Ralph Connor

“ In that hour of solemn sacrament the boy in an unspoken covenant dedicated himself to the care and protection of this babe upon whose blue eyes God for some mysterious reason had let this unspeakable horror of darkness fall. Thenceforth no love, no lure could draw away the boy’s heart whensoever the babe had need of him. In that hour too the Indian mother of the blind child gave to the boy the deep adoring love of her heart, veil it as she might, second only to that she had given to the man for whose sake she had abandoned home and race and all else that she held dear. ”

“ Except when spoken to by Paul her face was masked by the passionless colour of the dead. Paul alone could kindle a flicker of light in her sombre eyes and set tremulous life waves rippling over her face. Often she would be found by Paul, wearing her Indian dress and roaming the woods, ostensibly seeking for roots and herbs for medicinal use. It seemed as if her loneliness and grief were driving her away from the newer environment of the white men’s civilisation and back to the ancient racial and primeval precincts of her own people. ”

“ Today my heart is dead. I have seen your woman. I have seen your face. You have no thought, no love for the Indian girl. To you she is like the dead leaves—nothing! nothing! You would kill her and her child. I saw death in your eyes just now. I go away, back to the Athabasca. You will never see my face again. But before I go I ask you one thing. This boy, this little boy”—for an instant the even calm of her voice was shaken—“he is my son, but first he is your son. What will he be, Indian or white man? The Indian is like the buffalo and the deer. ”

“ Her last words were, ‘Tell Daddy till seventy times seven.’ Dalton, I have been saying the Lord’s Prayer night and morning for seven years, and every time dodging the issue under a pretence that in seeking vengeance I was only seeking justice. Justice is not hatred, bitter, hot, heart-racking hatred. Justice is a holy thing, with its foundation in the heart of the Eternal God, and lies next to mercy. I have been a self-deceiving hypocrite. Never in these seven years could I have gone to Sleeman and said, ‘Sleeman, I only seek justice upon you.’ I knew I wanted more than that. ”

“ For some moments the eyes of each held the other’s, then sweeping in one all-embracing gesture earth and sky, the old chief intoned as in a solemn ritual, “The sun, the sky, the earth, these have heard. These will remember. The eyes of the Great Spirit are never shut. They will follow the trail through the forests, over the mountains and down the valleys, while the winds blow and the rivers run.”
For a moment he held Paul’s hand in his, then gave both hands to the boy Peter, kissing him on both cheeks. ”

“ Across this pitiless, glaring, wind-swept, sun-burnished plain now a little party made its painful way; a youth verging to full manhood; a boy in his early teens; a girl some years his junior, a mere child indeed; fur-clad all of them, leading and driving three limping dogs attached to a toboggan. Upon the toboggan lay a woman wrapped close in furs. Where the drifts obscured the trail the youth broke the way for the team of limping dogs which the boy following lashed into movement lest they should drop in their tracks. ”

“ The poplars and birches about were bare and gaunt, but the balsams and spruce clustered in a kindly way near the little plot, and overhead the tall pines waved their feathery tops and sighed softly in the wind. To Paul the place was as a temple of God, but as he looked upon his father’s grave and remembered how it was that he came to be lying there, into his heart there came a prayer that justice should be done on him who had wrought this evil, and with the prayer a solemn vow that the execution of that act of justice should not be by his hand. ”

“ The boy’s face, the honest, clear, blue-grey eyes, the pain in them, the anxiety, the doubt, held back Dalton’s glib disclaimer of faith. He temporised.
“Is what true?” he said.
“Is the Bible true? The story of Adam and Eve, of Joseph, of David and Goliath—that Psalm, is that true?” Again Paul laid a shaking finger upon the words that had just been read.
“Gaspard,” said Dalton, “don’t be a darned fool. What has that psalm got to do with Adam and Eve, and Noah, and the rest of those old boys? Don’t you know how your Bible is made up? That’s not one book. ”

“ The wife slowly drew away from the grasp of the Indian woman, climbed somehow on to her pony, and, with the face of one stricken with her death wound, she set off slowly down the homeward trail.
For a single moment the Indian woman followed her with scornful eyes. This supreme, this mad folly in a woman who would turn away from a man who so obviously and so passionately was hers, she could not understand. It was the madness of the white race. White women did not know how to love. She caught up her boy, ran with him to the chief. ”

“ Breaking the track and pulling hard on his leading line, the young man, with unseeing eyes set in his haggard face, strode, or rather stumbled along, leaning far over his stride like one ever on the verge of falling. For the last hour and more he had abandoned any attempt to hold the trail. The main direction he knew lay down this frozen lake, and between the flanking lines of low bush half a mile distant on either side. Half a day’s journey away was the Hudson’s Bay Post, the last lap in their fifteen days’ struggle against wind and sun and snow-blocked trail. ”

“ One afternoon, wearied with a long day in the saddle after straying cattle, Paul, allowing his pinto to graze at will, lay down to rest and fell asleep in a thicket. He was startled into wakefulness by the sense of some living thing near him, which becomes second nature with those bred in the wilds. Creeping stealthily toward the edge of the thicket which sheltered him he saw erect upon an out-jutting rock a woman’s figure with wind blown tresses, with one hand outstretched toward the Sleeman ranch and in her outstretched hand a long hunting knife. It was the Indian woman Onawata. ”

“ Thus the morning hours passed, till at the approach of noon the voices of Paul and his father were heard from the paddock near the house. At the first sound of the man’s voice the Indian girl leaped to the window, flung one swift glance at the man’s face, stood one moment, trembling, uncertain, then with quick resolve gathered up her sleeping boy in his blanket and with the fleet and silent movements of the wild things of the forest she slipped from the room out of the house and disappeared into the brushwood at the rear. ”

“ The emotion manifested by the stoical and simple-hearted savage released the flood of grief and loneliness that, without his knowledge, had been gathering within Paul’s heart ever since he had turned in at the Pine Croft drive. He threw himself into a chair, put his face in his hands, while great sobs shook his body. On the floor beside him the Indian sat, silent, his face rigid, immovable, as if cut in stone, his eyes unseeing, staring straight into space. ”

“ I stood at the doors of your grand theatres and music halls. I saw there the painted women, poor unhappy creatures that they are! Beasts of burden? Would to God they were only beasts of burden, sir! Beasts, and lower than beasts, made to serve the lusts of English gentlemen!” The blue eyes of the Scot were aflame with indignation. “I warrant you, Paul, you saw nothing of that among your Indians of the North. Ah, sir,” turning again to Laughton, “the paganism of London is something for which all honest Englishmen ought to be concerned and for which all of us ought to blush. ”

“ Associated with him was the young lawyer, Dalton, a master of all technicalities of his profession, a shrewd negotiator, an alert watch dog against all such predatory creatures as had made prey of Dan Tussock during his checkered and eventful life. With them, the youth Paul Gaspard, inexperienced in the ways of men, ignorant of affairs, but furnished in rich measure with the priceless endowments of a clear, high mind, with instincts for things right and fine, and a heart vastly capable of unlimited loyalty to a friend, even to the obliteration of self. ”

“ Indeed he knew himself to be possessed of a strange power of reading the hearts of men. No man had ever been able to lie successfully to him.
Filled as he was with a settled and deadly rage toward Sleeman, he knew that though he could kill him with his bare hands and though some such vengeance was the man’s due for the killing of his father, yet from such an act of vengeance he was prevented by the conscience within him and by his solemn word to both his father and his Indian stepmother. ”

“ His first thought had been that the Indian woman should simply disappear from his world and find a home with her own people. But as he listened to her quiet and reasoned appeal in her quaintly picturesque speech, the product of the mission school, and as he looked upon her face, alight with clear-seeing intelligence, aglow with the divine light of motherhood and distinguished with a beauty beyond any he had ever known, the solution which first suggested itself to his mind somehow failed to satisfy. ”

“ Paul started from the bedside where he had been kneeling and stood tense and rigid.
“What, Daddy?” he said. “You know, Daddy, I must kill him. He deserves to be killed. It is right, Daddy.” The boy spoke quietly with the steady voice of a man set upon a simple and irrevocable duty. His father’s eyes rested with loving pride on his boy’s face for a moment or two.
“Good boy!” he said, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Good boy! And you will be a good man—a better man than your father.”
“Daddy! Don’t, Daddy!” The boy’s voice broke in a cry of pain. ”

“ My father is not strong,” she explained to Paul, “and therefore he needs to be cared for like a baby.”
“Ah, Mr. Gaspard,” said her father, “she is a hard taskmaster. She is one to be obeyed. She rules me with a rod of iron. I shall leave you. There is the piano, and I beg you to consider yourself as in your own home.”
“Yes, Mr. Gaspard,” said Julie, “we shall treat you like one of the family and leave you to yourself. My father must have his sleep, and for me there are my household duties waiting.”
“And I will not disturb you if I play?” said Paul to the old gentleman. ”

“ The boy? The little chap standing up straight on sturdy legs, gazing at him with piercing, solemn, appraising eyes—his boy? His heart gave a queer little quiver. Indian or white man? Condemned to be hunted back beyond the horizon of civilisation? Or trained, fitted for a chance for life among men? Never in his life had his thoughts raced through his mind as today in the presence of this girl, this grave, controlled woman by whose very calmness he stood accused and condemned as by a judge upon the bench. ”

“ And over all the world the moon rode high, serene in her soft and radiant splendour.
Within an hour there came to Peg up in her bedroom the sound again of hoof beats, hard driven as by dread of impending death. Nearer they came and nearer and with no slackening speed. She sprang to the window. She heard her father go to the door. She could make out the piebald coat of the pinto coming down the lane. Clearing the bars in his stride the pinto came with unchecked speed to the very door. From the saddle Paul hurled himself and fell breathless in the Colonel’s arms.
“Oh! Uncle Colonel!” he gasped. ”

“ He pictured the reaction in her, of horror, loathing, repulsion. For well he knew her lofty sense of right, her Puritan holiness of spirit. She would despise him beyond hope of restoring. She could never bear to look upon him, much less allow him to touch her. She would pity him, but never more could she regard him with that adoring love which had been to him the supreme joy and satisfaction of his life. Without her love, life for him would be over. His mind, with one swift, comprehending glance, scanned the future years, and from the desolation his soul shrank back in fear. ”

“ He could hear beneath the howlings and shriekings the hiss of their whispering voices just at the back of the shelter. He sprang to his feet. He would meet them out there on their own ground. Out from the cover of the shelter he leaped into the blizzard. The cutting drive of the granulated snow bit into his bare face. A moment he stood staring into the blinding, cutting, needle-pointed drift, then suddenly he stumbled back and sank huddled behind the shelter, his soul and body shaken by the impact of a new fear. ”

“ It was bravely and cleverly done.
“Paul,” he shouted, peering among the underbrush for his son, “where are you?”
“Huh,” grunted the chief, whose quick eye had caught sight of the boy farther down the bank, lying motionless at the root of an old birch stump. With one leap the chief was over the pony and at the boy’s side. Swiftly he lifted the boy, carried him down to the river’s edge and laid him gently down. ”

“ Oh, thank you, dear Mrs. Pelham. I have thought this out during many dark and terrible nights in the North Country, and I resolved that, whatever duty I owed to Onawata, my present wife, I owed a prior duty to my dear wife now gone and to our boy Paul. I am not going to allow Paul’s future to be entangled or embarrassed by association with the children of mixed blood. No one can tell how they will turn out. While I am here they will be all right, but no one knows how long I shall be with them. Sometimes I have my fears as to myself. ”