“Tell Sandy Macdougal,” he whispered weakly, “to come up and get my packsack. I could have wished—to have lived—to kiss the bride.”
The heart of Josephine Stone was too full for words. Silently, she stooped and pressed her warm lips to his chilling ones. With scarcely a tremor the light left his face and he was very still.
The spark that had been a man had fled.
II
Sandy Macdougal, who, by the way, afterwards discovered he was the main beneficiary in Acey Smith’s will, insisted on going up alone to recover the packsack of the Big Boss. What he found it to contain he told to no living being, but those contents threw a light on another weird phase of the protagonist soul of the Timber Pirate. In the pack, neatly parcelled, were: a suit of coloured blanket-cloth trimmed with buck-skin lacing, a pair of beaded shoe-packs, necklaces of wolves’ teeth, a wig of long, coarse black hair with a purple band around its crown holding a single eagle’s feather at the back, a bottle of stain that dyed the skin a copper hue, a stick of blood-red grease-paint and a solution for quickly washing the stain and the grease-paint from the face and hands.
Acey Smith who had been Alexander Carlstone was also Ogima Bush the Medicine Man!
III
They buried Acey Smith on the crown of one of his native hills where trails fork to the cardinal points of the compass into the wild scenic grandeur he loved and called his home. There the shore-wash of the great lake is within ear-shot on the one side, while to the other the fantastic Laurentian ranges forever lift their scarred and battered breasts to heaven as if in mute testimony to the travail of man below.
On the mound above his resting-place the Indians set up a great totem-pole bearing graven images and painted faces relating his merits and his deeds, and on it they gave place for an epitaph from the white workers of his camps and boats.
Because none knew of any faith he held to there was no religious ceremony; but a little later there came a strange company to pay last respects to one who had proved their friend in the hours of dire need. There were aged ones, lame men and blind men—and with them was a woman; she whose daughter was a Mary Magdalene and had been snatched from the burning by the strange, whimsical man that was gone. They brought with them a few cheap wreaths as tributes of their regard; and, noting the absence of Christian emblems, these simple people made of birch boughs a little white cross which they planted in the centre of the grave in soil hallowed by their tears.