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God’s Garrison
by
And Pretty Pierre after a moment replied: “So that’s it, Grah?–you’ve got bullets stowed away? Well, I must have them. It’s a one-sided game in which you get the tricks; but here’s the pipe, Idiot–my only pipe for your dribbling mouth–my last good comrade. Now show me the bullets. Take me to them, daft one, quick.”
A little later the Idiot sat inside the store, wrapped in loose furs, and blowing bubbles; while Pretty Pierre, with many handfuls of bullets by him, waited for the attack.
“Eh,” he said, as he watched from a loophole, “Gyng and the others have got safely past the Causeway, and the rest is possible. Well, it hurts an idiot as much to die, perhaps, as a half-breed or a factor. It is good to stay here. If we fight, and go out swift like Grah’s bubbles, it is the game. If we starve and sleep as did Grah’s mother, then it also is the game. It is great to have all the chances against and then to win. We shall see.”
With a sharp relish in his eye he watched the enemy coming slowly forward. Yet he talked almost idly to himself: “I have a thought of so long ago. A woman–she was a mother, and it was on the Madawaska River, and she said: ‘Sometimes I think a devil was your father, an angel sometimes. You were begot in an hour between a fighting and a mass: between blood and heaven. And when you were born you made no cry. They said that was a sign of evil. You refused the breast, and drank only of the milk of wild cattle. In baptism you flung your hand before your face that the water might not touch, nor the priest’s finger make a cross upon the water. And they said it were better if you had been born an idiot than with an evil spirit; and that your hand would be against the loins that bore you. But Pierre, ah Pierre, you love your mother, do you not?'” … And he standing now, his eye closed with the gate-chink in front of Fort o’ God, said quietly: “She was of the race that hated these–my mother; and she died of a wound they gave her at the Tete Blanche Hill. Well, for that you die now, Yellow Arm, if this gun has a bullet cold enough.”
A bullet pinged through the sharp air, as the Indians swarmed towards the gate, and Yellow Arm, the chief, fell. The besiegers paused; and then, as if at the command of the fallen man, they drew back, bearing him to the camp, where they sat down and mourned.
Pierre watched them for a time; and, seeing that they made no further move, retired into the store, where the Idiot muttered and was happy after his kind. “Grah got pipe–blow away–blow away to Annie–pretty soon.”
“Yes, Grah, there’s chance enough that you’ll blow away to Annie pretty soon,” remarked the other.
“Grah have white eagles–fly, fly on the wind–oh, oh, bubble, bubble!” and he sent the filmy globes floating from the pipe that a camp of river-drivers had given the half-breed winters before.
Pierre stood and looked at the wandering eyes, behind which were the torturings of an immense and confused intelligence; a life that fell deformed before the weight of too much brain, so that all tottered from the womb into the gutters of foolishness, and the tongue mumbled of chaos when it should have told marvellous things. And the half-breed, the thought of this coming upon him, said: “Well, I think the matters of hell have fallen across the things of heaven, and there is storm. If for one moment he could think clear, it would be great.”
He bethought him of a certain chant, taught him by a medicine man in childhood, which, sung to the waving of a torch in a place of darkness, caused evil spirits to pass from those possessed, and good spirits to reign in their stead. And he raised the Idiot to his feet, and brought him, maundering, to a room where no light was. He kneeled before him with a lighted torch of bear’s fat and the tendons of the deer, and waving it gently to and fro, sang the ancient rune, until the eye of the Idiot, following the torch at a tangent as it waved, suddenly became fixed upon the flame, when it ceased to move. And the words of the chant ran through Grah’s ears, and pierced to the remote parts of his being; and a sickening trouble came upon his face, and the lips ceased to drip, and were caught up in twinges of pain…. The chant rolled on: “Go forth, go forth upon them, thou, the Scarlet Hunter! Drive them forth into the wilds, drive them crying forth! Enter in, O enter in, and lie upon the couch of peace, the couch of peace within my wigwam, thou the wise one! Behold, I call to thee!”