Northern Lights | Page 4

feet will bleed, but beyond is the happy land.'
And I would not go for the voice that spoke, and at last there came an
old man in my dream and spoke to me kindly, and said, 'Come with me,
and I will show thee the way over the hills to the Lodge where thou
shalt find what thou hast lost.' And I said to him, 'I have lost nothing;'
and I would not go. Twice I dreamed this dream, and twice the old man
came, and three times I dreamed it; and then I spoke angrily to him, as
but now I did to thee; and behold he changed before my eyes, and I saw
that he was now become--"she stopped short, and buried her face in her
hands for a moment, then recovered herself--"Breaking Rock it was, I
saw before me, and I cried out and fled. Then I waked with a cry, but
my man was beside me, and his arm was round my neck; and this
dream, is it not a foolish dream, my mother?"

The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly,
and looking out of the wide doorway towards the trees that fringed the
river; and presently, as she looked, her face changed and grew pinched
all at once, and Mitiahwe, looking at her, turned a startled face towards
the river also.
"Breaking Rock!" she said in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking towards the lodge, then
came slowly forward to them. Never in all the four years had he
approached this lodge of Mitiahwe, who, the daughter of a chief,
should have married himself, the son of a chief! Slowly but with long
slouching stride Breaking Rock came nearer. The two women watched
him without speaking. Instinctively they knew that he brought news,
that something had happened; yet Mitiahwe felt at her belt for what no
Indian girl would be without; and this one was a gift from her man, on
the anniversary of the day she first came to his lodge.
Breaking Rock was at the door now, his beady eyes fixed on
Mitiahwe's, his figure jerked to its full height, which made him, even
then, two inches less than Long Hand. He spoke in a loud voice:
"The last boat this year goes down the river tomorrow. Long Hand,
your man, is going to his people. He will not come back. He has had
enough of the Blackfoot woman. You will see him no more." He waved
a hand to the sky. "The birds are going south. A hard winter is coming
quick. You will be alone. Breaking Rock is rich. He has five hundred
horses. Your man is going to his own people. Let him go. He is no man.
It is four years, and still there are but two in your lodge. How!"
He swung on his heel with a chuckle in his throat, for he thought he had
said a good thing, and that in truth he was worth twenty white men. His
quick ear caught a movement behind him, however, and he saw the girl
spring from the lodge door, something flashing from her belt. But now
the mother's arms were round her, with cries of protest, and Breaking
Rock, with another laugh, slipped away swiftly toward the river.
"That is good," he muttered. "She will kill him perhaps, when she goes
to him. She will go, but he will not stay. I have heard."
As he disappeared among the trees Mitiahwe disengaged herself from
her mother's arms, went slowly back into the lodge, and sat down on
the great couch where, for so many moons, she had lain with her man
beside her.

Her mother watched her closely, though she moved about doing little
things. She was trying to think what she would have done if such a
thing had happened to her, if her man had been going to leave her. She
assumed that Dingan would leave Mitiahwe, for he would hear the
voices of his people calling far away, even as the red man who went
East into the great cities heard the prairies and the mountains and the
rivers and his own people calling, and came back, and put off the
clothes of civilisation, and donned his buckskins again, and sat in the
Medicine Man's tent, and heard the spirits speak to him through the
mist and smoke of the sacred fire. When Swift Wing first gave her
daughter to the white man she foresaw the danger now at hand, but this
was the tribute of the lower race to the higher, and--who could tell!
White men had left their Indian wives, but had come back again, and
for ever renounced the life