The Girl From Tim's Place

by Charles Clark Munn

And now Angie, more interested in spites and the weird belief which she heard that this Indian held than in the sight of a doe, began to ply Old Tomah with questions, and bit by bit she led him on toward that subject.

It was not an easy task. His speech came slowly. Deeds, not words, are an Indian’s form of expression, and this fair white lady, serene as the moon and as suave and smiling as culture could make her, was one to awe him.

With Chip he had been fluent enough. She had been almost a protégée of his, a big pappoose whom he had taught to manage a canoe, for whom he had made moccasins, a fur cap and cape, who had listened to all his strange theories with wide-open, believing eyes, and, best of all, a helpless waif whom he had learned to love.

But this white lady, awe-inspiring as she was, now failed to induce him to talk.

Chip, however, keen to catch the drift of Angie’s wishes and anxious to have her own faith defended, soon came to the rescue and induced Old Tomah to speak–not fluently at first, the “me” in place of “I” always occurring, adjectives following nouns, prepositions left out in many cases; and yet, as he warmed up to his subject, his coal-black eyes were fierce or tender, and the inborn eloquence of his race glowed in face and speech.

And what a wild tale he told! Some of it was the history of his own race, beginning long before white men came. He related the contests of his people with wild animals, their deeds of valor, their torturing of prisoners, their own scorn of death and stoical endurance of pain. His own ancestors had been mighty chieftains. They had led the tribe through many battles, swept down upon their white enemies, an avenging horde, and were now roaming the happy hunting-grounds where he would soon join them. Mingled with this tale of warfare and conquest, and always an unseen force for good or evil, were the spites–the souls of all brute creation. How they followed or led the hunter! How they warned their own kind of his coming! How they lured him into unseen danger, and how they continually sought to avenge their own deaths! There were also two kinds of them,–some evil and the others good. The evil ones predominated, the good ones feared them, yet sought to interfere in all evil effort. These two hosts also had their own warfares. They fought oftenest when storms raged in the forest. Then they swept the tree-tops and scurried over the hills in vast numbers, shrieking and screaming defiance.

Another apparition was oft referred to in this weird talk. A great white spectre and chieftain of all spites, who sprang from his abode in the north, whose breath was a blast of snow, howling as it swept over the wilderness–this ghost, so vast that it covered miles and miles of wilderness, was altogether evil. It spared neither man nor beast. The hunter trailing his game met death on the instant and was left rigid and upright in his tracks. Squaws and children huddled in wigwams shared the same speedy fate. Lynxes and panthers, deer and moose by the score, were touched by the same mystic and awful wand of death.

It was all an uncanny, eerie, ghostly recital; yet all real and true to Chip, whose eyes never once left the Indian’s face while he was speaking. Angie, too, was spellbound. Never had she heard anything like it; and while believing it was all a mere myth and legend, a superstitious fancy, maybe, of this strange Indian, its telling was none the less interesting.

Ray was also enthralled, and he was half convinced that the forest might, after all, contain spooks and goblins.

But Old Cy was only a curious listener. He, too, had woven many a fantastic tale of the sea, its storms and monsters leaping from the crests of waves, and all such figments of the imagination, and this fable was but the same. The only feature of passing interest to him was the fact that any Indian had such a vivid imagination and could relate such a mingled ghost story so coherently.