail. 
 
 And when he did see her it was in surprise, for she 
 appeared so little like the bright young creature who had 
 looked at him with fond, shy eyes in the morning. She 
 seemed tired and her feet lagged heavily, and she avoided 
 meeting his eyes. 
 
 "Yes, I am late," she agreed, wearily. "Sick? No, only 
 I thought of other things than the trail, and I walked far, 
 very far, in the wrong way; that is all." 
 
 "Was it the baby in the white man's house that you 
 thought of," he asked, teasingly. " Did you see it again, 
 and was that what made you forget to come back to me? " 
 
 "I did not forget, but I did see the child; and I am 
 tired, very tired." 
 
 But tired as she was she did not sleep, and when morning 
 came she was still silent and thoughtful. 
 
 "What is in your mind?" he asked many times. "Has 
 anyone followed you? Is it trouble about your work? " 
 
 " No, the work is plenty. I got new work at the post, 
 for the white lady down there all a beaded suit; and she 
 will pay much for it." 
 
 " So you have talked with her. I thought you kept away 
 from women." 
 
 " Yes; but they left messages with Antoine. I knew the 
 money would be good to have, so I went where they live- 
 I will not go again. White women ask many questions." 
 
 He laughed. " Some of them do, but you must not be 
 troubled because of them." 
 
 She cut out the little moccasins and the little gloves for 
 the suit that was to bring much money. 
 
 " She must be a very little woman," he remarked, " and 
 with hands and feet even smaller than your own." 
 
 She made no answer then, but after a little she said:
 
 HER SONGS. 167 
 
 " Do the white women where you live all look white and 
 soft like babies, and do they all dress so clean and fine? 
 Where they cooked in that house looked fine as the altar 
 in the chapel." 
 
 " Oh, no; there are dirty whites as there are dirty Indians. 
 But has that house made you sorry you live with me in a 
 cave? " 
 
 " With you? Listen, I have wanted to ask you. I have 
 thought much of the white women's ways. Does that one, 
 the whitest of all, whose face is on your breast does she 
 live fine like that in some far-off place where many people 
 are? " 
 
 " Does she live so well as a miner's wife in the Selkirks? 
 Why, my child, she is a little girl who owns nearly all of 
 the ' Little Dell,' and in the States has more acres and cat- 
 tle than you could count; the floors where she walks have 
 coverings of velvet, and she has nothing to do but be happy 
 all her life, and nothing to prevent it. There is nothing in 
 these hills so fine as the life she is used to. She is a flower 
 such as grows only in the sunny, sheltered places." 
 
 "Then she could never live long in our mountains," 
 mused the girl, " for even the snow-birds die in our 
 winters." 
 
 "What has put such fancies in your head? " he asked, 
 irritably; "the white woman who lives at the trading- 
 post? Be sure you will see no woman who can ever give 
 you an idea of how lovely she was little Delia! But talk 
 of something else to-day. I want to forget." 
 
 " Is it so hard to do so? Then what if somewhere in the 
 world you cross her path again, and if she looks at you as 
 she looks in the picture laughing? " 
 
 "^louise! " he cried, in sharp protest, "you don't know 
 what you are saying. Be still; never speak of her or of 
 that other life again. I am outside of it all now, and my
 
 168 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 heart grows homesick when you remind me. Let me be 
 content here if I can." 
 
 She nodded her head, and in silence marked on the toe 
 of the moccasin the form of a heart that was to be beaded 
 in scarlet. 
 
 " And I would rather you could avoid the white women 
 when you go down there," he persisted. " They send you 
 home to me like a dark, disturbed shadow of yourself. Since 
 you declare that you are so entirely Indian, I'll just tell you 
 that the less an Indian knows of the white people's ways 
 the better the Indian is. I don't know why it is so, when 
 the white race is supposed to be superior, but results con- 
 firm it. Do you understand? I like you best as you are. 
 Don't try to be like the white women. Don't sit in their 
 houses and let them talk to you." 
 
 " Never any more," she agreed, listlessly. 
 
 All her former interest in the glories of Ewing's cabin 
 had departed. He wondered, as he looked at her, if it was 
 through envy that she came back gloomy from the houses 
 of the whites. Was she, after all, woman enough to long 
 for the purple and fine linen of life? He wondered yet 
 more when, after a long silence, she said in the evening: 
 
 " Would you let me once more see the face you carry for 
 a charm? " 
 
 " Yes," he answered, " if you in return will tell me why 
 you wear on your breast the feathers sacred to the braves. 
 Is that for a charm too? " 
 
 But she would not tell him, only stood stolidly, as if not 
 hearing, until he loosened the chain and .id the locket in 
 her hand, smiling at her childish wn n, for he had no 
 doubt she thought of the little oval frame as of a pretty 
 toy. 
 
 But it was the face she looked at a long, long time, study- 
 ing its fair lines, until, with a quick sigh, she raised her
 
 HER SONGS. 169 
 
 hand to her hair straight, black, unlovely hair when com- 
 pared with the fair halo of gold about the pictured face; 
 and then her eyes fell critically on her own hard hands and 
 her own weather and work stained garb, at the moccasin 
 that was torn, and at the leggings that were ripped and 
 stripped of the gay fringe that once adorned them. For 
 filouise, the maker of gay garments for others, had little 
 time to spend in decking her own beauty of form, even if 
 she had been conscious of its possession, which she was not. 
 
 " I tell you what I think," she said, at last. " The 
 face looks weak and pretty, like a face of a child; but I 
 think that she is stronger than women who have strength. I 
 mean she could get with a look of her eyes what stronger 
 women would beg for; and people will love her in their 
 hearts, though she never did good to anything." 
 
 He looked at her in amazement; the analysis of char- 
 acter was so unlike an Indian, though he felt its accuracy 
 and was irritated at it. The girl criticised was of his 
 order a gay, charming creature, easily comprehended by 
 him, and very attractive to people of taste. To be sure, 
 there was nothing subtle or deep in her personality. Who 
 would wish a girl to possess such attributes? And for this 
 boyish huntress, this witchy songstress even the devoted 
 nurse to speak of her with a note of contempt in her tones 
 was a grievance. He felt angry that the things he and 
 men like him loved were deemed trifling by the half-savage 
 critic, who dressed in rags, and often made a dinner of 
 roots. 
 
 " She was but a child," he said, petulantly, and looked at 
 the fair pictured face. " Why, she was but fifteen years old." 
 
 She laughed shortly, angrily, and turned away. 
 
 "A child! In the year I was fifteen I swam the river 
 where it measured a mile. I was alone on the trail for 
 three days in the mountains, and killed a deer heavier than
 
 170 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 a man could carry. A child! The whites think wen if 
 their boys of twenty can do so much." 
 
 It was the first boastful words he had ever heard from 
 her, and her ill-concealed anger surprised him. 
 
 " Why, filouise! " he began, and reached out his hand 
 with a conciliating smile and gesture. But she drew back, 
 with tremulous lips, and tears in her stormy eyes. 
 
 " Nah! I am but an Indian; keep your fair words for fair 
 faces. The ways of filouise are not gentle ways, and she 
 is best alone." 
 
 And then she passed quickly, as a bird that flies low to 
 cover, and he sat alone in the silence, thinking that she 
 had never appeared so like to other women as when she 
 had turned on him with angry, tear-wet eyes. And the cause 
 of it? Was she, for all her strange, passionate threats and 
 devotion, only a petulant child at heart? 
 
 But it was no heart of a child from which a wail as of 
 prophecy was sent out from that nook in the cliff far above. 
 Creeping close, he listened to the words sung lowly, and 
 the sadness and despair of them brought an ache to his 
 heart. The shadow of her own young desolate soul seemed 
 to fall over him, and a realization of pain such as had never 
 touched his life. He did not speak to or interrupt her; 
 he did not even see her face; only the voice floated 
 weirdly out from that altar of stone where he felt she was 
 kneeling the voice with the sound of tears in it: 
 " Alone! lone am I. 
 
 The winds cry my call; 
 The heart sno\vs are nigh 
 When love's bright leaves fall. 
 And they fall, 
 And they fall 
 On the grave of my dead, 
 On the grave 
 Of a life 
 That is dead; that is deadl"
 
 A PRIEST OF THE WILDS. 171 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 A PRIEST OF THE WILDS. 
 
 IF there is any one time more than another when an 
 Indian village appears a place loathsome to a mind of refine- 
 ment, that time surely is in a season of sickness, when the 
 seed of contagious disease is scattered among their ill- 
 prepared tribes. 
 
 Year after year the quaking demon of the ague haunts 
 their marsh-lands, and leaves the families of fishers power- 
 less to contend with the deadly fevers that creep up on the 
 hot winds of the south. The cholera, small-pox, and other 
 devastating ills sweep annually across scattered tribes, 
 leaving only remnants of families to be attacked with 
 renewed force in the season to follow. 
 
 In such a village, one which the mightiest of hunters and 
 the strongest of their braves would avoid, there dwelt 
 through the days and weeks of that summer the man of 
 whom Neil Dunbar had heard so much in that haven of the 
 unnamed nation. 
 
 The " red death," so called because of the fatality of it 
 among those of Indian blood, had raged with cholera-like 
 fatality from the time the frost left the marshes. 
 
 " If I only had you across there in my own hills," their 
 priest and nurse would say often, and point to the lines of 
 blue in the east that showed where the mountains were. 
 "But here! it weakens the strongest to live on these levels 
 where the soil is gray and white in the sun, and where the 
 water stands green in the pools." 
 
 For they were not of his people or his race, these creat-
 
 172 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 ures whose bodies were squat, and who reminded him of 
 fish, for they could neither walk nor run as his tall, stalwart 
 people of the hills could do; but swim! there was no water- 
 born creature that could live more at home in the rivers 
 than they. The " fisher people," they were called, being 
 a mongrel lot whose ancestors had been wreckage from the 
 Cathlamets, the Waak-i-cums, and the Clatsops, who, too 
 weak to hold their own against the stronger tribes of the 
 fishing-grounds, had crept northward to the desolate 
 stretches of glade-land where they dragged their nets and 
 their lives sluggishly through the seasons, and made ham- 
 pers of reeds to trade to the hunters and fishers who packed 
 dried meats for use in winter. No herds were owned by 
 them. A plurality of wives was all that distinguished the 
 man of wealth from the pauper among them, and the 
 man who possessed the greatest number was chief of the 
 lodges, by common consent. Surely a field for a mission- 
 ary; but in the actual care of the people, young and old, 
 in their sickness, there were left but few moments for the 
 religious teaching that is the work of priests. 
 
 Their filth, their degradation, and miseries might have 
 made many a mind wonder if, after all, it was not a mistake 
 to try to prolong lives like theirs; swinish souls, with no 
 sort of comprehension of the devotion to a supposed duty 
 which sent the tall priest of the huntsmen down from the 
 mountains, into the very resting-place of horrid death. 
 
 But he baptized them; he closed their eyes with the ben- 
 ediction of the faith for which he lived; not a touch or 
 speech from him to show that his duty could be a repulsive 
 thing when it came to the acceptance of such creatures by 
 the shepherd of souls. 
 
 And if at times he escaped into the sleepless stillness of the 
 night, and envied the stars that seemed gemming the brow 
 of his distant mountains, he did penance by added devotion
 
 A PRIEST OF THE WILDS. 173 
 
 to his charges until the gray dawn crept over the sullen 
 lands. 
 
 Few of the older people were left alive, and the rest were 
 like frightened children, needing a commander. An at- 
 tempt had even been made by some of the terror-stricken 
 to burn the lodges with the dead and the fatally sick, offer- 
 ing up this as a sacrifice to the spirit they believe exists in 
 flame an evil power that they do homage to through fear, 
 and one entirely antagonistic to that which they suppose 
 answers the plea of their medicine men for many fish. 
 
 More than once, in closing the eyes of some young dead 
 thing, he felt a throb of thankfulness that the other child, 
 the one of the mountains and the eagle's eyrie, whom he 
 had cared for in her babyhood, was free somewhere on 
 those blue heights. Her life, unfit as it was for a girl, 
 seemed so immeasurably above that which these creatures 
 lived and died in. Even if she died somewhere up there, 
 no death on the hills could come in so horrible a garb as 
 the pestilence in these fetid swamps. 
 
 Once he heard of La Mestina. She had been seen by a 
 hunter who was going north to Lake Quesnelle. She was 
 up in the Big Bend region, and she was alone. The man 
 had an idea that the little squaw, her daughter, had run away 
 from her; had heard something to that effect, but did not 
 remember well. 
 
 Run away! The thoughts of the priest went back to the 
 other time she had done so poor passionate, brave little 
 ^llouise! 
 
 " If she has fled from Mestina, then she is gone also from 
 the places of the white people; she will live in the hills," 
 he thought, and tried to be satisfied. He feared less the 
 wildness of the forests for the child than he did the haunts 
 of men. Yet the bodies of the disease-stricken amphibians 
 were forgotten ever and anon in his anxiety for the life and
 
 174 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 the soul of the young creature for whom he felt in many 
 ways responsible. 
 
 Only through him had she knelt at the altar of his God, 
 or bent her wild will by his persuasion toward the faith 
 from which her mother had turned. Her first communion, 
 her confessions all her stumbling steps toward the ac- 
 quirement of divine grace his voice, his hand, had led her 
 to. She belonged to him as to no other, if only by the grant 
 of the old people that day long ago when he had borne her 
 from death in the nest of the eagle. 
 
 In the months of late he had been making plans for her 
 for the child that was growing to womanhood and whom 
 he longed to see among those devoted women of the East- 
 ern convents. It was all he could think of for her. She 
 was unlike either the white people he knew or the Indians 
 they had known together; only in the bosom of the church 
 could a sure refuge be found for such a stray. 
 
 Yet the days went by, and the people died, and others 
 sickened, and he seemed tied endlessly to their level lands; 
 and never a traveler passed by whom he could send a mes- 
 sage to the mountains. 
 
 He envied every bird that flew to the east, and only the 
 patience of the Indian blood in him made it possible for 
 him to murmur prayers and await their fulfillment. 
 
 And one evening at dusk he arose from his work of lay- 
 ing a child's body in the earth, and turned to his one 
 assistant a boy, yet strong, whom either shame or devo- 
 tion kept close to the "black gown." 
 
 "Have you ever been so far as the hills that rise?" and 
 he pointed to the faint blue waves that touched the pearly 
 sky; but the boy shook his head; the mountains were as 
 another world to him. 
 
 " No hunter you know in all this marsh-land who would 
 carry word there that I can not take myself ? "
 
 A PRIEST OF THE WILDS. 175 
 
 " If I could go on the water," began the youth, doubt- 
 fully; but the priest shook his head. In his own country a 
 dozen messengers would have answered to his need, with 
 never a question as to distance or danger. 
 
 " There is one there," said the boy, pointing northward, 
 " whose mother you buried the day before this. He moves 
 over much ground. If you could watch alone to-night, I 
 will find him may be." 
 
 And Father Henri watched alone, many times praying 
 for a soul on the mountains while a soul was flitting from a 
 senseless body within reach of his hand in that marsh-land 
 swamp. All at once a great sense of fear had touched him 
 for her. If it ? had not been for the helpless creatures about 
 him who had no other hope! 
 
 Severely did he take himself to task for the impulse to 
 desert these people, who, even to a priest, a disdainer of 
 the perishable body, seemed hopeless. Only the grace of 
 God and the charity of the saints could ever leaven that 
 mass of humanity into conscious, enlightened personalities. 
 
 They caused him to think with a great gratitude of his 
 people of the hills, of the hardy hunters, and the women, 
 chaste and modest, among whom he had grown; and among 
 them all his thoughts would wander so strangely to the one 
 child who was somewhere on those heights needing a 
 friend, and, he feared, possessing none but him her brother 
 Henri, her father confessor. 
 
 "She is no worse off than many another girl of our 
 people," he told himself; " why, then, should the face of this 
 one come so suddenly and strangely between my eyes and 
 the dying faces about me? It is as a temptation of the 
 devil to draw my thoughts from holy offices. Asperge me 
 Domine" and he repeated a Latin prayer fervently, think- 
 ing between the sentences, "But ISlouise can be no 
 emissary of evil powers; the child was good always."
 
 176 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Something strong had taken hold of his heart a troub- 
 lous something as vague as unformed prophecy. It was 
 confusing his thoughts and lifting him above the swamp- 
 lands of the "red death;" and every rustle of wind in the 
 grass seemed like a voice calling him to the mountains. 
 
 And in the dusk of that day the child he thought of sung 
 as the " true singers " sing the cry of a loneliness to come. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 IN THE HOME OF THE WHITE WOMEN. 
 
 HIGH-LOW had been properly shocked at the spectacle 
 of a favorite comrade cut at by the little squaw, and 
 properly interested in the disappearance of the former; 
 but as the boom of prosperity drifted up the river with the 
 warm season those incidents, together with other notable 
 ones, had been left to find their own place in the pages of 
 High-Low history. Dunbar was of the past, a past when 
 the post was in doubtful uncertainty as to any future. 
 That was over. A future was assured, and a golden 
 present almost within reach. 
 
 The mine men affirmed that good luck had been brought 
 to the hills by Miss Delia; others said it was by the baby; 
 anyway it had arrived, and, in the commotion that ensued, 
 the mystery of the man's loss seemed forgotten by the 
 majority. 
 
 Of course Miss Delia herself did not belong to the 
 majority, for never a ride or walk did she take without the 
 thought of the handsome fellow who was lost to her; and
 
 IN THE HOME OF THE WHITE WOMEN. 177 
 
 in all the ranks of those who flocked into the little valley 
 she could see no one equal to him him, the prince charm- 
 ing of her childhood. Though, to confess the truth, her 
 regret, while sincere, did not prevent her from coquetting 
 with many men of many minds in most things, but unani- 
 mous in their opinion of Miss Delia's perfection. 
 
 Not that she was heartless; she was no more so than the 
 average girl who likes attention, and there was not a man 
 in the hills from whom she would not have turned loyally 
 at sight of the missing one. But he did not come and the 
 others did, and she was only a girl, after all. 
 
 But to be only a girl, and not a very big girl, either, she 
 had grown to be a power in the settlement, a sort of auto- 
 crat of the valley, her only rival being the all-pervading 
 spirit of Mr. Clevents, who had suddenly adopted High- 
 Low, boom and all, and managed to have a substantial 
 interest in every substantial scheme afloat within its limits. 
 
 " Tell you what it is, Mrs. Nannie," said the girl, apropos 
 of nothing, "if I ever conclude to trade Uncle off for 
 another business partner, I'll propose to that handsome 
 ranger, for that is what he seems to me a ranger into all 
 professions and enterprises." 
 
 " And what would you do with the other ninety and nine 
 aspirants for the same position whistle them down the 
 wind?" 
 
 "Oh, no; sing them a song and ask them to supper. 
 That would appease all of them I am acquainted with." 
 
 " Perhaps;" and then, after a little silence, " Do you 
 notice how baby seems to miss Redney? When any of the 
 other men come in he looks so eager, and then so disap- 
 pointed. I told Milt yesterday I believed his chum was an 
 Indian wizard." 
 
 " And what did he say? " asked the girl, who was 
 smoothing out her rebellious crown of tresses, 
 
 12
 
 178 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 "Well, really, I don't believe he said anything," returned 
 Nannie. " But he would never doubt very strongly any 
 attributes that boy laid claim to. Those two have a 
 religious sort of faith in each other; and I know Redney's 
 affection for Milt is all that kept his royal sulkiness here 
 after our arrival." 
 
 " How modest you are! Why do you not say my arrival? " 
 laughed the other. " Don't you remember how slow he was 
 to accept me as a citizen? " 
 
 "A frame of mind he must have recovered from," remarked 
 Mrs. Nannie, with significant dryness, " since that whip and 
 spur look like proof of an open bribery to retain you." 
 
 The girl's eyes turned to the glittering bits of a riding 
 outfit, and smiled, though her cheeks did flush a little at the 
 words. 
 
 " Well, if you had heard the ungracious way in which he 
 presented them, you might form another opinion," she said, 
 carelessly. " He said that since I did go riding around with 
 tenderfeet, I might as well go ' right,' and have something 
 to manage my mule with; and that little silver spur is really 
 lovely. Who would have thought of his buying such a 
 thing; and I wonder how much it cost." 
 
 " Rather an unusual thought for you, isn't it? I'm afraid 
 you count the cost of things too seldom." 
 
 "For myself, perhaps," she agreed; "but it is of the 
 boy I am thinking now, and of the hole these trinkets must 
 have made in his earnings; for I don't suppose even the 
 superintendent of a portage gang receives a princely salary 
 in this region." 
 
 " And while you are thinking about him at all, why not 
 count the cost of treating the poor half-breed as though he 
 were some dethroned prince? " suggested the little matron, 
 warningly. 
 
 " Why, Mrs. Ewing "
 
 IN THE HOME OF THE WHITE WOMEN. 17& 
 
 "Now, now, don't get indignant! It is very lovely of 
 you, and all that; shows the right Christian spirit, I suppose; 
 only I've an idea that the natives here would have to get 
 used to the Christian spirit by degrees. Too much of it at 
 a time is likely to turn the heads of the best of them." 
 
 "I thought Mr. Redney's head pretty level," returned 
 the girl, carelessly; " and he is decidedly the best and most 
 interesting specimen I've seen, barring the little moccasin- 
 maker. I know she would be interesting if only she could 
 be made to talk; and her voice is so musical! I hardly 
 knew whether she had fallen in love with me or was afraid 
 of me, but her speechless gaze was something awful to face, 
 though she is so pretty! " 
 
 "Oh, her wonder was at the splendor of the new riding- 
 dress, the glitter of the spur and whip. No doubt they ar$ 
 the first of their kind in this region," hazarded Mrs. Ewing, 
 rather averse to the discussion of the girl's new specimen. 
 " She is, I suppose, simply an ignorant little imbecile, with 
 brains enough to follow a pattern in beads on deer- skin, but. 
 with not a spark of the intelligence you fancied shone in 
 her eyes. The ragged, staring creature said nothing 
 because she thought nothing, I suppose." 
 
 "Well, she is pretty, anyway," insisted the girl; "and do 
 you know I believe Mr. Clevents must have thought so too, 
 for after she left I watched her she is so wonderfully 
 graceful for a squaw and, looking across the ravine, I 
 saw that gentleman watching her too, and not with the 
 naked eye, either. I saw him, with that field-glass in his 
 hand, climb up where that bald knob is you know you can 
 see so many peaks from there; and for three full hours he 
 never came down, and the glass was turned always toward 
 the mountain Mr. Redney told us the legends of." 
 
 " The mountain of your tipsy apparition? " 
 
 " Never mind. I'm going up there again some day when
 
 180 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Redney can go along. You know I have not such a great 
 while left for excursions; this summer is going." 
 
 And a shortly drawn breath, like a smothered sigh, fol- 
 lowed her words, to tell that the loss the summer had 
 brought was never forgotten, even for the later attractions 
 of "specimens." 
 
 "And is it not nearly time for your uncle's return?'' 
 asked Mrs. Ewing. " Oh, how I shall miss you! " 
 
 " Never mind. We will have the distinction of being 
 remembered in the history of High-Low as the first ' fam- 
 ily ' women within its limits, and that alone is worth a pil- 
 grimage up the Columbia; " and then she consulted a letter, 
 over which she wrinkled her pretty brows. 
 
 "Someone has been telling that uncle of mine fairy 
 stories about the terrible midsummer floods up here," she 
 observed, "and he is afraid a land-slide, or something 
 equally terrible, will overtake us if we should linger through 
 August. It seems ridiculous to fear snows in the mountains 
 more in midsummer than all the rest of the year 
 combined." 
 
 " Well, I confess I can't see the ridiculous side of the 
 question so much as the fearful," acknowledged the other- 
 " The stories I have heard here of floods from the snow 
 in the summer are not reassuring to pioneers. Think of 
 that Indian village that was buried on the other range last 
 summer! " 
 
 " Oh, think of something more pleasant," suggested the 
 girl " of how surely your fortune is to be made in this 
 Selkirk country, and how charming it will seem to have you 
 to come and see in the summers that are to be. I shall feel 
 like a native when I come through the Arrow lakes next 
 time. You need not be surprised if I even discard civil- 
 ized raiment at the railroad terminus, and make my canoe- 
 trip in beads and deer-skin. Really, I am longing to see
 
 IN THE HOME OF THE WHITE WOMEN. 181 
 
 that Indian dress. How soon was it to be done? I forget 
 what she said about that." 
 
 " I don't think she said," returned Mrs. Ewing. " I 
 inferred that her acceptance of the commission was a favor 
 you must be duly grateful for, and that time was not to be 
 considered in the productions of such an artist as your 
 ragged prot6g6." 
 
 " You are too nice a woman to be sarcastic," commented 
 the girl; " and I've an idea that her ragged highness is too 
 independent to be the protege of anyone, though, if she 
 were not why, you've awakened a bit of inspiration in 
 me if she were not, what a delightful novelty it would 
 be to take so pretty an Indian back home with me! Nannie 
 Ewing, if lucre or wooing words can entice her, she is 
 mine." 
 
 " I believe you," said Milt Ewing, thrusting his head in 
 at the window; " especially if the words are yours. But 
 what diabolical plot is it I have overheard but a part of? " 
 
 " Oh, she is possessed with the idea of taking back with 
 her some live-stock in the shape of Indians. She wants to 
 begin with a young squaw who makes moccasins and such 
 things." 
 
 "A squaw! Mr. Ewing, that title gives you no idea of 
 the character I mean. She is a rarity, I know, and as pretty 
 as her name filouise, or Alouise. May be you know her. 
 Redney told me her mother was a real princess in their 
 tribe." 
 
 Ewing nodded. 
 
 "The most appalling female I ever met, even on the 
 frontier," he observed. The girl is a degree or so better, 
 I believe, but hardly the sort you would want as a com- 
 panion." 
 
 " I'm sure Redney knows her," began the girl; and Red- 
 ney's partner smiled.
 
 182 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " But that boy knows everybody, good and bad, in the 
 country," he returned, " so that argues no excellence; and 
 an Indian would have to be pretty bad if he wouldn't treat 
 her friendly on account, may be, of that Indian mother 
 that he never knew. But if you really want a hostile cap- 
 tive to take home, you'd better go to one of the mission- 
 schools and get a good ' church ' red that can say its cate- 
 chism without a break." 
 
 "But it isn't any Indian I want," she persisted; "it is 
 this particular one that is so pretty and so odd." 
 
 " Well, you can't have her," he said, smiling teasingly, 
 "so find another plaything that's a good child; for down 
 ^here at the camp a swamp red arrived an hour ago. 
 Antoine says he came from their priest to get word of the 
 girl, to have her go back to their church, I suppose. Any- 
 way, he is a messenger from the priest, and is searching for 
 your charmer; and the church is a power among these 
 Chinook country reds." 
 
 "Well, I'm not strikingly irreligious, but in this case I'm 
 going to pit myself against the emissary of holiness. Where 
 is that herald from the swamps? and where is the girl sup- 
 posed to live? " 
 
 " I heard Antoine tell him that no one knew," he replied 
 to the latter question; " and the last I saw of Mr. Strange 
 Indian, Clevents had tackled him, and they seemed to be 
 trying very hard to understand each other. He does speak 
 the most outlandish guttural jargon you ever heard. If he 
 is a specimen of the flat-land tribes, I don't think you will 
 want to make any collections or adoptions among them." 
 
 " So Mr. Clevents is trying to cut me out, is he? " queried 
 the young lady, frowningly. " So much for the constancy 
 of man. I was flattering myself that I filled the horizon of 
 his thoughts, and behold, he has hidden interests interest* 
 in squaws! "
 
 IN THE HOME OF THE WHITE WOMEN. 185' 
 
 " But he is not a bad sort of a fellow, for all that," 
 returned Ewing; "and one thing sure: when he takes a 
 liking to anyone, he doesn't change his mind often. See 
 how persistently he has tried to help Redney." 
 
 " Oh Redney! " and her tone was an odd combination 
 of contempt and fondness. " Where is the virtue required 
 for liking him? I think it would be a rather small soul that 
 did not like that boy. I am fond of him myself." 
 
 " Your fondness is too frank to be very deep, I guess," 
 remarked Mrs. Ewing; but the girl shook her head. 
 
 " Don't you believe it; I am neither more nor less than I 
 pretend; and I'm sure that the most decided liking I ever 
 had for anyone and that was poor Neil was plain to all 
 observers, and I frankly did my half of the courting. But, 
 of course, that was all very different from this ranger-like, 
 out-of-door comradeship with the mountaineers." 
 
 "Of course," agreed Ewing, curtly; "but some of 
 them might come to grief through not being bright enough 
 to understand the difference," and then he walked away 
 from the window, leaving the principal stockholder of the 
 " Little Dell " mine in a state of bewilderment. 
 
 " Now, what did I say? " she asked. " Nothing to vex 
 anyone, yet surely Mr. Ewing spoke as if I tried his 
 patience in some way. But men are such incomprehensible 
 creatures at the best." 
 
 " And women never are? " said Mrs. Ewing, with a quiz- 
 zical smile. "But don't mind Milt; he's been out of sorts 
 ever since Redney was up last. He misses him at his work, 
 too; and do you know, Milt is just superstitious enough to 
 think that boy a sort of mascot, and the prospects for 
 silver much less because his luck has gone down the river 
 with that canoe party. And Redney himself is not quite 
 the same; the river life, or something, has changed him." 
 
 The girl did not reply, but her glance turned after a little-
 
 184 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 to the little whip and spur hanging there as a mute 
 reminder of how entirely the sulky, defiant young nomad 
 was changed into an attendant self-conscious cavalier. 
 
 She had been one of the darlings of the gods all her life, 
 and had numberless gifts, costly and dainty, extended to 
 her, but among them all nothing had ever appealed to her 
 with the dumb pathos of that bit of riding-gear. She 
 remembered little economies practiced against himself in 
 several ways, and his personal outfit for the river-work that 
 Milt had growled over, saying it was all insufficient for his 
 needs. Poor boy! And all the time it must have been that 
 he could bring her back something worthy her acceptance. 
 
 " Of course the idea is an awfully conceited one on my 
 part," she told herself repeatedly; "but how am I to help 
 it, when the fancy will come every time I look at the things 
 and remember his face? Love? Not at all, Dell Raeforth! 
 Yet I could scarcely keep the tears out of my eyes as I 
 thanked him; and may be, after all, he was only trying to be 
 civil with a stranger, and may be, after all, his 'thoughts 
 were with that pretty squaw for whom he buys beads more 
 than for you, Mistress Conceit." 
 
 And away down the course of the Columbia a dark-eyed 
 boatman gave swift strokes with the paddle that was hur- 
 rying his canoe northward; and when the sky flamed golden 
 toward night, he would say in his heart, " It ain't so pretty 
 as her hair in the sunshine;" and when a bird triumphant 
 would send a shower of sweet sounds out across the water, 
 his thoughts would revert to a clear ripple of laughter that 
 had music in it. 
 
 " And you've got considerable to learn yet," was his 
 summing up of the comparison, and his gratuitous infor- 
 mation to the feathered songster.
 
 WARNINGS OF THE HEIGHTS. 185 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 WARNINGS OF THE HEIGHTS. 
 
 IN the time of the harvest moon, strange changes 
 are wrought by the warm nights and the sun that beats 
 persistently on the white peaks of those northern ranges. 
 Floods descend beneath cloudless skies, and into the tiny 
 pools where the trout slept in high ravines will suddenly be 
 dashed big torrents, and great timbers be borne downward 
 with a force terrific. 
 
 Sometimes the smallest of rills will search unseen for a 
 secret underground path from the peaks to the great river, 
 and gurgle its triumph to buried rocks and wealth of min- 
 eral over which it runs. And then, as its strength and its 
 pride grow more confident, a great thing happens to it, and 
 the hidden bit of life in it, like an unspoken passion that 
 has slept long, bursts forth and shatters the frame that held 
 it; tosses great bowlders like egg-shells down the gray dis- 
 tance, and tears great reaches of timber and rock-land from 
 the side of the mountain, starting them slowly, slowly, 
 but with every added step of their way gaining a momen- 
 tum that sends sounds as of rumbling thunder along the 
 range, and churning through fair valleys that are laid bar- 
 ren wastes by the passionate force from above and all 
 because of a tiny secret hidden once in the breast of the 
 mountain. 
 
 When the clouds that are " weather-breeders " are seen 
 gathering about the peaks in the summer-time, the Indians 
 move themselves and their fishing-traps along the ravines 
 of the lower hills. The waters swell everywhere as the
 
 186 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 snows melt; but if the snows should melt and the rains 
 descend at the same time, then indeed are the bravest care- 
 ful, for the death by it has nothing of glory in it. No 
 prayers can be said over the graves never found; and to die 
 with the taste of mud in one's mouth and choke in the 
 foaming yellow of the rivers! 
 
 The people of High-Low felt they had nothing to fear 
 from the ravages of the midsummer snow-fiend, as the hills 
 nearest them were not capped with white to any great 
 extent. To be sure, the splashing of Tumwata Creek told 
 them it was likely to grow into a small river in a wet sea- 
 son; but the houses had never been built very close to it, 
 and then the highlands were close and foot-hold easy. 
 
 But more than one of the weather-wise among the Sel- 
 kirks turned dubious glances toward peaks that were wear- 
 ing caps of ice and snow, but hidden now by pale clouds 
 held on the summits as if by enchantment mists that all 
 the force of the sun could not drive away. 
 
 "But it's not the going away, it's the coming back, that 
 is a thing of interest to the community," Ewing explained 
 to the ladies, who wondered that a filmy little cloud should 
 be noted and commented on by people who had witnessed 
 terrific storms of the highlands. " The mists gather and 
 gather like that, and then come down in rains that set 
 glaciers swimming down the valleys." 
 
 "Those lazy, innocent-looking little clouds?" 
 
 "Yes," and Mr. Clevents, hearing her, smiled blandly 
 on the speaker; "it is not alone the gigantic things that 
 create havoc in the mountains. I've seen a very small 
 nugget set a whole camp wild." 
 
 " Indeed! Was it a bronze nugget of the kind your flat- 
 land friend was seeking yesterday? And, by the way, did 
 he find her?" 
 
 Clevents glanced at her sharply. Was she as innocent of
 
 A BLACK ROBE. 187 
 
 the squaw's late history as the Ewings supposed? He had 
 his doubts sometimes when she persisted in questions of 
 that dusky-eyed straying one. 
 
 "No, he did not; and he has gone back to his Indian 
 priest." 
 
 " That is one of the novel things I have yet to see up 
 here," she said " an Indian priest. Does he say mass in 
 Chinook? or blend the fierceness of a scalp-dance with his 
 invocations to the saints? " 
 
 " He is as dignified as an Arab, and as domineering as the 
 mischief with the poor reds v/ho happen to be faulty," said 
 Ewing. 
 
 "And I hear he can whip any of his converts, in pairs or 
 by the half-dozen," added the other man. " He would be 
 their mighty warrior if he did not happen to be their 
 priest." 
 
 "Are all their clergy heroes?" asked the girl. "Don't 
 you remember Chief Simon telling us of the brave trapper 
 priest who was his nephew, and how proud he was of 
 him? " 
 
 "This is the same man," returned Ewing; " and I guess 
 he's proud of himself." 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 A BLACK ROBE. 
 
 AND as the light of the hot day died out over the flat- 
 lands, and the vapors of the hot night arose from the 
 brackish pools, the proud one bent under the weight of a
 
 188 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 dead woman, and began the task of burial that came as 
 regularly as the darkness. 
 
 The youth who helped was tired of the dead faces and 
 the prayers the prayers that might be a great medicine, 
 but the people died, just as they died before the black robes 
 were seen among them. His eyes and thoughts wandered 
 from the new grave to the lands south where the water 
 was. Down there the people who fished moved in boats, 
 and moved swiftly, and his wish was for the life they lived; 
 but here for a day's journey in any direction there was 
 nothing but 
 
 "Papa na/if" he exclaimed, suddenly breaking in on 
 the prayer for the dead; and the father looked as he was 
 told, for the hand of the boy was pointed eastward at a 
 thing that rose and fell on the far levels a black body 
 against the dusk sky. 
 
 And then, with a sign of the cross marked on the air, the 
 priest again bent his bared head in the service for the 
 dead; but if words were uttered, none were heard by the 
 boy, who, rebuked by the cross, knelt at the foot of the 
 grave, and wondered that the other showed so little interest 
 in the coming ot the messenger he had tried so hard to 
 secure. 
 
 " Is it always the dead bod ies, then, that the black robesc are 
 most for? " he thought, stealing glances at the intense face 
 of the other, that never raised, though minute after minute 
 went by and the darkness grew. And at last, when the sound 
 of feet came to them until they halted close beside where 
 they stood, it was the new-comer who broke the silence. 
 
 " Tyee " (chief ), he said, questioningly; and the priest, 
 with again that sign of the cross, turned to him. 
 
 "You found her? you bring me word?" he asked, with 
 a little pause between the questions, while he scanned the 
 man's face for hope.
 
 A BLACK ROBE. 189 
 
 "No; the squaw ^louise is not where the white people 
 are. None can follow her trail so they tell me. I would 
 have tried, but you said, ' In four suns be here again,' so 
 I am come." 
 
 " Is that all they say the people? " 
 
 " One man said more. He is a chief, I think. He asked 
 me many things of you, and then he gave me this to 
 bring." 
 
 It was a leaf from a note-book, but the darkness had 
 grown too deep for reading its contents. 
 
 " You are tired from a fast trail," Father Henri said, qui- 
 etly; "go into my tent and rest. The best I have of food 
 is yours; you have served me well." 
 
 "You served my people first," said the messenger, sim- 
 ply, and followed where a bit of fire glimmered under a 
 kettle. In it fish were stewing, and the light outlined two 
 forms that lay within the opening of a tepee. One face 
 looked strangely still. 
 
 Father Henri knelt to read the lines written in pencil, 
 and then arose, standing in the shadow, with his face turned 
 toward the grave he had just left; and away beyond the 
 grave loomed the peaks of the Gold Range. 
 
 The messenger had dropped a stout, light walking-stick, 
 and it lay near the -feet of the priest, who stooped and 
 picked it up, and then reread the note, that said: 
 
 " I am the man who won the girl you look for at a game 
 of cards. I count on you being a square man when I tell 
 you she is living alone with some man on a mountain near 
 here. If you have any good influence over her, come and 
 use it. I'll back you with several ounces of dust, and help 
 do whatever you want for her. Ask for 
 
 "CLE VENTS." 
 
 That was all. Brief enough, but the sense of it seemed 
 to creep so slowly through his brain. Won at a game of
 
 190 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 cards! his little filouise, his unspoiled young eagle of the 
 heights. Living alone with some man! she, the untamed 
 one, snared by some treachery, held through hated force, 
 and never a one to aid her. Had she been calling for him 
 through those summer nights when he had seemed to hear 
 her voice on every breeze that blew? 
 
 The messenger, kneeling to build up the fire under the 
 kettle, heard something like a moan from the priest above 
 him, but looking up saw only the dark, impassive face, 
 with lips close-set; and the youth, who emptied more water 
 into the boiling mess, answered the stranger's look of 
 inquiry by saying, lowly: 
 
 " It is for the people in the graves that he makes cries, 
 and acts like a medicine man that works cures. There are 
 nights when he kneels till the stars all cross the sky, and 
 I would be sure he weeps but that he is too brave. Come 
 away; he talks to the charmed beads." 
 
 But the priest, raising the rosary and the crucifix near 
 his lips, uttered no audible word to them, only it seemed 
 that he kissed them. 
 
 " Look to the sick there and the dead," he said to the 
 boy; and then, with the stick yet in his hand, he turned 
 back into the darkness, toward the grave they had just 
 left. 
 
 " He will fast there till the sun comes," said the youth, 
 discontentedly, thinking of the very few in the tepees who 
 were able to wait on themselves; " he thinks more of the 
 spirits of the dead than of any living thing." 
 
 But when the sun came up, the black gown of Father 
 Henri was out of range of the eyes of the flat-lands; and, 
 while the dead of the marshes were half-forgotten, a living 
 soul imperiled was drawing him like a magnet to the hills. 
 
 The white dawn was creeping through mists of the east 
 when he reached the shores-of the Columbia. In the time
 
 A BLACK ROBE. 191 
 
 of one night he had covered the ground of a two days' 
 march, and a glance at the waters told him of thaws on the 
 heights. Straight above him he knew the white of the 
 snows was hidden by the green giants of the primeval 
 wood, and she was perhaps hidden somewhere in the course 
 of relentless glaciers. 
 
 He pushed on through the wild growth as animals push 
 who hear the hunters on their trail, and have never a 
 moment of time to turn aside for obstacles. Even the 
 natives of the forest seemed to understand that his haste 
 made him no foe to be feared, for small eyes peered at him 
 from the security of the undergrowth. A deer and fawn, 
 couched in the herbage, darted upward along the stream, 
 and then turned to gaze at him with soft, sad eyes, while a 
 bear plunged into the river and swam across, making a 
 deliberate halt on the far shore, and sauntered fearlessly 
 along the sands before disappearing in the forest opposite. 
 
 But ere the fog lifted, other sounds than the stealthy steps 
 of animals fell on his ear the sounds of voices the voices 
 of many; some were on land, some on the water, and all 
 discussing the sudden rise of the wind and water, and the 
 dangerous swiftness over rocks now submerged. 
 
 They called to him, asking of the country above any 
 damage yet done to the camps by the snow torrents, and 
 what signs for rain on the mountains. 
 
 " It has come already," he said, briefly. " Miles north it 
 has been on the hills. The mist is Here now; the rain will 
 follow." 
 
 " Oh, I say! " called out a voice from the water, " tell us 
 something better than that. Give us time to reach High-Low 
 before the clouds fall; we never can make it up-stream in 
 canoes if the water rises." 
 
 The speaker was a man of about fifty, a good-looking 
 fellow, with crisp curls of gray forming a rather striking
 
 192 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 contrast to the bronze of his face; for, though app. t .*ntly 
 not a Selkirk man, he was not a tenderfoot, his outfit 
 looking like that of a well-to-do prospector who had trav- 
 eled many trails, and a dauntless air of good-humor seemed 
 his distinguishing feature. 
 
 " Oh, you're a reverend, are you? " he continued, with a 
 more scrutinizing glance at the solitary form that had ap- 
 peared on the shore; " then I'm left again. I've been pad- 
 dling my own canoe, but I don't know the riffles above, and 
 hoped you were a native river-man. The boss of this freight 
 gang might spare me a man, but he's the surliest white chap 
 I ever saw." 
 
 The boss, who was hurriedly helping break camp, and who 
 had good ears, straightened up at the words. 
 
 "But I don't happen to be a white chap," he returned; 
 " and as you froze to this outfit on your own invite, I don't 
 allow to be accountable for you. You can swim up, for all 
 me." 
 
 It was Redney, and he recognized the priest. 
 
 " But I'll find boat-room for you any day," he continued, 
 and came closer. " You don't know me, but I reckon you 
 can't be anyone but Father Henri, the Indian priest. 
 Louise told me of you." 
 
 " filouise you know her you know of her now? " 
 
 " Not much," and his face flushed for the truth in the 
 statement he had meant at first to know such a great deal; 
 " but she's alive and and well, I guess. She's in High-Low 
 mostly when I get there. If you've any word to send 
 
 "I take my own word; and I will guide the boat of the 
 stranger over the rocks, since he has no help, but only if he 
 goes at once." 
 
 Redney turned away in a sulky sort of unconcern. His 
 disapproval of the independent stranger was plain. 
 
 "Well, I tell you, now, I'm grateful for this," began the
 
 A BLACK ROBE. 193 
 
 stranger with much heartiness; but the priest only pushed 
 the garpoint from shore and picked up the paddle. 
 
 "You owe me no thanks," he said; "the rest of the trail 
 to camp is shorter by boat than on foot, or I would not 
 be boatman for you this morning." 
 
 The rest of the boats were soon left beyond sight or 
 sound; all were heavier laden than that of the stranger, and 
 so it was that it, as courier of the fleet, met first the whirl 
 of water that came down in great waves bearing the debris 
 of the higher shores, along which the river leaped in so short 
 a space that the canoe could scarcely be dragged quickly 
 enough beyond its boundary. 
 
 Bits of cut timber and sticks with the mark of the ax 
 on them mingled with wood torn by the roots from the 
 shore. The priest noted them, and threw the rope of the 
 canoe to its owner. 
 
 " Lash it to the tree where it rests until you carry its 
 load up above, if you wish to save it, and then if you fol- 
 low straight the way I go you will reach the camp in the 
 half of an hour." 
 
 " But, see here! Hello! Curse the luck! can't you lend 
 a hand? Some things in this canoe are too valuable for 
 me to lose." 
 
 " And some human things across that hill may be lost 
 while we wait," answered the native, and turned into the 
 forest toward the north, where a call, strong, though 
 silent, seemed vibrating until it reached his heart. 
 
 13
 
 194 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 
 
 THE wind was whistling down from the mountains with 
 a chill on its wings. The smaller timber was bending low 
 under its force, and the heavier growths creaked omi- 
 nously. Clouds low and black were driven past him, and he 
 knew he was on the outer edge of a tornado that higher up 
 the mountains was leaving many a barren waste where 
 giants of the wood had stood for ages. Dashes of rain 
 touched him at times, but there was no steady fall. At 
 times it seemed as if the showers had been dipped by the 
 wind from the river, and above and beyond him the mount- 
 ains were roaring. 
 
 From the bluff above High-Low he saw the settlement 
 half under water, great trees turning and tossing where 
 the road had been; and a few men on improvised rafts 
 were on exploring expeditions among the jam. 
 
 The people were so terror-stricken that few noticed the 
 advent of a stranger. Some people were missing, and for 
 them search was being made. One shanty had been swept 
 clear off the ground, and was lodged intact between two 
 trees locked together by their entwined tops. From its one 
 window a woman was shrieking, and Clcvents, who was 
 trying to get to her, felt suddenly the weight of another 
 body on his raft of lashed logs, and the help of an added 
 oar or pole as the craft was guided straight to its destina- 
 tion by a hand stronger than his. Turning, he saw the 
 intense dark face and the garb of the priest. 
 
 "You have come? " 
 
 "You are the man?"
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 195 
 
 No other words were exchanged; but the priest held the 
 raft steady while Clevents, with scant gallantry, got the 
 woman one of the objectionable half-breeds through the 
 window and reached the wet land once more, to the grins 
 and delight of her many friends. A certain air of distinc- 
 tion surrounded her because of being rescued by a priest 
 and the most fastidious ranger in the diggings. 
 
 The two "family ladies" watched the rescue from the 
 safe pinnacle of their own bluff, and took turns in looking 
 through a field-glass at the picturesque form of Father 
 Henri that stood out definitely among the rest. They saw 
 Clevents hold out his hand as if in some pledge, and after 
 a little bit the tall native clasped it, and pointed with the 
 other across the creek where the trail led to the north and 
 west. 
 
 But Clevents shook his head. 
 
 "You are right, I think; that is the direction, but the 
 force of the Columbia has dammed up this creek so that 
 one can't cross for hours to come." 
 
 " Once I knew every trail of the hills, with water-courses 
 full or empty. I may not have forgotten the path to her 
 nest," said the priest, quietly. 
 
 Clevents glanced at him from under his wide hat, won- 
 dering just how deep was the churchman's interest in the 
 little squaw the haste in which the letter had been 
 answered surprised him; but the calm dark face of Henri 
 Mercier was as a mask. Clevents scarcely knew how to 
 speak to him of the stray up there, but said, in some 
 embarrassment: 
 
 " Then you know her hiding-place? I was told you 
 brought her back to her people once before when she was 
 living like that. I must say I find it hard to think evil of 
 that girl; she seems so fit for better things that I feit it a 
 sort of duty to send for you."
 
 196 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " If any say the child lived in sin that other time when I 
 found her, they speak falsely," returned the other; "if she 
 is as clean of soul now " 
 
 But his voice was not so steady as before, and he did 
 not finish the sentence. At his feet lay something black, 
 washed there on the waters; he stooped and picked it up 
 a little black cross. After a little he said: 
 
 "Will you, before I go to her, tell me what you can? It 
 is not so long a time since I was here, yet much has hap- 
 pened. You gambled for her you won her a human life 
 then what? " 
 
 Mr. Clevents' usually audacious eyes wavered before the 
 uncompromising gaze of the younger man. 
 
 "Then? Not much of anything, so far as I was con- 
 cerned. But come where we can get a bite to eat, there we 
 can talk; and then I'll go with you, if you'll have me." 
 
 The priest hesitated. He had halted but because of the 
 flood of back-water and the calls of frightened women. He 
 had even a fear that she might be among them; but now 
 that she was not, the minutes of delay were as hours. 
 
 " Well, whatever you can do, I don't intend to take the 
 trail without some breakfast first. I've got a cook to be 
 proud of, and I don't think the water reached his supply; 
 and while we are eating, filouise may come into camp. She 
 hasn't been here for days; and if she's on high ground, she's 
 likely to have seen that cloud-burst, or whatever it was. 
 This is Redney's time up, and she will more than likely be 
 anxious about him." 
 
 " Redney? " 
 
 " The only person, I believe, who knows all about her 
 and who is with her, but he won't tell a square sort of a 
 young half-breed who has charge of a portage gang from 
 Farwell." 
 
 "He is yonder but a little ways," said the priest, "if
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 197 
 
 their boats are not caught in the storm of wind and water. 
 He knew me, and offered to be my messenger to llouise; 
 but I came " 
 
 Close to where they walked a woman was crouched 
 against the wall of a shed. Wet and sodden though her 
 garments, she seemed half-asleep, but aroused enough to 
 blink up at the two men, who passed on, not noting her. 
 
 " Message to filouise," she whispered in maudlin fashion 
 " message I will see where stops. Ho, ho, Henri of the 
 black gown! You hunt for the squaws and no pay the 
 money? I see " 
 
 She staggered to her feet and followed slowly. She heard 
 a man's voice say, " Here is the princess, ladies; your curi- 
 osity can now be satisfied," and stopping, she looked 
 toward the speaker. 
 
 He was laughing, and two white women, pretty and 
 young, gazed at her in wonder. 
 
 "You are only teasing us," said one of them; "that is. 
 never the famed Mestina, who sat in council a princess." 
 
 The Indian woman heard, and smiled vacantly. 
 
 " Mestina me," she assented. " Princess poor, miserable, 
 wet; no lum no chickamin; sorry princess." 
 
 "And a sorry one you look," retorted Ewing. "Have 
 you no more children to sell and buy rum with? " 
 
 His wife touched him on the arm, for in his disgust he 
 had blurted out more than he had intended, and Miss Delia's 
 eyes were very wide with wonder; but the representative of 
 Indian royalty answered mournfully: 
 
 " No none; so Mestina's heart is sad. Got lum for poor 
 sick? " 
 
 But the spirit of sympathy was not abroad in the land that 
 morning, and for the lack of it La Mestina stood like a 
 whimpering statue of desolation for many minutes after 
 the others walked away from her. She knew she was weak
 
 198 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 and thirsty, but did not know the weakness was from 
 starving. She wanted rum. She even seemed to forget 
 her first intention of following the black gown, and relapsed 
 once more into an attitude of ease, if not of grace, and 
 made a couch of a slanting slab. There, heedless of the 
 destruction about her, and the turmoil caused by the bank- 
 ing up of waters there, freed from the carking cares of 
 property owners, she slept the sleep of the guiltless through 
 the added hours, until the noon divided the day, and the 
 wandering ones from the upper mines came straggling in 
 with stories of how the tornado or cloud-burst had appeared 
 from different points of view; for the rainfall was conceded 
 to be but a local affair, and there were peaks west and north 
 on which the sun had never ceased shining. 
 
 " Talk about the quick storms and changes of the tropics," 
 growled one of the discontented " they'd have to hustle 
 some to keep up with the break the Columbia made this 
 morning; wonder if it's true that the portage gang are 
 washed down with it? " 
 
 " No only one boat swamped, and one owned by the 
 stranger that just set up the drinks. He's bitter on that 
 priest for not lending a hand to hold the plunder, but you 
 don't see the black gowns exercise their muscles much." 
 
 "Who Brother Henri?" remarked one of the Selkirk 
 men, with a grim smile. " Well, don't you ever grow reckless 
 and banter him, or you'll learn your mistake. He's a skookum, 
 you bet." 
 
 " Wonder if he's trying to convert Clevents? " 
 
 " Say, who's that packin' truck through the scrub-oaks? " 
 
 They forgot their gossip to watch the man with the 
 
 truck, and saw there were two of them Redney and one of 
 
 his helpers; and the stuff they carried was the mail and 
 
 express packages that were deemed of too much value to
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 199 
 
 leave back with the outfit anchored among the trees, high 
 above the usual lines of the Columbia. 
 
 The first face that met the young messenger as he 
 entered Antoine's door was that of the dauntless stranger 
 who had joined the gang at Farwell. 
 
 " Well, my young friend, the river was no more friendly 
 than yourself, but I got here just the same," he said, airily. 
 
 Men were gathering in to ask about mail, and none 
 noticed that Redney had no reply to make. Clevents came 
 in on hearing the mail had arrived, and the priest was with 
 him. Each had been watching closely the back-water of 
 the creek that had been steadily falling now for two hours; 
 one more, and to cross it would not be impossible, and the 
 nearer route to Thunder Mountain could be entered upon, 
 and in the end be reached just as soon as by the other possi- 
 ble, but almost impassible, course. 
 
 Father Henri spoke kindly, but in reserved fashion, to 
 the several who pressed forward to renew acquaintance, and 
 to Antoine's attempted gossip of filouise he gave no encour- 
 agement. 
 
 " I have come from sick bodies in the flat-lands, and am 
 going to a sick soul in the hills," he said; " that is enough 
 for you to know, Antoine. If the time comes when I can 
 remain among you, I will ask you of all the trouble, but 
 not to-day." 
 
 And Antoine smiled his content, and offered some red 
 wine to the priest in memory of the days when he was not 
 a priest, but only a little Indian carrying traps along the 
 valley. But once the clerical back was turned, his dissat- 
 isfaction was outspoken. 
 
 "You come here to remain a citizen?" he asked the 
 stranger, who was getting acquainted by distributing drinks. 
 " Then take by me a little of advice me who did help first 
 to make the town that did arrive at this camp. Keep wide
 
 200 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 from the track of the red-feet, even tkough they are high- 
 est of the church. They remember no favor and no friend. 
 There is this one so often has he eaten of my bread, but 
 turns like a stranger if I but ask one little civil thing, and 
 for a squaw who was as his sister, and who lives now in the 
 shameful sin; even she he cares nothing to bring back to 
 the church so quick do they forget. Though," he added, 
 truly enough, " when a squaw turns bad if that is what 
 the young one is it is waste breath for the man who tries 
 to convert them to good again; and if she is not bad, would 
 she shun all people and live alone in the mountain? Even 
 a squaw that is old will not do that. You, now, Mestare 
 Harty, a gentleman that has traveled wide, you will have 
 known enough of them for that." 
 
 "Harte my name is Harte," explained his listener; 
 "but a hearty name, too ha! ha! Yes, sir, you're right. 
 The curse of the country are these degraded reds. The 
 missions make a big bluff toward civilizing them, but what 
 use is it? That's what I want to know, gentlemen what 
 use it? Do the best they can, and a Siwash remains a 
 Siwash, and a squaw is naturally alow piece of God's crea- 
 tion. They can teach them the catechism, but they can't 
 keep them away from the white men's camps." 
 
 " Especially if they're half-starved and scent a square 
 meal," remarked a joker in the crowd. 
 
 "Right you are, and we'll just drink on that. And they 
 tell me there is one miner has his wife up here from the 
 States. Now that's a thing I couldn't make up my mind 
 to do let a white woman, and a lady, see the way these 
 degraded squaws live; so my wife lives on our ranch 
 down in Washington when I take a notion to ride the line 
 outside civilization." 
 
 "If I don't miss my guess, I run across you in the 7o's 
 down in the Walla Walla country." said a sharp-visaged
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 201 
 
 veteran who had been watching the speaker lazily; "but if 
 you're the chap, your scalp-lock hadn't so much white in it, 
 and you could cover all the ranches you owned then with 
 your two feet." 
 
 The other looked nettled for an instant, and then joined 
 in the smile that was popular at that moment. 
 
 "I'm the chap," he agreed, "and a reckless devil-may- 
 care I was, to boot. No, I hadn't caught up with luck then, 
 and real estate wasn't worth much in my eyes, but the 
 white scalp-lock has changed that." 
 
 "And turned you on the reds, too," insinuated the 
 veteran. 
 
 The man from Washington gave a longer, keener look 
 at the lazy face of the man, but it was blandly innocent of 
 all double intent, and he answered decidedly: 
 
 "Yes, sir, it did; and if I make a business stand in any 
 part of the country, my first move would be to clear the 
 ground of such cattle. They keep decent women away, 
 and one of them one squaw will demoralize more men 
 than " 
 
 And then a couple of men near the door began to laugh, 
 and a living indorsement of Mr. Harte's words dragged 
 herself in from the road and stood drowsy and stupid 
 among the men. 
 
 It was the princess, and Redney, who had hated her 
 faithfully for many moons, was so close behind her as to 
 have the appearance of an escort to the slouchy squaw; in 
 fact, she turned to him and said: 
 
 "Where? Who waits here for La Mestina? Damn! 
 Devil! You lie like dog or white man." 
 
 He did not reply. His eyes were too busy watching the 
 prosperous, public-spirited gentleman from Washington, and 
 he was gazing in utter disgust at the unkempt creature 
 whose hair fell over her face.
 
 202 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 "Here's a living example," he began; but a scream from 
 the squaw stopped him. The hair was flung from her eyes, 
 and she stood like one suddenly awakened, and trembling 
 visibly. 
 
 " Jimjams," remarked one. 
 
 " Redney, I thought you didn't deal in that sort of stock," 
 laughed another; but the boy said nothing. He was smil- 
 ing in an ugly way at the expression on the face of the 
 stranger as the Indian woman moved toward him. 
 
 "Rubee," she said, softly, with a little laugh a strange, 
 blood-chilling laugh "Rubee, all the day . f . wait and cry 
 cry, but no no more. You come at night time all same to 
 rest, and now now " 
 
 She looked about again as if bewildered. The men 
 watched her in wonder. No one among them had ever 
 heard the tones in which she spoke, though they had heard 
 her voice in oath and in wrangle for many seasons along 
 the Columbia. 
 
 But all the unusual gentleness of it did not reassure the 
 stranger. His face whitened as she moved nearer to him, 
 with one hand outstretched, as one who asks alms. 
 
 "Go away!" he muttered, hoarsely. "What the devil 
 does she mean? Take her away, some of you, or by 
 God" 
 
 The sweat broke on his forehead, and his hand clenched 
 threateningly. He looked like a man who sees a ghost; 
 and she did not seem quite real to any of them not 
 natural, at all events. And not a man moved except 
 Redney, and his revolver was suddenly leveled at the 
 clenched hand. 
 
 " What is it to you? " demanded the man, aroused to the 
 fact that the boy had an active antagonism toward him, 
 instead of a merely passive sulkiness. But he dropped his 
 hand.
 
 THE GENTLEMAN FROM WASHINGTON. 203 
 
 The Indian woman had cowered before it and the horror 
 of his face, but only for a moment, and then she smiled in 
 a vacant, horrible way. 
 
 "Rubee," she grunted, and turned around once, twice, 
 with a blind, groping movement " Rub<?/ " 
 
 And then she fell to the floor, as filouise had spoken of 
 her falling long before when she realized that she was 
 deserted. But this time it was only the body that fell; the 
 breath of life had left her with his uttered name. 
 
 Redney turned the sodden face, with its wide-open eyes, 
 up to the gaze of all, and more than one man drew back 
 shuddering at the picture, and reached for the whisky- 
 bottle. 
 
 His touch was not particularly gentle; a smothered rage 
 seemed to vibrate through gesture and voice. 
 
 " You're in luck," he said, insolently, to the stranger, 
 who stood moveless and pallid. " Here's a first-class 
 specimen of depravity for you to lecture about and guard 
 your decent women from. But, while you're about it, 
 couldn't you say a word or so of truth for the beasts like 
 yourself who make these poor devils what they are? " 
 
 "Hold on, little one," said one of the men, laying a 
 warning hand on his shoulder. " Men have to swallow 
 lead for less than that sometimes." 
 
 " And he'll have to swallow either that or his words," 
 added the stranger, who was more self-reliant when dealing 
 with a man than with the dead wretch on the floor. 
 "You're a damned insolent young cur, anyway." 
 
 Redney looked at him very coolly, very contemptuously. 
 
 "I couldn't well be anything better considering the low 
 dog of a father you gave me. Now, curse you, if you've 
 got anything to say back to that, say it." 
 
 But he did not seem to have anything to say. His face 
 flushed scarlet and then faded, leaving him with a strange
 
 204 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 white look about the lips. The bold, black eyes met those 
 of the boy with a keen scrutiny that ended in his drawing 
 his empty hand from his hip-pocket, and trying to smile 
 with his natural air of bravado, as if the temper of the 
 youth, like the craziness of the squaw, was beneath a man's 
 notice. 
 
 But in looking from the dead face on the floor to the 
 living face above, the smile died out, and, without a word, 
 he turned away. 
 
 And Redney's eyes, with something like a bit of a tiny 
 blaze showing in each of them, watched him go out through 
 the side door by which filouise had fled that night not so 
 very long ago. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 ABOVE THE CLOUDS. 
 
 WITH the faint dawn-light ^llouise had arisen and made 
 her fire of dry sticks where the fish were to bake. The 
 sign of sleepless nights had fallen over her dark, heavy 
 eyes, a lassitude unusal bound her young limbs, and 
 standing there looking across to the east where the dim 
 curtain of day was lifting up, she seemed strangely old 
 compared with the impetuous young savage who had flung 
 the cross away and bound on her breast the token of the 
 pagan. 
 
 Perhaps it had through all those fearful, happy weeks 
 shielded her from the evil she had begged for help against; 
 but there had arisen others, soul-disturbing, against which
 
 ABOVE THE CLOUDS. 205 
 
 the charm had no potency. Would the cross have had? She 
 did not know; she did not regret. Her life had been lived 
 in the light of his eyes for all those weeks. Dearer happi- 
 ness than that she had not prayed for; but a something 
 un-Indian in her nature was making her pay a mental pen- 
 alty, and the stings of dread it brought her were keen as the 
 cut of a scourge. Not the rustle of a leaf, or flutter of a 
 bird in the brush, but that she feared it was some step of 
 fate that would bear the truth to him. She was living only 
 from hour to hour, from day to day. 
 
 Of the future her forebodings were so sad that she dared 
 not attempt to sing. When he asked, she said always 
 " No," for in her memory was one legend of a singer of the 
 past who in the improvising of song from his thoughts 
 had, forgetful of listeners, confessed a crime for which he 
 was given death. 
 
 Not that she feared death only the scorn of the living. 
 
 When she turned, he stood close beside her; he was 
 growing stealthy as herself in all movements, for the sight 
 of her constant watchfulness had taught him caution. 
 
 " My young eagle," he said, fondly, "do you never sleep? 
 for I always find you up and awaiting the day. Are you 
 trying to steal the daybreak songs of the birds ?" 
 
 " I am listening to the sounds in the ice mountains," she 
 answered, and pointed where the glaciers of the Selkirks 
 were yet hidden in fog. " Strange noises are there it is 
 from the hot sun; and rains are coming across there soon, 
 and that will be bad for canoes on the river." 
 
 " I have seen no signs of rain. Do the birds and the fishes 
 tell you these things?" 
 
 "No; but about the peaks over there little clouds have 
 been coming. They gather and gather like that, then they 
 drift up and out as the wind blows, and they always carry 
 rain, sometimes more than rain, for the little winds go
 
 206 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 around and around the bowls of the mountains until they 
 roar and grow strong, then they break loose; and the whites 
 call them the tornado." 
 
 He smiled as she talked. Her speech was less brief than 
 when his life had commenced in her retreat. He seldom 
 heard her use now the Chinook words only when he asked 
 to be taught their meanings. 
 
 " How wise you are in knowledge of the origin of all 
 phenomena of the hills," he said, caressingly. " If only you 
 would give half as much thought to the human things on 
 them." 
 
 " I do think much I do what I can," and she turned 
 wearily away. " And this day I must go to the people down 
 there. The finished work must be taken; it is all done now. 
 If Redney is there, it will give us the money to buy a boat; 
 it will buy you the way toward the sea; then you will not 
 say I do not think of you. You say that many times; you 
 will soon say it no more." 
 
 He checked her as she tried to pass him; barring her 
 way with one arm, he touched her shoulder with the other 
 hand ere she eluded him. 
 
 " Do not leave me to-day," he said, suddenly. 
 
 "And why so? You are strong now; you do not need 
 me." 
 
 " I shall always need you, opitsah" (sweetheart), he an- 
 swered, with eyes tender as his words; and to-day well, 
 it's only a fancy, I suppose, but I dreamed of losing you 
 last night. I awoke myself trying to call you. The dream 
 seemed so real that I had to come out and see you, hear 
 you speak; but the dread stays with me. Do you under- 
 stand? It is like the signs of the storms over there; it 
 makes me afraid. Do not leave me." 
 
 " I will get your breakfast, and you tell me of the dream," 
 she said, as if hearing none of the tender tones of his
 
 ABOVE THE CLOUDS. 207 
 
 speech. " May be it is well for me to stop here to-day. It 
 would be bad if a storm should come that would keep me 
 in the valley. But tell me what you thought in your sleep." 
 
 Lines of sulphurous yellow were ranging themselves 
 along the sky in the far east, and above them the whitish 
 banks of clouds, that soon dropped down to meet the mists 
 of the valleys. Only for a few minutes did the lurid light 
 show itself threateningly, and left only the moist gray 
 dawn within range of their vision. 
 
 It was an unusual thing for them to talk in the dawning 
 he seldom saw her until sunrise; and they looked strangely 
 at each other as they sat watching the fish cook; then he 
 laughed. / 
 
 " We look like some witch and wizard at some incanta- 
 tion scene, before the day is awake to watch us. I feel as 
 people do when waiting for a journey that is to be made 
 an unsettled feeling. I wonder what it is we are both out 
 here waiting for this morning." 
 
 "You did not yet tell me of the dream," she answered. 
 
 " Oh, it was not a long dream, only I thought you were 
 a bird, and I saw you fly away, and was not troubled about 
 it until, suddenly, a dark wall rose up and shut you out of 
 sight. I could not even see the blue sky or the white 
 clouds where you had been; and when I thought you were 
 gone forever, I fell on my face in the darkness, and called, 
 and called, but you would not answer. When I wakened, I 
 was still trying to call you, and there were tears on my face, 
 and I was trembling and sick at heart." 
 
 " I can not see far into dreams," she said, thoughtfully, 
 "but I will not go far from you to-day. Mestina could tdl 
 you all the meanings of dreams, so they called her wise." 
 
 " She could not have told the meaning of many when J 
 saw her last." 
 
 " No," agreed the girl; "her life has run so far wrong.
 
 208 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 Do you know how the trees bend crooked when they are 
 hewed near to the heart? People turn like that sometimes, so 
 I think. They grow straight, may be, for years, and then the 
 sorrow, or the evil, touches the heart, and their life is 
 crooked from that until the grave." 
 
 "Sometimes I wish you could have schools, like the 
 daughters of white people," he said, "just to see how you 
 might have grown under cultivation; and then the fear that 
 they might have robbed you of your naturalness by their 
 pattern system makes me glad every time you speak that the 
 mountains were your only teachers." 
 
 She dropped her head in her hands, and the un-Indian 
 sound of a sob came to his ears. 
 
 " Do not be so kind in your words," she muttered, 
 whisperingly; " in my heart is a pain when you speak. I 
 am better alone or in your silence." 
 
 He reached out his hand pleadingly, and was about to 
 speak, when she sprung to her feet, with her hand raised 
 and a caution to silence on her lips. 
 
 She seemed listening intently, but he could hear nothing, 
 and, wordless, watched her face that was paler than he had 
 ever noticed it; and on her lashes the tears shone tremu- 
 lously. 
 
 After a little the dim sounds came to his ears too, sounds 
 like muffled thunder, and sharp reports breaking through it. 
 Masses of clouds drifted before them, and hid from their 
 <nght whatever it was that roared and surged between the 
 ranges. A mighty tempest seemed raging so short a dis- 
 tance away, and its coming had been swift as the wind. 
 Clouds rolled to their feet and almost hid their faces from 
 each other; birds flew with frightened cries to their shelter 
 under the terrace; things unseen rustled and fled through 
 the brush so close about them, and over and above all else
 
 ABOVE THE CLOUDS. 
 
 was that mighty cloud-draped force with the wind-shrieks 
 driving it onward. 
 
 Instinctively those two moved closer. Death was surely 
 sweeping across their path. Each face was white in that 
 strangest of all mornings, as he reached his hands to her, 
 and her own met them. 
 
 With the end of life ends the rule of the world and its 
 barriers, and the end of life had surely come to them; and 
 as he drew her close, all disguises were ended for filouise. 
 
 They sunk to the ground as the wind struck them not 
 thrown by the force, but staggering through the envelop- 
 ing cloud to a nook of shelter. The pebbles and sand of 
 the mountain cut in their faces until he drew hers close 
 to his own. They dared not open their eyes, for the wind 
 that had only bent the tree-tops in the valley surged and 
 broke against the high walls of the hills. Not a drop of 
 rain came to them, only the terrific rage of the wind shriek- 
 ing and storming at their fortress of shelter. 
 
 And through it all he held her, unresisting, in his arms;, 
 though winning no word from her, he whispered again and 
 again fond words, fond names, and touched her with his 
 lips. She moved shiveringly in his embrace, but opening 
 her eyes on the dread gray walls that closed down like a 
 tomb and would scarce let her see his face, she turned to 
 him with a helpless moan that was smothered by his mouth 
 pressed against her own. 
 
 Away below in the valley a deluge was descending into 
 the Columbia and its tributaries for a mile on either side; 
 and the tempest of wind was making strange twists and 
 curves along the range now darting down and leveling 
 all it touched, and then rising triumphant from the spoils, 
 would merely touch the tops of the trees for miles. But 
 about the summit of the ancient hill of rtfuge the clouds 
 
 14
 
 210 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 pressed, black, moving, shifting, but forgotten by the hur- 
 rying winds. 
 
 And those two, drawn to each other more closely by the 
 threatening dangers than they had ever been by the 
 uneventful security of their days, heard, as in a trance, the 
 roar of the tornado pass away through echoing gulches, 
 growing fainter and fainter in the distance, but leaving 
 that thick gray canopy about them. 
 
 Whether it was minutes or hours that passed, they could 
 not have told, for time had halted under the dense cover 
 they had thought was a shroud; but when it lifted at last, it 
 did so as quickly as it had fallen, and by the wings of the 
 wind the great billows were swept aside, and the sun high 
 in the heavens shone down mercilessly on their entwined 
 arms. 
 
 She dresv away, with a mingled cry of shame, contrition, 
 and accusation. 
 
 "^louise!" he begged, reproachfully, "comeback. Do 
 not look at me like that. What difference does the sunlight 
 make? You are mine now through all the days, all the 
 nights. Come! " 
 
 But the lips that had softened under his kisses were firm 
 as a drawn bow. She had dreamed a sweet dream with the 
 hope of death to follow, but awoke to the light of the sun 
 and to judgment of herself. 
 
 "No! no! no!" she moaned, staggering back from him; 
 " do not touch, do not follow. You will hate me much, 
 may be, when that sun shines again when I tell to you 
 
 But she could not say it. He met her strange gaze, 
 passionate yet pathetic, for an instant, and then she van- 
 ished quickly as the clouds had gone; and, call as he might, 
 she would not return. Whatever battles of the heart or 
 conscience she had to fight, she had taken to the lonely 
 places of the mountain.
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 21J 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 
 
 LEFT alone, he was restless and uneasy. Would she come 
 back, or would she, remembering again the night he had 
 sold her, pit that memory against the love she had proven, 
 and in revenge leave him there to starve if he might? He 
 had heard of Indian natures puzzling in their methods of 
 vengance; and surely, of all inexplicable Indians, this fond, 
 yet repellant, young savage was the most so. 
 
 He watched the sun pick out other peaks from the 
 changing clouds, and wondered if the settlement near the 
 river had been swept as the hills had; if so, none of it would 
 be left, for all along the mountain-side the timber was torn 
 out by the roots and twisted off many feet from the ground. 
 
 If filouise had attempted that trip down the mountain, 
 she would have been crushed to death, and the thought 
 coming to him brought a swift horror to his heart if he 
 should lose her! 
 
 He did not dare tell himself yet that perhaps he had lost 
 her. The memory of her final surrender, of her wordless 
 acknowledgment of love as she lay in his arms, was too 
 sweet a victory to spoil by forebodings of evil. Being a 
 strange, wild creature, she had fled as a bird from the cage 
 of his arms; but even the bird returns to the prison of the 
 hand it loves, and so would filouise return he was so sure, 
 so sure! 
 
 And when she did, how effectually he would quell those 
 absurd fears of hers that he might ever hate her as if that 
 could be possible!
 
 '212 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 She did not seem so much like a weird little witch 
 now as she did before, despite the uncanny surroundings 
 to their love-making. She was only a foolish little girl who 
 adored him and who was ashamed of having confessed it. 
 
 So thinking, he took up the task she had left unfinished, 
 that of preparing breakfast. Convulsions of nature or of 
 the spirit may for awhile drown forgetfulness of meal-time, 
 but not for long; and the sun falling westward from the 
 center of the sky told him that the noon was past. 
 
 He gathered sticks and replaced the fire blown into the 
 little rill by the storm, and at every turn, coming and going, 
 he looked and listened for steps of the young savage. He 
 even went to that sheer wall under the grotto of the altar, 
 remembering her former threat, but neither dead nor living 
 Elouise lay at its base. 
 
 He nervously began to dread remaining alone in their 
 home under the cliff. Shadows of lives that had been 
 seemed to fill every nook and corner. His fancy, despite 
 himself, would wander to the weird legends of the people 
 who had lived there ages ago. The dead nation that ruled 
 in the land had sung its triumphs from these heights, and 
 held as sacred the weak, the penitent, and the outlaw who 
 fled to the fortress above; and of all their sovereign glories 
 nothing remained, and only one little semi-pagan, semi- 
 christian lived of this generation as heir to their blood and 
 their spirit. 
 
 Was it so strange to wonder if they would not guard or 
 avenge her? He arose impatiently at the thought; it 
 annoyed him and made him glance quickly over his shoulder 
 at a sound as of something creeping through the leaves 
 toward him. But he could see nothing. 
 
 The sun was almost down. That thought of the hosts of 
 the savage dead ranging themselves against him was horri- 
 ble; he could not get it out of his mind, yet he told himself
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 
 
 again and again there would be nothing to avenge. Why 
 should there be? He was too fond of her to treat her basely,, 
 or 
 
 Again he turned at that sound a strange, dragging sound 
 back of him and saw, but a few feet away, the slow coiling 
 of a snake with its flat head thrust forward and moving 
 oddly from side to side. 
 
 Not a thing was near to defend himself with everything 
 of wood was blown away by the wind; but springing back 
 beyond the length of it, he found in the brush a long wattle 
 of oak, from which he stripped leaves and branches. 
 
 The reptile seemed to fly at him as he returned, but being 
 beyond its reach, he struck it just back of the head as it was 
 coiling for a second attack. 
 
 Its neck was broken by the stroke, but the way it thrashed 
 the ground in its ceaseless writhings showed so much 
 vitality that he felt in no way secure until he had found a 
 stone with which to finish its death. . 
 
 It was the first snake he had ever seen up there, and had 
 no idea of its kind; it had no doubt fled from below in the 
 tempest. 
 
 But wherever it came from, the blood or the poison from 
 it sickened him. He moved away, turning his face in the 
 direction the fresh wind was coming, and bending his head 
 in his hands sat down, feeling dizzy and disgusted the 
 horrid black coil there had made him ridiculously nervous. 
 If only IClouise would come and free him from the suspense,, 
 the loneliness, that the coming of that serpent had only 
 intensified. It had crept into their retreat like a warning of 
 evil to their Eden. 
 
 Lifting his eyes to look again at the dead foe, he arose 
 slowly to his feet in a breathless sort of wonder, for stand- 
 ing over the snake, like a suddenly materialized spirit, was 
 the somber, dark figure of the Indian priest.
 
 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 Not a sound had betrayed his coming; in fact, Dunbar 
 had an idea he must have been there a long time, invisible. 
 The snake, yet moving, touched his feet, but he did not 
 bend even a glance to it. His eyes were fixed in mute ques- 
 tion on the surprised man who faced him, a tall, full-bearded, 
 rather pale-faced man, whom few would have ever recog- 
 nized as " Gentleman Neil." 
 
 But after his first moment of doubt as to whether it was 
 an apparition or a man, Dunbar knew, and flushed slightly 
 at the thought, that it was no other than the Henri whom 
 she had always loved best who had been her friend and 
 champion, but whose kindness of visage was marred by the 
 set, stern mouth and the deep wrinkle between the eyes, 
 He was the first to speak. 
 
 " You live here, stranger? " 
 
 Dunbar grew stronger at the words, since the priest did 
 not seem to know whom he was addressing. 
 
 "Yes, it's a summer resort of mine," he answered, easily; 
 " rather high for the average ranger. Barring that creature, 
 you are my first visitor." 
 
 "You live alone?" 
 
 "Well, yes; my family is rather limited." 
 
 "And filouise where is she?" 
 
 "Who? Why" 
 
 "Do not be false! " and the priest's voice had a ring of 
 command instead of entreaty. " The track of her moc- 
 casin is in the wet sand by the stream, and that is not the 
 work of a white man." 
 
 The thing pointed to was the deer-skin hunting-dress, 
 with its fringed and beaded trimmings. He had, in sheer 
 loneliness, brought it out from the dwelling, cutting over 
 any of the fringe admitting of it, and admiring the fancy 
 bit of Indian work which he supposed would soon be car- 
 ried away south by that lucky lady. One of the tiny moc-
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 215 
 
 casins, with a blood-red heart on the toe, lay clear of the 
 rest, and spoke loudly against him. He stood sullenly still. 
 
 "Somewhere on the mountain she is hidden; where it is 
 you must tell me," continued the other, quietly. " I am 
 here to take her away." 
 
 " No! that you shall not do," he began, angrily; and 
 then, checking himself, added, " that is, against her will. 
 But if she wanted to go to you, wouldn't she do that with- 
 out you coming after her? " 
 
 The priest seemed stung with the truth in the words, and 
 the taunt in them. 
 
 " But if it is that she is kept by fear by force? " 
 
 "Was she ever afraid?" asked Dunbar, more quietly. 
 " Your wanting to know about her is all right, of course. 
 She has told me of you. But you must not think she is 
 here unwillingly. You will only make her unhappy by 
 coming, and she is better contented than in the settlement 
 down there; let her be." 
 
 The softened intonation of the speaker made the priest 
 look at him more keenly. He had dealt with rough men 
 most of his life, but knew that this man did not belong to 
 the uncouth, however he might appear an outcast, possi- 
 bly a renegade. 
 
 " She is your wife? " he asked, suddenly, and his lips 
 scarcely moved with the question; but Dunbar, after a 
 moment's hesitation, shook his head. 
 
 "Why, no; a man can't marry every little squaw who 
 cooks his meat, you know." 
 
 " filouise is different from many squaws you may have 
 known," returned the priest, with a chill sort of patience. 
 " She must keep the lodge of but one man. She is a child 
 in heart, but we are men; men must think for children and 
 the old people. She lives with you here alone, and your 
 heart turns to her? "
 
 216 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 " She has been here yes." 
 
 The priest looked at him for an answer to the other 
 question looked at him so long, so sternly, that Dunbar 
 felt the red waves flushing up to his hair. He strove to 
 return glances defiant, but failed; and the other, with a 
 long breath, as of a man half-strangled, held up his hand 
 for silence. 
 
 " Tell me no words," he said. " But she is of my people; 
 she was meant for the holy church so it would have been. 
 If you have robbed the church of her life, claimed her for 
 the world, you must pay the world's price. I have come 
 for that; so it must be." 
 
 "The price? My God! would you be willing to sell her, 
 as her mother was to gamble her away? Is that your 
 friendship for your people, the teaching of your holy 
 church? Well, my wealth is shadowy just now; but if 
 promissory notes will be taken, we may settle this family 
 matter amicably," and Dunbar's contempt was very appar- 
 ent in his speech. " I'd be willing to give a good deal and 
 be rid of you before she gets back; before she knows that 
 you can be as grasping for money as the old princess 
 herself." 
 
 " The old princess is dead. Let the dead rest if they 
 can! Her body, dying this morning, was only a part of 
 death; her soul died so many years ago, killed by a man 
 perhaps like you." 
 
 "Well, you are cursedly impertinent, anyway," retorted 
 Dunbar, angrily; " and imaginative, too. The certainty of 
 old Mestina ever having possessed a soul is doubtful; if so, 
 it must have been donated by the devil. But that has 
 nothing to do with filouise; and what is the price you have 
 settled on, and to whom am I to pay it? " 
 
 The contemptuous query was made in mere curiosity. 
 He had no idea of really buying filouise. Was she opt his
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 217 
 
 by more than the will of her tribe? But no man who has 
 lived in the forests of that north country is surprised, even 
 at this day, to hear of a squaw sold for money. He had 
 expected something different from this priest he had heard 
 much of. Yet, after all, he was only an Indian. 
 
 " Come, now, the price? " he repeated. 
 
 "Your name, and the payment to be made to her 
 filouise." 
 
 "Well, by God!" 
 
 " By the God it shall be," affirmed the other, quietly. 
 " Marriage ordained of him must not be desecrated' by his 
 children. Men far in the wilderness live lives unpleasing 
 in the eyes of heaven often, and thoughtlessly so, but 
 when the church, in her priests, seeks them as bearers of 
 the sacrament, then surely must the clean-hearted be 
 thankful. So I am come to you, by the help of the saints, 
 in the name of Christ crucified." 
 
 Dunbar recoiled before the burning eyes of the zealot, 
 whose expression had something exalted in it. Doubts of 
 the man's sanity flashed through his mind. 
 
 "You are surely not serious," he said, at last, in a pacific 
 tone, "filouise can choose her own life, as other women 
 have done. If she chooses to remain with me, she shall not 
 be sorry. But more than that I can not promise; and to 
 marry, actually marry, a squaw is more than any man must 
 ask of me." 
 
 " Will you find a better heart and soul among your white 
 women? " 
 
 "No," he answered, frankly enough; "she is devoted to 
 her friends. But you, though priest, see enough of the 
 world to know that white men owe a duty to their own 
 race when they pick their wives, and their race does .not 
 approve of Indians in their families." 
 
 " My mother was an Indian, my father was a good man;
 
 218 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 he married her," said the priest, with that strange patience 
 he had shown from the first. 
 
 " Oh, well, but he was a hunter, living with her tribe. I 
 will hardly live such a life." 
 
 " I have asked you not what you are, nor how you live. 
 From your speech, you perhaps belong to some family that 
 is proud. You see I understand? Well, I will tell you, if it 
 is of ancient birth, of ruling blood, in all the land there 
 lives none this day with the sovereign pedigree of that 
 child, who knows not their value in the white man's land. It 
 is no slave I ask you to take. If she were dowered as a prin- 
 cess of your world is dowered, she would be equal in race and 
 tribe with any, if only by her Indian blood. The white 
 blood of the father may be unclean it is often so; but 
 you can lead her away where she can forget the evil he 
 brought to them. As a wife she " 
 
 "See here," interrupted Dunbar, "I believe all you say. 
 Your intentions are good enough, but it's no use. Fond as 
 I am of her, I can't and won't marry an Indian. I'd die 
 first." 
 
 The priest nodded his head, so keenly intent in his quest 
 that he did not hear a choking sound from above their 
 heads, where the ledge jutted over like a roof, or, if he had, 
 might have thought it his gambling friend coming closer 
 at the sound of raised voices. 
 
 "Listen! " he urged, appealingly. "You say she is devoted 
 to her friends; how much more devoted, then, has she 
 shown herself to you when she forgets them all for your 
 words. She is only a child, a pure one at heart when I 
 knew her last. Could you spoil all that by making her life 
 like the life of her mother? Her life is yours to make or 
 unmake. I know that in my heart, else she would not live 
 here where you live. Her soul has been as a white flower 
 opening above swamps where the poison is. Like the
 
 HENRI MERCIER. 219 
 
 eaglets, whose nest she shared once, she has lived above 
 the levels of evil. We must keep her so you, the man she 
 turns to, and I " 
 
 He stopped uncertainly, and clasped with his fingers the 
 crucifix. Was there anything more to say? He had said 
 so much, so many words, persistent yet not hopeful words, 
 for the man before him seemed to congeal with each added 
 plea. 
 
 "Good God!" he broke out, "you talk as though I 
 would be a brute to her! I! Why, man but what use is 
 there in telling you, a priest? Priests do not understand 
 loves of men and women; so leave us alone." 
 
 " I will do so," he answered, with calm significance. I 
 came to give her to you in marriage if your minds turned 
 toward each other; but if you say no, then I will leave 
 you much alone, for I will take her away. Will you bring 
 her to me for marriage? " 
 
 He put the question as though it were final, and Dunbar's 
 lips straightened angrily. 
 
 "No! I won't be bullied into promising anything, and 
 that's all there is of it," he declared. "We will get along 
 better without your interference than with it; but to talk of 
 taking her from me is foolish," and in spite of himself, the 
 note of triumph would ring through his speech. "You 
 will never make her leave me while I live." 
 
 The priest's hat dropped to the ground; he raised his 
 hand, making the sign of the cross in the air, and seeming 
 in Dunbar's eyes to suddenly loom up taller, more impos- 
 ing, and with as terrible a light in his eyes as had belonged 
 to the dead serpent at his feet. 
 
 " The time that you live will be short," he said, and the 
 slow concentration of the tone was chilling. " Think of 
 prayer, think of God! Of your sins, I absolve you! Of 
 your blood, be it on my head!"
 
 220 SQUAW fLOUISE. 
 
 And then, as a panther springs on its prey, so he hurled 
 himself on the other, who went down under the blow as 
 the brittle trees in the leveling wind. 
 
 Dunbar reached for a knife, but the circling fingers on 
 his throat rendered him powerless. In the dark, vengeful 
 face of the priest a face all Indian now he read the use- 
 lessness of a hope for mercy. Death lurking in those 
 strong dark fingers turned all the sky a narrowing dome 
 of crimson in his starting eyes, and that face above him 
 but a darker blot of blood, and then he knew no more. 
 
 Of that low cry from the shelf of the ledge and the form 
 of the girl darting from her hiding-place, of the sudden 
 crashing through the brush and the horror-stricken expos- 
 tulation of Clevents, the man on the ground was past 
 hearing, and the man above past heeding. 
 
 filouise clung to the priest's hands, moaning, "Henri! 
 Henri! " while Clevents, with what words and what muscle 
 he could, was striving to draw him from the thing that 
 seemed only a lifeless body. 
 
 " Henri, hear! " and the girl raised herself, facing him, 
 on her knees, and whipping from her blouse the knife Clev- 
 ents had seen her use before " let him go, or I, filouise, 
 I who love you, will die with him. You will kill us both." 
 
 He saw the knife raised to her throat, the point even 
 touched the soft neck, when he caught her hands and 
 wrested the knife from her. 
 
 She let it go without effort, and dropped moaning on the 
 still form before her, shielding the neck, livid-striped, with 
 her own face.
 
 ^LOUISE. 221 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 ^LOUISE. 
 
 CLEVENTS, wordless, stepped back, watching the strange 
 actors in the drama of the Indian refuge. He had not 
 heard the words of the two men, having halted too far off. 
 The girl he had not seen at all until the men were on the 
 ground, but she had evidently seen their approach and 
 crept close in their wake; and the priest, looking down on 
 the girl with an indescribable expression on his face, had 
 filled his mind with strange conjectures and a good deal of 
 amazement. 
 
 He was again as still, as undemonstrative, as he had been 
 since Clevents' first meeting with him. The creature of 
 passion, who had for those moments clung with such diabol- 
 ical tenacity to the other man's throat, had faded again 
 into the character more fitting to the garb he wore, and lis- 
 tened with cold face to the low moaning breaths of the 
 girl who bent in such intense question over Dunbar. 
 
 " Is it then so, oh, filouise?" he asked in their own Ian- 
 guage. "Is it so that the pride of the eagle's heart is 
 lowered to the carrion toward which the foul birds fly? 
 Has the soul of your race died within you at the words of 
 a stranger? Had you never a blade for your own breast ere 
 your heart grew weak? For I, who led you to the baptism 
 of the holy church, would have dug the grave for your 
 body and sung triumph songs sooner than see you bowed 
 with the shame of your life." 
 
 She turned one pleading, deprecating glance to him. 
 
 "You do not know," she answered in English; that was
 
 222 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 all a vibrating, pathetic suggestion in the words that 
 thrilled Clevents, though he could say nothing. He felt 
 barred away from her by those two men. 
 
 But a little cry from her brought him nearer. 
 
 " He has breath! he is living! " she said, and drew back 
 a little. 
 
 It was true; the tremulous lids of the eyes, and the slight 
 gasping breath growing stronger with each effort, showed 
 that the Indian priest had at least stopped short of murder; 
 but he did not seem particularly interested in the fact. It 
 was Clevents who carried water in his hands and dashed it 
 in the man's face, and from a pocket-flask poured whisky 
 between his teeth, looking at him all the time in a puzzled, 
 scrutinizing way. 
 
 As for the girl, despite her despair at his fancied death, 
 she arose from his side with little of joy in her face and 
 turned to the priest. 
 
 He saw all the sadness of her eyes and the heart-breaking 
 tremble of the childish lips, but above all that a something 
 in expression that made the young face look strange to him; 
 a fateful force that vibrated through her voice and made 
 her words slower, firmer, when she said: 
 
 "The man is to live, Henri; he the man you would kill 
 for wrong that is not his. If breath had gone away from him 
 always, I, "ftlouise, would have let you go to your grave and 
 heard no word from me; but now I say to you the deed 
 was wrong which you did. I heard your words together 
 some of them. I crept there when you looked at the beads 
 on the deer-skin. The man who is there has suffered much 
 at my hand. Why should you too hunt him? And marry? 
 When did you ever before think filouise would be squaw 
 for the white men who climb to our mountains? While you 
 kill, kill two, for I also say ' no ' when you talk of marriage." 
 
 "Then you filouise have no love in your thoughts?"
 
 ^LOUISE. 223 
 
 / 
 
 oegan the priest in troubled wonder; but the girl uttered a 
 short, hard laugh. 
 
 " Ask of the man who crept to this peak with you," she 
 returned, grimly. " He can tell you, may be, what love I 
 had." 
 
 But the priest did not understand; his eyes, in sad scrutiny, 
 wandered from her face to her bosom, where the beak of 
 the eagle caught his Indian eyes, and he did understand 
 that. 
 
 "Why? " he demanded, and pointed to the pagan totem; 
 " and the cross? " 
 
 She answered only by a passionate upward action of the 
 hands; what use were words, explanations, now? She 
 walked away from them all, and seated herself at the 
 entrance to the stone dwelling in which it seemed to her 
 she had lived so long a li,fe, the life holding both hell and 
 paradise in its span of one summer. The work they had 
 completed together lay near her feet the fine raiment for 
 the lady, so dainty, so beautiful, who waited down there in 
 the valley for its completion, for the worker who had 
 wrought it well! 
 
 She heard the first horrified utterance of Dunbar as his 
 voice returned, and she shivered, crouching, with covered 
 face. 
 
 "You you!" he was saying, and grasped at Clevents' 
 arm to assure himself it was no disembodied spirit bending 
 over him. " Great God! how is this? I can't see " 
 
 He raised on his elbow. The man who had striven to kill 
 him stood not a rod away, indifferent and superior in man- 
 ner. The serpent still showed a faint motion of life in its 
 quivering length, and beyond it sat someone with bowed 
 head. That must be filouise; yes, filouise come back 
 filouise grieving for his hurts his eagle that was yet a 
 dove at heart.
 
 224 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 But from the rest his gaze returned to that other. 
 
 " You are not dead I did not kill you? " and Clevents 
 answered with a laugh and held out his hand. 
 
 " I know you now, old fellow! Why, where on earth and 
 why on earth have you been hiding out? Well, this is the 
 unexpected! I never dropped to it that it was your face 
 back of that Rip Van Winkle beard until you spoke; though 
 you puzzled me, too. This is the queerest thing I've struck 
 for a day or so." 
 
 "And you didn't die?" Dunbar's hand passed over 
 his forehead confusedly. " I feel a little dizzy and crazy, 
 I thought you died." 
 
 " Same to you," returned Clevents. " But your head 
 must be out of order if you've got the notion in it that you 
 had ever killed me. You've been dreaming, old boy. Why 
 should you kill me and where? " 
 
 "That night, you know," and Dunbar struggled upward. 
 "Isn't it true? My God! isn't it true? I've thought 
 myself half-crazy over it that night over the game the 
 night you drew the knife on me, and I " 
 
 "I never drew a knife on you in my life!" asserted 
 Clevents, hotly. 
 
 Dunbar stared at him, and unbuttoned the breast of his 
 shirt, pushing it back. On his throat were the marks of 
 those strong priestly fingers, but aside from them, nearer 
 the shoulder, was the fresh scar. 
 
 " Then who? " 
 
 Clevents looked at the girl. He was about to tell, but 
 the sight of her covered head checked him. 
 
 " I've nothing more to say," he said. " You're alive, and 
 so am I; that's enough to think of just now. I never tried 
 to harm you that I know of." 
 
 " But filouise said " 
 
 He looked toward her hesitatingly, but did not finish
 
 ELOUISE. 225 
 
 the sentence. She had heard. She arose to her feet and 
 looked Clevents in the face. 
 
 " You do right," she said, briefly, coldly. "When a sin 
 is done, its own mouth must confess. I lied to you, to him, 
 to everyone." 
 
 " No! " broke in the priest, and stepped to her side. " It is 
 a madness that is speaking in her; a lie she never did tell. 
 I stand witness." 
 
 But she raised her hand and smiled bitterly. " Not in 
 the other summers, Henri; no, may be not. All is changed. 
 This llllouise who speaks you never knew. I led him away 
 from his bed in the valley. I builded a wall of lies that 
 held him prisoner here on the mountain. I have made him 
 suffer through all the days in this place that of old was 
 made for peace. His heart is eaten with hunger for the 
 people there," and she pointed to the valley, "yet he dared 
 not go; I held him." 
 
 Dunbar smiled at her fondly, wondering what she meant. 
 Even yet he was so confused by their many words their 
 contradictions. What the truth of it all was he did not 
 know, but he trusted filouise. 
 
 "What difference about our life here," he asked, kindly 
 enough. " We know what it was; that is past. It is of this 
 I asked," and he pointed to the scar. " If you know whose 
 knife left that mark, and whose hand drove it, tell me." 
 
 From the ground she picked up the knife he had seen 
 her use daily preparing their meals. 
 
 "There is the knife," she said in a low voice, and 
 dropped it point downward on the rock where she stood; 
 " and here is the hand." 
 
 " My God! no!" uttered Dunbar, but drawing away a step 
 as he said it, for, meeting her eyes, he felt she did not lie. 
 "You, llllouise?" 
 
 The priest looked from one to the other in perplexity. 
 16
 
 226 SQUAW t LOUISE. 
 
 " And this this man who has shared your home is the 
 man they told me you tried to kill in the camp? " he asked. 
 
 And then she turned from Dunbar's horror-stricken gaze. 
 
 " It is so," she said, in a lifeless sort of way. " He was 
 selling me;" and the priest understood. 
 
 "Well, you had no knife ready for the princess," 
 observed the gambler. " Was it affection held you in check 
 there? " 
 
 She looked at him without a word, but back of the dull 
 pain in her eyes he read something that made him feel 
 ashamed. 
 
 "Don't mind me. I'm a harmless fool, anyway," he said, 
 and turned to Dunbar. "Well, I'll tell the boys you're 
 alive, Neil, for I'm going to take the home trail. This 
 seems a family party, and I'm out of it; only," and he 
 looked at the girl " I told you before I was a friend of 
 yours, and as a student of Indian human nature, I'd just 
 like to know if this scheme of yours was a bit of Indian 
 vengeance in a new dress? " 
 
 Dunbar also looked at her, questioningly and coldly. She 
 noted it, and answered: 
 
 "Yes, it was vengeance, Indian vengeance, and it is 
 done." 
 
 Clevents had heard of an Indian proverb saying, " The 
 arrows of vengeance poison the hand of the warrior who 
 fits them to the bow, unless the cause be sacred." 
 
 He thought of that as she spoke. She looked as though 
 the poisoned arrows, rebounding, had touched her heart. 
 
 " See here," he said, with characteristic abruptness, " I 
 really won you at cards, you know, and I'm going to tell 
 you something. If you're treated right where you want to 
 stay, I'm out of it. I heard you say awhile ago that you 
 didn't want to marry the man we thought you meant to," 
 and his glance wandered to Dunbar; " and that's all right,
 
 ELOUISE. 
 
 for nothing seems to be what we expected to find up here 
 the reverend and me. But if you ever need an extra 
 gun to back you, or get what's your due out of this planet, 
 I'm ready to turn proprietor again and square things for 
 you. You're a squaw, but, for all the lies you own up to, 
 I've an idea there's something whiter about you than half 
 the ladies who have the pleasure of knowing me. I'm 
 done." 
 
 The priest held out his hand, and the gambler, after one 
 glance at his face, clasped it. Each understood that either 
 would risk considerable to win content for the strange, 
 moody child who strove for no content herself. Yet 
 neither had ever accepted a favor from her; and a little 
 apart, and reading their thoughts, stood the man for whom 
 she had striven much for whom she had cared through 
 all those torturous days of sickness, and who felt vaguely 
 ashamed of his own judgment of her of his common sense 
 in the presence of those two sentimentalists. 
 
 "Go slowly," he said to the gambler, "and I'll join you 
 that is if these friends of yours don't try to massacre me 
 again." 
 
 To the priest he had given no word or glance; but the 
 gambler once gone, he turned his eyes shrinkingly, yet 
 reproachfully, to filouise. 
 
 " Is it all true? " he asked. " Was it hate made you cold 
 to me, and revenge that made you deceive me? And he said 
 you refused to " 
 
 He stopped, and a great wave of conscious red flushed 
 his face as he met her eyes. 
 
 For many suns he had been so sure she adored him, 
 her devotion had been so complete; but something besides 
 adoration was in the gaze she bent on him. He felt its 
 pride and its irony. He felt that those black velvet eyes 
 read every impulse that made him draw from her; made
 
 228 SQUAW LOUISE. 
 
 him frame his speech to her with a canny regard for the 
 opinion of her priestly champion, who stood so near. 
 
 She had called him " master/' and had served him as a 
 slave; but, with the knowledge of all her duplicity in his 
 heart, he felt that she had risen above him, beyond him, 
 when she spoke. 
 
 " He said I refused the wish to be wife to you," she com- 
 pleted; " that is so. My kinsman was told wrong. He did 
 not know it was revenge made me guard you so he came; 
 but he knows now, and you need fear no more," and her 
 tone was scornful. "It was an Indian revenge but it is 
 done, and my heart is tired. Go! " 
 
 What a parting after those love pledges of the morning 
 those kisses scarce dead on his lips! The memory of 
 them touched him. 
 
 " You shall go too," he began, doubtfully; but she shook 
 her head. 
 
 "Never now," she answered, lowly. "Not for filouise 
 will the flowers grow there in the south by the sea, but the 
 picture of them is in my heart, the smell of them will live 
 with words that have been said; that is enough. Klahowya." 
 
 " ^llouise, opitsah! " (sweetheart). 
 
 " Nah! " she cried, passionately, throwing out her hand 
 as though the sound of the loved word hurt her; " no 
 more opitsah! Squaw filouise, slave filouise, only. Hear! 
 My knife sought you; my tongue lied to you; you know 
 that it is all you care to know of the Indian. You have 
 suffered. Well, I will send you pay, may be. I will send 
 from down there where the whites live a squaw who is not 
 an Indian; who has never dug roots with her white hands; 
 who has never had to fight with the wolf or the bear for 
 the meat she eats; who has never, may v be, lied as the 
 Indian lies, and whose white face is there on that chain of 
 your throat. Yes, it is she! Find her; braid in her hair
 
 ^LOUISE. 229 
 
 the flowers by that south sea. If you know how love is, I 
 pay you for the knife, for the cheat, when I tell you she is 
 down there. She waits for you the one who will wear 
 those red hearts on her toes the one they call the Dell.' 
 
 "Down there! Then I did see her it was no dream? ' 
 
 " No dream; all the rest is, may be, not the white squavtf. 
 When the new days come, she will be the only real thing; 
 the days left here will be the times of the evil dreams." 
 
 Her voice, faltering, growing tremulous, made him check 
 her as she turned. 
 
 "filouise, I don't seem to know you now; but I know 
 this, that I owe you for your good care for your nursing. 
 Whatever your reasons, you seemed my good angel once. 
 I do not want a harsh parting; I do not want to forget." 
 
 She picked from the stone floor of their doorway a bit of 
 white bark fallen there. Only the day before he had 
 drawn on one side of it a sketch of her head, and touched 
 it with his lips, jestingly, when she herself had drawn from 
 his caressing arms. 
 
 "But you will forget," she said, not looking in his face. 
 
 "But I owe you " 
 
 "You can owe me not anything ever," and she turned 
 blindly up toward the path of the terrace grotto, where so 
 many a starlit evening had found them; and for the first 
 time he made no attempt to follow or call her back. 
 
 He was left facing the tall, somber-eyed priest, who had 
 listened in silence to their words. Whatever he thought 
 was locked in his own half-savage breast. But the words 
 of iClouise had been plain; the sin was hers alone. This man 
 was the victim of her revenge; it was over, and he must be 
 let go in peace, so it seemed; and however his instincts 
 urged him to do battle for her, he pointed with an 
 imperious gesture to the valley below, and the victim of 
 Indian revenge bowed his head and passed out of sight.
 
 230 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 And then Henri Mercier turned with the instincts of a 
 hunter toward the trail of her feet; and up there she 
 crouched by the stone altar, and felt the touch of his hand 
 on her shoulder. 
 
 " My daughter filouise! Child 
 
 " No, not now, Henri; that child you did know has died 
 is dead aei! " 
 
 And up the heights shivered a moan for the child-life he 
 had known for the heart of the woman broken by its 
 death and he who had uttered solace over many graves 
 was struck dumb beside this one. 
 
 All that night the most memorable of his life he 
 never left her. From some misery known only to his own 
 heart, words at last arose to his lips, and his speech forced 
 her to listen. With his own hands he unclasped that pagan 
 symbol from her breast and replaced it with the cross 
 drifted to his feet on the flood, and looking at her in the 
 wan starlight, that change alone seemed to bring her closer 
 to him in the bonds of their once mutual faith. 
 
 The dawn drove the night onward, and the birds were 
 calling each other awake in the wilderness below, when he 
 led her, unresisting, down to the doorway of her dwelling. 
 
 '.' Rest a little until I bring for you food," he said, gently. 
 "Then we will go, you and I, far, where the churches are; 
 where your days will be days of prayer and help to others. 
 So only will your wounds be healed of the sin you have 
 thought and done. I will not be long. You will remember 
 your promise? " 
 
 She looked up blankly into his anxious face. " The 
 promise? " she said. 
 
 " The promise for your life." 
 
 " Oh, yes," she assented, bitterly. " I promised not to 
 kill myself. Well, I broke another promise to make that 
 to you. But, if you want it well! "
 
 ^LOUISE. 231 
 
 " But you promised? " 
 
 "Why should you give thought to that? " she asked, but 
 without interest. " I said no word to you of my wish. But 
 I promised. Go, if you like. I will seek no death; but if 
 it comes, I will not step aside from the trail." 
 
 He laid his hands on her head, hands trembling with the 
 weight of his love and his fear for her; and, blessing her 
 silently, left for the pool where the fish are. 
 
 She looked after him, and kissed the cross he had laid on 
 her breast. He was so good; the saints in heaven could 
 not be better, she thought, than was Henri Mercier to her. 
 The saints take care of their own souls, but he would have 
 lost his for her by that murder. 
 
 She did not know why he should be so kind; she had 
 never been so kind to him. She seemed yet to feel his lips 
 on her hands, as he had prayed with her and for her 
 through the night. Yes, Henri was a good priest. 
 
 She told herself that over and over. It was only Henri 
 and his church she spoke of, as she lay there through his 
 absence, striving to crowd out all other memories, all other 
 faces. 
 
 But she could not; and, suddenly flinging herself face 
 downward, in utter abandonment of despair, she moaned, 
 tearlessly. What use to try to deceive herself as she 
 deceived Henri? She could not. The cross on her breast 
 could not blot out that vow to Manitou. Her soul had 
 been sold traded to the Great Spirit for his life and his 
 faith. That was done, and Henri did not know; he never 
 would know. She must act a lie to him forever, if she 
 lived; and death would be better better. 
 
 She raised her face on her hands, and lay there in the 
 dim dawn with a wonder in her heathenish heart as to why 
 it was so evil a thing to stop the breath of the body when 
 every breath was a prolongation of pain. When love dies,
 
 232 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 what is left to live for? The beauty in the soul dies; 
 the true life-beat of the heart dies; and if the steel or the 
 arrow stops entirely its aching efforts, what then? The 
 real life is dead is dead! 
 
 Something moved under the deer-skin dress lying there 
 in the gray dusk. It was within reach of her hand, and, 
 without moving from where she lay, she brushed aside the 
 fringed skirt and touched a living black body. In an 
 instant its crested head darted forward and sunk its curved 
 lances of death into the open palm of her hand. 
 
 It was the mate of the reptile whose life Dunbar had 
 ended. It had followed to that height for its vengeance. 
 
 She shook it loose, but raised her hand high as her head 
 to do it, it clung so; and then she did not heed where it 
 moved to. An electric shock seemed tingling from that 
 hand through all her veins; flashes of heat and cold shiv- 
 ering over her until even the gray walls she could touch, 
 and the crimson heart on that moccasin, faded far away 
 from her, barely visible in the half-light. 
 
 " I did not go to death, Henri," she protested, feebly 
 "it hunted me; and it is good." Tinkling bells sounded 
 in her ears and shut out the sounds of the bird-calls. 
 Strangely enough, they seemed to echo the words of that 
 song she had sung and forgotten. Yes, they came to her 
 ears clearly 
 
 " Heart-snows are nigh 
 When love's bright leaves fall; 
 And they fall, 
 And they fall 
 On the grave of my dead; 
 On the grave 
 Of a life 
 That is dead, that is dead." 
 
 She tried to repeat the words in song as they came back
 
 ON THUNDER MOUNTAIN. 233 
 
 w her, but it was only the whisper of music that she 
 uttered; a dimness of all things in sound or sense seemed 
 closing around her, and she even smiled her content at it. 
 " It is good to sing as the true singers sing," she said, as 
 to someone who was listening "to sing true, and die ere 
 the false songs come to the heart. That is best, Henri. 
 Love is like that love Aei! the cross! " 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 ON THUNDER MOUNTAIN. 
 
 THE dew yet lay in the shadowy places when Redney 
 reached the summit of Thunder Mountain, and halted to 
 look back, with the bitterness of contempt on his young- 
 face. 
 
 "They are all alike the cursed whites!" he told him- 
 self; "kind and false. If he knew how her hand shook, 
 and how her cheek flushed when I touched her, would he 
 have knelt there beside her as I saw them last night? And 
 if she knew all, would she think his rescue by some Indians 
 was such a romantic thing, and be so anxious to start with 
 him at once for the south country? May be. They'll go on 
 all their lives like that, I s'pose, cheating each other, and 
 stealing sweet words to whoever comes handy. ^Ilouise 
 couldn't have been like that if she tried. She was a fool, 
 but she was honest; and it's just the honest fools that get 
 left, like abandoned claims, whether it's on the mountains 
 or in the camps." 
 
 He started on, picking his way through the scrub-brush.
 
 234 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 He had never yet followed her up there, or seen exactly the 
 home they had shared; but he remembered the location by 
 that visit of Miss Delia's to the edge of the terraced rock. 
 He blamed himself passionately for not telling in the very 
 beginning who the man was abiding there. If he had 
 guessed how it would end 
 
 Two people back in that camp he felt blue at leaving 
 that morning; they were Milt and Clevents, who had called 
 " Klahowya!" after him, but with no idea in their minds 
 that High-Low would know him no more. He told him- 
 self that the rest down there he hated, and hated, and 
 hated! Not the baby, of course, for the tears were in his 
 eyes as he kissed it; and when good Mrs. Nannie laid her 
 hand on his shoulder with a touch like a caress, he had 
 fairly run from her. But the rest he knew he hated. He 
 was going up on the mountain; he would find iSlouise and 
 take her far away toward the south, where the Indians of 
 the churches and the schools lived. There they would live, 
 out of the sight of the white aristocrats, who bring only sor- 
 rows to Indian hearts. All the wealth of their gold should 
 never bind him to their service again. 
 
 So he told himself, so he would tell filouise when he 
 found her. 
 
 But he found first the strange dark snake, dead since the 
 day before, and a little farther on, the headless body of its 
 mate, that showed a faint motion when his foot touched it. 
 Its head, as though twisted from its body, lay near, and, 
 startled at the sight, he turned quickly around looking for 
 the girl. 
 
 And in the shadow of the ancient dwelling he found her, 
 sleeping the death-sleep for which the serpent had given 
 the potion the serpent whose kiss had proven more merci- 
 ful than that of love. 
 
 And her resting-place was the arms of the Indian priest,
 
 ON THUNDER MOUNTAIN. 235 
 
 who bent his dark face over hers, saying Latin prayers, 
 may be; anyway, he was speaking in the softest murmur of 
 tones, and if he had not been a priest, Redney would have 
 simply thought he was talking in some unknown tongue to 
 the dead girl, often waiting as if for replies, and then con- 
 tinuing the tender monotone. 
 
 At first glance the boy thought he had something of white 
 bound about his head; but when he heard the voice of the 
 new-comer, and arose to his feet with her form clasped close, 
 Redney saw that his hair was snow-white. 
 
 "She is mine now," he said. "Go follow the trail the 
 others have left. I will find her a bed where the eagles 
 nest. She belongs to them they knew it long ago. She 
 is gone from your life. She is mine now." 
 
 At the first words, low, intense, the boy feared he was 
 mad, and the startling change in his appearance that white 
 crown above the dark face strengthened the idea. But the 
 tenderness of his speech to her moved him to sympathy, 
 and he walked to them and laid his hand on her dead 
 breast. 
 
 "She is mine too, father," and despite himself his voice 
 trembled at the tardy avowal. "She was my sister." 
 
 "Her mother had no other child." 
 
 " But her father had. I never told her I'm sorry now; 
 but she was my sister." 
 
 "Sister so she was to me," the priest murmured, sadly; 
 "sister, child, and companion so she should always have 
 been. But it is over now. You are her kinsman; you 
 then may see where her grave is made." 
 
 His low-toned words and strangely impressive tones awed 
 Redney, who had never before stood in awe of anything 
 human. Obediently he followed, while the priest alone 
 carried dead filouise up to the grotto on the heights. 
 
 The bench of stone served as her couch, where she lay
 
 236 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 facing the south that land of the wished-for life! Had she 
 chosen, it must surely have been for that resting-place. 
 
 For the first time in Redney's life he knelt in the prayer 
 for the dead, and heard an anthem of the holy church, as 
 Father Henri's voice rolled out and upward in music he and 
 FJlouise had sung together in the old days when their hearts 
 were as the hearts of children. 
 
 And then the two labored there on the summit while the 
 sun dropped down and down to the very edge of their world, 
 and its last beams lit the face of a tomb walled up where 
 the grotto had looked out over the far green lands and 
 silver-hued glaciers. A mound of stone in the form of a 
 cross blocks the shelf in front of it. It is the only guard 
 of her tomb. 
 
 And beside it the priest turned to the boy. " We part 
 here. I go to the west, where the red death is and you? " 
 
 " Wherever I can get away from the faces of white people; 
 I'm tired of the camps. If you would need me ' 
 
 "You are her kinsman; if you wish, come." 
 
 And so they descended together to the valley and walked 
 without separating toward the west. 
 
 Once as they crossed a stream where the water was as a 
 mirror, the youth touched the priest's arm and pointed to 
 the reflection of the hair whitened that one morning. 
 
 "It is the hand of God," he said. " I carried evil in my 
 heart, and was a priest; hidden evil that my own eyes could 
 not see. Then in one hour it was made plain to me. I had 
 sinned. The mark is .left to show I suffered. My life is 
 left to make atonement."
 
 BACK TO THE WORLD. 237 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 BACK TO THE WORLD. 
 
 No one wondered, least of all his fiancee, that Dunbar 
 was anxious to leave the scenes where his health had he 
 said been broken by sickness. He was asked remarkably 
 few questions of his absence, except by Delia, and the 
 forty-eight hours from his return until they left High-Low 
 together was a state of blissful content in all things to her. 
 The summer had brought her a bona-fide romance of her 
 own, and it circled about Dunbar as a halo. He was her 
 Prince Charming, as he had been in her childish days. 
 Everything had turned out just as she hoped, and the wed- 
 ding was to be at once. The last birthday of her maiden- 
 hood was over the ninsteenth, for which they had waited. 
 
 All High-Low was on the banks as their canoes were 
 pushed off. Dunbar looked a little pale and quiet, espe- 
 cially pale when Mr. Clevents, after shaking hands heartily 
 with Miss Raeforth, put his hand in his pocket and did not 
 offer it to the groom-elect. They looked at each other, 
 but said nothing. 
 
 " Kind o' bleached, ain't he? " remarked one of the men, 
 as the canoes left the shore, and Mr. Collins, who stood 
 near, grinned. 
 
 "Not near so bleached as he looked and made me feel 
 last night," he answered. " It was moonlight, you know, an' 
 he was comin' down off the mountain a tearin'; and white! 
 he'll never be whiter when he's dead, and you'd better 
 believe I was scared. It's my notion that cut has left him 
 loony."
 
 238 SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 " What mountain was he on? " asked Mr. Clevents, and 
 smiled without mirth when the man answered: 
 
 "Why, up on old Thunder, where there ain't any business 
 to take anyone, 'specially at night." 
 
 "Well, loony or not, he's in luck, anyway." 
 
 And the man who was in luck skimmed with his sweet- 
 heart over the proud bosom of the Columbia, and watched 
 with tender eyes the childish beauty of her face, and told 
 her truth and lies in those judicious installments known and 
 practiced of all men under like interesting circumstances, 
 all the while keeping his face turned down the river, the 
 way of their future, and the place of their wedding. 
 
 A bundle lay at the girl's feet, and remembering Mr. 
 Clevents had placed it there, telling her it was a souvenir 
 of the Selkirks, she opened it eagerly, and laughed with 
 delight. 
 
 " My Indian dress! Oh, Neil, isn't it lovely? And the moc- 
 casins, look at them! I never hoped to see them when 
 they told me that priest had taken the little squaw 
 away. How kind of Mr. Clevents, and I do wonder how 
 he got them. I asked Redney about them, and he just 
 walked away and I never got sight of him again he was 
 so queer sometimes. Well, I wanted that pretty Indian 
 girl to take East, but, as I can't get her, I'm satisfied to 
 have these, and they are beauties; don't you think so? 
 Look at the pretty red hearts on the moccasins." 
 
 She put them in his hands, and he did not know what he 
 replied. He held them, and assented to the beauties she 
 found in them, but saw more than she did. He saw the one 
 border of beads he had been allowed to sew on, and it was 
 crooked; he saw a little mark where a drop of blood had 
 fallen from the finger of filouise and stained the white 
 leather; he saw the border of fringe he had cut as her pupil; 
 he saw was he to see these on the feet of his wife and
 
 BACK TO THE WORLD. 239 
 
 listen over and over to her light-hearted chatter of them? 
 His hand dropped over the edge of the canoe, when Delia 
 caught it. 
 
 "Why, Neil! I would not have them wet for anything. 
 You silly boy, did you think they needed stretching? Give 
 them to me, and tell me some Indian stories of the river or 
 mountains. Don't you know any not even a canoe- 
 song? " 
 
 A canoe-song! What was that song sung that night on 
 the heights, the song of the boat that should bear him 
 away? He told himself he must get over this weakness that 
 came with memory. He would try and repeat it. 
 
 " The boat is built, 
 
 And the water sings 
 To you. Dear heart, good-by! 
 It will bear you far, 
 
 On its tireless wings, 
 From me. Good-by! good-by!" 
 
 "Oh, Neil, how sad that air is!" breathed his little 
 sweetheart, and slipped her hand into his. 
 
 And then from the high wall of green above them the 
 wide-spread wings of an eagle beat the air, darting toward 
 the water for an instant, and then changing its course sailed 
 over their heads, with the wild call that is so startling when 
 it comes close. 
 
 And it had surely startled Dunbar, for his face grew very 
 white; his hands were trembling. 
 
 " It was only an eagle," he assured the girl, who heeded 
 it the least of the two; and then he turned nervously to the 
 oarsmen. 
 
 " Row faster faster, can't you, and get us out of this 
 wilderness; we are barely creeping along." 
 
 The men smiled at each other it was so natural for the 
 road to seem long when a man goes to his wedding; and
 
 24C SQUAW ^LOUISE. 
 
 they dipped the paddles in the singing wate*j and darted 
 downward as if indeed borne on wings. 
 
 And high up over the wilderness the call of the eagle 
 sounded Ai-ee! ai-cc! and then drifted into silence. 
 
 THE END.
 
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