M

IX

Y GOD! What had she seen in me to love? I sat up and held the book against my bosom. Its cry out of her past filled the world from horizon to horizon. The ox that she had wreathed in roses would have heard it through her silence. But the brutal, slow Bourbon had gone his way, turning his stupid head from side to side, leaving her to perish.

Punctuated by years, bursting from eternities of suppression, it brought an accumulated force that swept the soul out of my body.

All that had not been written in the book was as easily read as what was set down. I saw the monotony of her life, and her gilding of its rudeness, the pastimes she thought out for children; I saw her nursing the helplessness which leaned upon her, and turning aside the contempt of pioneer women who passionately admired strong men. I saw her eyes waiting on the distant laggard who stupidly pursued his own affairs until it was too late to protect her. I read the entries over and over. When day broke it seemed to me the morning after my own death, such knowing and experiencing had passed through me. I could not see her again until I had command of myself.

So I dressed and went silently down stairs. The

Pawnees were stirring in the kitchen. I got some bread and meat from them, and also some grain for the horse; then mounted and rode to the river.

The ferryman lived near the old stockade. Some time always passed after he saw the signals before the deliberate Frenchman responded. I led my horse upon the unwieldly craft propelled by two huge oars, which the ferryman managed, running from one to another according to the swing of the current. It was broad day when we reached the other shore; one of those days, gray overhead, when moisture breaks upward through the ground, instead of descending. Many light clouds flitted under the grayness. The grass showed with a kind of green blush through its old brown fleece.

I saw the first sailing vessel of spring coming to anchor, from the straits of the great lakes. Once I would have hailed that vessel as possible bearer of news. Now it could bring me nothing of any importance.

The trail along the Fox river led over rolling land, dipping into coves and rising over hills. The Fox, steel blue in the shade, becomes tawny as its namesake when its fur of rough waves is combed to redness in the sunlight. Under grayness, with a soft wind blowing, the Fox showed his blue coat.

The prospect was so large, with a ridge running along in the distance, and open country spreading away on the other side, that I often turned in my saddle and looked back over the half-wooded trail. I thought I saw a figure walking a long way behind

me, and being alone, tried to discern what it was. But under that gray sky nothing was sharply defined. I rode on thinking of the book in the breast of my coat.

It was certain I was not to marry. And being without breakfast and unstimulated by the sky, I began to think also what unstable material I had taken in hand when I undertook to work with Indians. Instinctively I knew then what a young southern statesman named Jefferson Davis whom I first met as a commandant of the fort at Green Bay -afterwards told me in Washington: "No commonwealth in a republic will stand with interests apart from the federated whole." White men, who have exclaimed from the beginning against the injustice done the red man, and who keep on pitying and exterminating him, made a federated whole with interests apart from his.

Again when I looked back I saw the figure, but it was afoot, and I soon lost it in a cove.

My house had been left undisturbed by hunters and Indians through the winter. I tied the horse to a gallery post and unfastened the door. A pile of refuse timbers offered wood for a fire, and I carried in several loads of it, and lighted the virgin chimney. Then I brought water from the spring and ate breakfast, sitting before the fire and thinking a little wearily and bitterly of my prospect in life.

Having fed my horse, I covered the fire, leaving a good store of fuel by the hearth, and rode away toward the Menominee and Winnebago lands.