The woman looked blankly at him, with eyes that seemed watching for something—something that never came. Billy dared not trust himself to say another word. He finally set the child down and turned away.
In a few minutes the "procession" was in full swing, Billy and his father, in one of the carriages, being driven beneath arches and banners, and handclasped on all sides. Somehow, he got through that uproarious day smiling, but shy as usual, but when night came he was tired and utterly undone, and "turned in" early. But sleep would not come. Then he arose and crept to his little bedroom window, standing there a long, long time alone in the dark—thinking. How glorious it all had been!—the glad, loyal faces of his boy friends, the magnificent welcome home—if only they could have brought Jack Morrison back with them! Oh! Billy would have given up all the glory, the music, the cheers, the banners, to get away from the haunting memory of a woman's white, suffering face and black-robed figure, and the feel of the clinging hands of a tiny fatherless boy! His eyes did not see the homely street at his feet—the dying rockets and fireworks glaring against the sky. He saw only a simple grave in the open veldt in far-away Africa—a grave that he, himself, had heaped with stones formed in the one word "Canada." At the recollection of it, poor Billy buried his aching head in his hands. The glory had paled and vanished. There was nothing left of this terrible war but the misery, the mourning, the heartbreak of it all!
The Brotherhood
"What is the silver chain for, Queetah?" asked the boy, lifting the tomahawk* and running the curious links between his thumb and fingers. "I never saw one before."
[*The tomahawk and avenging knife spoken of in the story are both in the possession of the writer, the knife having been buried for seventy-three years on the estate where she was born.]
The Mohawk smiled. "That is because few tomahawks content themselves with times of peace. While war lives, you will never see a silver chain worn by an Iroquois, nor will you see it on anything he possesses," he answered.
"Then it is the badge of peace?" questioned the boy.
"The badge of peace—yes," replied Queetah.
It was a unique weapon which the boy fingered so curiously. The tomahawk itself was shaped like a slender axe, and wrought of beaten copper, with a half-inch edge of gleaming steel cleverly welded on, forming a deadly blade. At the butt end of the axe was a delicately shaped pipe bowl, carved and chased with heads of animals, coiling serpents and odd conventional figures, totems of the once mighty owner, whose war cry had echoed through the lake lands and forests more than a century ago. The handle was but eighteen inches long, a smooth polished stem of curled maple, the beauty of the natural wood heightened by a dark strip of color that wound with measured, even sweeps from tip to base like a ribbon. Queetah had long ago told the boy how that rich spiral decoration was made—how the old Indians wound the wood with strips of wet buckskin, then burnt the exposed wood sufficiently to color it. The beautiful white coils were the portions protected by the hide from the flame and smoke.
Inlaid in this handle were strange designs of dull-beaten silver, cubes and circles and innumerable hearts, the national symbol of the Mohawks. At the extreme end was a small, flat metal mouthpiece, for this strange weapon was a combination of sun and shadow; it held within itself the unique capabilities of being a tomahawk, the most savage instrument in Indian warfare, and also a peace pipe, that most beautiful of all Indian treasures.