The Shagganappi | Page 4

to explain that as he passed the library door on his way to the baths, Professor Warwick called him in and introduced him to the tall, lithe Westerner, who had wonderfully easy manners, a skin like a tan-colored glove, and whose English was more attractive than marred by a strong accent that sounded "Frenchy."
"When he found that I was heading for the baths he asked to come, too," rattled Cop; "been on the train over three days and nights coming from Winnipeg; said he felt grimy, so I took him along. Jingo, you should see his clothes--silk socks, silk shirt, top-coat lined with mink, an otter collar--must have cost hundreds. Says I, 'Well, pal, your governor must be well fixed.' Says he, 'My father is a trapper and trades with the Hudson's Bay Company. He trapped all these minks, and my other clothes--oh, we buy those at the H.B.C. in Winnipeg.' Wouldn't that phase you, fellows? But I forgot his clothes when I saw him strip. Jiminy Christmas! I never saw such a body. I'm in bully training, but I'm a cow compared to 'Shag.'"
"What a rum name!" said Locke, still a little resentful.
"Found out all about that, too," went on Cop. "Seems he has a whole string of names to choose from. Heard him tell the Head that his first name is 'Fire-Flint,' and his last name is 'Larocque.' Seemed to kind of take the Head where he is weakest.
"'If you don't like it,' says the Indian, with a dead-quiet, plumb-straight look at the Head, 'you may call me what the people up along the Red River call me; I'm known there as the Shagganappi--Shag, if you want to cut off part of the word. The other boys may call me Shag if they want to.' Say, fellows, I liked him right there and then. He may chum up with me all he likes, for all his silk socks and shirts."
"What did the Head say?" asked little Johnnie Miller.
"Said he liked the name Shag," replied Cop. "'Then I'm Shag to you, sir, and the others here,' speaks up his Indian nibs. Then he and I struck for the tubs, then they took him to get his room, and I came up here."
As Cop finished speaking the chapel bell sounded and all four boys scrambled down to prayers. As they entered the little sanctuary, one of the masters standing irresolute near the door, beckoned to Cop. "Billings," he whispered, "Will you please go and ask Larocque if he cares to come to prayers? He's in room 17; you met him this morning, I believe."
"Certainly, sir," replied Cop, dashing up the nearest stairway.
"Entrez," replied an even voice to Cop's unusually respectful knock. Then the voice rapidly corrected itself, "Enter, come in," it said in English.
"How about prayers?" asked Cop. "Perhaps you're tired and don't care to come?"
"I'll go," replied the Indian, and followed noiselessly where Billings led.
They entered just as Professor Warwick was beginning prayers, and although the eighty or so boys present were fairly exemplary, none could resist furtive looks at the newcomer, who walked up the little aisle beside Billings with a peculiarly silent dignity and half-indifference that could not possibly be assumed. How most of them envied him that manner! They recalled their own shyness and strangeness on the first day of their arrival; how they stumbled over their own feet that first morning at prayers; how they hated being stared at and spoken of as "the new boy." How could this Indian come among them as if he had been born and bred in their midst? But they never knew that Larocque's wonderful self-possession was the outcome of his momentary real indifference; his thoughts were far away from the little college chapel, for the last time he had knelt in a sanctuary was at the old, old cathedral at St. Boniface, whose twin towers arose under the blue of a Manitoba sky, whose foundations stood where the historic Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, about whose bells one of America's sweetest singers, Whittier, had written lines that have endeared his name to every worshipper that bends the knee in that prairie sanctuary. The lines were drifting through his mind now. They were the first words of English poetry he had learned to memorize:
"Is it the clang of the wild geese? Is it the Indian's yell, That lends to the call of the north wind The tones of a far-off bell?
"The voyageur smiles as he listens To the sound that grows apace. Well he knows the vesper ringing Of the bells of St. Boniface.
"The bells of the Roman mission-- That call from their turrets twain To the boatman on the river, To the hunter on the plain."
"To the hunter on the plain," said Shag's thoughts, over and over. Perhaps