The Moccasin Maker | Page 7

husband that one of the children had evidently stolen a cake. (In her
mind the two negro servants employed in the house did not merit the
suspicion.) Mr. Bestman inquired which child was fond of the cakes.
Mrs. Bestman replied that she did not know, unless it was Lydia, who
always liked them.
Lydia was called. Her father, frowning, asked if she had taken the cake.
The child said no.
"You are not telling the truth," Mr. Bestman shouted, as the poor little
downtrodden girl stood half terrified, consequently half
guilty-mannered, before him.
"But I am truthful," she said. "I know nothing of the cake."
"You are not truthful. You stole it--you know you did. You shall be

punished for this falsehood," he stormed, and reached for the
cat-o'-nine-tails.
The child was beaten brutally and sent to her room until she could tell
the truth. When she was released she still held that she had not taken
the cooky. Another beating followed, then a third, when finally the
stepmother interfered and said magnanimously:
"Don't whip her any more; she has been punished enough." And once
during one of the beatings she protested, saying, "Don't strike the child
on the head in that way."
But the iron had entered into Lydia's sister's soul. The injustice of it all
drove gentle Elizabeth's gentleness to the winds.
"Liddy darling," she said, taking the thirteen-year-old girl-child into her
strong young arms, "I know truth when I hear it. You never stole that
cake."
"I didn't," sobbed the child, "I didn't."
"And you have been beaten three times for it!" And the sweet young
mouth hardened into lines that were far too severe for a girl of
seventeen. Then: "Liddy, do you know that Mr. Evans has asked me to
marry him?"
"Mr. Evans!" exclaimed the child. "Why, you can't marry him, 'Liza!
He's ever so old, and he lives away up in Canada, among the Indians."
"That's one of the reasons that I should like to marry him," said
Elizabeth, her young eyes starry with zeal. "I want to work among the
Indians, to help in Christianizing them, to--oh! just to help."
"But Mr. Evans is so old," reiterated Lydia.
"Only thirty," answered the sister; "and he is such a splendid
missionary, dear."
Love? No one talked of love in that household except the contradictory

father, who continually talked of the love of God, but forgot to reflect
that love towards his own children.
Human love was considered a non-essential in that family.
Beautiful-spirited Elizabeth had hardly heard the word. Even Mr. Evans
had not made use of it. He had selected her as his wife more for her
loveliness of character than from any personal attraction, and she in her
untaught womanhood married him, more for the reason that she desired
to be a laborer in Christ's vineyard than because of any wish to be the
wife of this one man.
But after the marriage ceremony, this gentle girl looked boldly into her
father's eyes and said:
"I am going to take Liddy with me into the wilds of Canada."
"Well, well, well!" said her father, English-fashion. "If she wants to go,
she may."
Go? The child fairly clung to the fingers of this saviour-sister-- the poor
little, inexperienced, seventeen-year-old bride who was giving up her
youth and her girlhood to lay it all upon the shrine of endeavour to
bring the radiance of the Star that shone above Bethlehem to reflect its
glories upon a forest-bred people of the North!
It was a long, strange journey that the bride and her little sister took. A
stage coach conveyed them from their home in Ohio to Erie,
Pennsylvania, where they went aboard a sailing vessel bound for
Buffalo. There they crossed the Niagara River, and at Chippewa, on the
Canadian side, again took a stage coach for the village of Brantford,
sixty miles west.
At this place they remained over night, and the following day Mr.
Evans' own conveyance arrived to fetch them to the Indian Reserve, ten
miles to the southeast.
In after years little Lydia used to tell that during that entire drive she
thought she was going through an English avenue leading up to some

great estate, for the trees crowded up close to the roadway on either
side, giant forest trees--gnarled oaks, singing firs, jaunty maples,
graceful elms--all stretching their branches overhead. But the "avenue"
seemed endless. "When do we come to the house?" she asked,
innocently. "This lane is very long."
But it was three hours, over a rough corduroy road, before the little
white frame parsonage lifted its roof through the forest, its broad
verandahs and green outside shutters welcoming the travellers with an
atmosphere of home at last.
As the horses drew up before the porch the great front