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A Lodge In The Wilderness
by
The old woman sat silent, clasping the hands of her daughter firmly, and looking out of the wide doorway toward 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 toward the river also.
“Breaking Rock!” she said, in alarm, and got to her feet quickly.
Breaking Rock stood for a moment looking toward 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 to-morrow. 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 softly 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 civilization, 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 forever renounced the life of their own nations, and become great chiefs, teaching useful things to their adopted people, bringing up their children as tribesmen–bringing up their children! There it was, the thing which called them back, the bright-eyed children, with the color of the brown prairie in their faces, and their brains so sharp and strong. But here was no child to call Dingan back, only the eloquent, brave, sweet face of Mitiahwe….. If he went! Would he go? Was he going? And now that Mitiahwe had been told that he would go, what would she do? In her belt was–but, no, that would be worse than all, and she would lose Mitiahwe, her last child, as she had lost so many others. What would she herself do if she were in Mitiahwe’s place? Ah, she would make him stay somehow–by truth or by falsehood; by the whispered story in the long night; by her head upon his knee before the lodge-fire, and her eyes fixed on his, luring him, as the dream lures the dreamer into the far trail, to find the Sun’s hunting-ground, where the plains are filled with the deer and the buffalo and the wild horse; by the smell of the cooking-pot and the favorite spiced drink in the morning; by the child that ran to him with his bow and arrows and the cry of the hunter–but there was no child; she had forgotten. She was always recalling her own happy early life with her man, and the clean-faced papooses that crowded round his knee–one wife and many children, and the old Harvester of the Years reaping them so fast, till the children stood up as tall as their father and chief. That was long ago, and she had had her share–twenty-five years of happiness; but Mitiahwe had had only four. She looked at Mitiahwe, standing still for a moment like one rapt, then suddenly she gave a little cry. Something had come into her mind, some solution of the problem, and she ran and stooped over the girl and put both hands on her head.