They scrambled to their feet and set out briskly, for, as Scott explained, if it was the wrong road they wanted to find it out before dark, as it would not be very easy to travel across country through the woods in the night. The road did not get any better or any worse, nor give any other signs of its ultimate destination. They had been traveling in this way for two hours when they heard a dog barking ahead of them, and soon they spied a small shack.
“Now for some Indian talk,” Merton exclaimed disgustedly.
He was not disappointed. In the doorway of the rickety old shack sat an old man, smoking an old blackened clay pipe, his eyes fixed on them in watery indifference. He must have been very old, Scott thought he looked at least a thousand. His face was a mass of deep-cut wrinkles forming the precipitous cliffs and mountain valleys of a bold relief map. His palsied head shook violently and his scanty white locks fluttered nervously against the high cheek bones. No one but an Indian could have looked so old.
Merton addressed himself to the old man but had little hope of getting an answer. “Can you tell us whether this is the road to White Earth?”
The old man’s expression changed not a particle, but he gurgled almost inaudibly, an incoherent stream of Chippewa. It did not enlighten them much, but it produced some effect, for a girl suddenly appeared in the doorway behind him and looked them over curiously. As Scott looked at her his poetic visions of beautiful Indian maidens faded away.
“That’s not Minnehaha,” he mumbled; “that’s a cinch.”
She was thin to emaciation, and unspeakably dirty. One eye was apparently closed with a loathsome disease, giving her face a sinister, leering expression. She did not look like a promising subject, but Merton tried her.
“Bojou, bojou,” he used the greeting of the old French coureurs des bois. “We are trying to get to the Peace Celebration at White Earth. Can you tell us whether this is the road?”
The old man mumbled some more Chippewa. The girl stared at them sullenly. Scott took out half a dollar and looked at it thoughtfully. The girl’s good eye caught the gleam of the silver instantly. “Frazee camp, ten mile. Straight trail,” she exclaimed, pointing to a faint track leading on westward from the house, and thrusting her hand eagerly over the old man’s shoulder for the money. Scott dropped it into her hand quickly, lest she should touch him, and with another exchange of “Bojou” they took to the trail again. Anybody but an Indian living in that unfrequented place could not have resisted the temptation to watch them on their way, but the girl turned indifferently into the cabin and the old man did not so much as turn his eyes to look after them.
“It’s about ten to one that she’s stringing us,” Merton said cheerfully, “but this is about as near right as we can go now and it will be great luck if we do strike that camp.”