Part 15 (1/2)

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

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

Then there arose the picture of the factor's daughter. I hated her.

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

What had that terrible old man said I was like? A _strange snake_.

A snake? The idea wound itself about me like the very coils of a serpent. What was this in the beaded bag of my buckskin dress? This little thing rolled in tan that my mother had given me at parting with the words, ”Don't touch much, but some time maybe you want it!”

Oh! I knew well enough what it was--a small flint arrow-head dipped in the venom of some _strange snake_.

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

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

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

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

They seem to have forgotten I am a woman.

The Legend of Lillooet Falls

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

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

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

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

She had been north to the Skeena River, south to the great ”Fair”

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

”And, oh! Tillic.u.m,” I cried, ”have your good brown ears actually listened to the call of the falls across the canyon--the Falls of Lillooet?”

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

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

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

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

I shook my head. This was always the crucial moment with my Klootchman, when her voice lowers, and she asks if you know things.

You must be diplomatic, and never question her in turn. If you do her lips will close in unbreakable silence.

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

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