The Bishop had no guide but the wind, and when a storm rises the wind veers. He gave the dogs their head, but even their homing instinct failed them in the storm and night, so that they crouched on the ice and howled in unison with the little Indian boy.
At dawn the boy said he smelled smoke, for he was an Indian, and smoke travels far in the clear, winnowed air of the North.
On looking to the west they sighted land, and after a painful journey met a dog-train coming toward them with men—the boy's father and uncle. The priest was celebrating a Mass for the repose of the Bishop's soul when he arrived, for "Les sauvages," says my informant, "had declared the Bishop would be frozen to the middle of hees heart. Ah, leetle Madam! Whom Le Bon Dieu guards are well guarded."
I did not know about this Father Lestanc before. I thought he was merely an old Oblate Brother passing from the sixth to the seventh stage of man's little day. Now I know him for one of the outstanding personalities of the North, and, as such, would do him honour, even I who am of the world, worldly. I know things about him that happened years and years ago when this was no man's land. I know how once he nursed and buried a young man whose companions had abandoned him to die at Rat Creek, near Portage la Prairie.
The man had gone into the Indian camps against the wishes of his fellow-teamsters who were travelling from Fort Garry to Fort Charlton. But he was a gamester, and he went. This was how he contracted small-pox, and the reason his companions were forced to leave him to fight death for himself with a little supply of pemmican and some bannocks as his sole backers. You may not have noticed that the life of a gamester and the race-horse are short ones in the north-west, but it is, nevertheless, indubitably true, and this case was no exception to the rule. His name? I do not know. One forgets names in the oblivious West.
Father Lestanc rolled the loathsome body in a blanket and decently buried it, for the buffalo hunters had learned that in cases of small-pox the healthiest thing a traveller can do is to mind his own special business.
"Did any one else catch the disease?" I ask.
"Non, non, no one else."
The old man muses a little, for he is growing tired, and this was fifty years ago. Suddenly memory floods in on him and he shows distress: "Pardon, Madam, pardon! I took eet. Oui, I took eet."
[[1]] Since deceased.