FullReads

But the odd little half-blood was extraordinarily handsome even as an infant. In after years when he grew into glorious manhood he was generally acknowledged to be the handsomest man in the Province of Ontario, but to-day–his first day in these strange, new surroundings–he was but a wee, brown, lovable bundle, whose tiny gossamer hands cuddled into his father’s palm, while his little velvet cheek lay rich and russet against the pearly whiteness of his mother’s arm.

“I believe he is like you, George,” she murmured, with a wealth of love in her voice and eyes.

“Yes,” smiled the young chief, “he certainly has Mansion blood; but your eyes, Lydia, your dear eyes.”

“Which eyes must go to sleep and rest,” interrupted the physician, severely. “Come, Chief, you’ve seen your son, you’ve satisfied yourself that Mrs. Mansion is doing splendidly, so away you go, or I shall scold.”

And George slipped down the staircase, and out into the radiant July sunshine, where his beloved trees arose about him, grand and majestic, seeming to understand how full of joy, of exultation, had been this great new day.

* * * * *

The whims of women are proverbial, but the whims of men are things never to be accounted for. This beautiful child was but a few weeks old when Mr. Bestman wrote, announcing to his daughter his intention of visiting her for a few days.

So he came to the Indian Reserve, to the handsome country home his Indian son-in-law had built. He was amazed, surprised, delighted. His English heart revelled in the trees. “Like an Old Country gentleman’s estate in the Counties,” he declared. He kissed his daughter with affection, wrung his son-in-law’s hand with a warmth and cordiality unmistakable in its sincerity, took the baby in his arms and said over and over, “Oh, you sweet little child! You sweet little child!” Then the darkness of all those harsh years fell away from Lydia. She could afford to be magnanimous, so with a sweet silence, a loving forgetfulness of all the dead miseries and bygone whip-lashes, she accepted her strange parent just as he presented himself, in the guise of a man whom the years had changed from harshness to tenderness, and let herself thoroughly enjoy his visit.

But when he drove away she had but one thing to say; it was, “George, I wonder when your father will come to us, when your mother will come. Oh, I want her to see the baby, for I think my own mother sees him.”

“Some day, dear,” he answered hopefully. “They will come some day; and when they do, be sure it will be to take you to their hearts.”

She sighed and shook her head unbelievingly. But the “some day” that he prophesied, but which she doubted, came in a manner all too soon–all too unwelcome. The little son had just begun to walk about nicely, when George Mansion was laid low with a lingering fever that he had contracted among the marshes where much of his business as an employee of the Government took him. Evils had begun to creep into his forest world. The black and subtle evil of the white man’s firewater had commenced to touch with its poisonous finger the lives and lodges of his beloved people. The curse began to spread, until it grew into a menace to the community. It was the same old story: the white man had come with the Bible in one hand, the bottle in the other. George Mansion had striven side by side with Mr. Evans to overcome the dread scourge. Together they fought the enemy hand to hand, but it gained ground in spite of all their efforts. The entire plan of the white liquor dealer’s campaign was simply an effort to exchange a quart of bad whiskey for a cord of first-class firewood, or timber, which could be hauled off the Indian Reserve and sold in the nearby town markets for five or six dollars; thus a hundred dollars worth of bad whiskey, if judiciously traded, would net the white dealer a thousand dollars cash. And the traffic went on, to the depletion of the Indian forests and the degradation of the Indian souls.