Once the wife of Tusda told her that Ninon was better off and not needing her in the least, but this only made Ermi's heart the more dull and leaden. Wazakoo thought that Ninon might have grown into such a wicked woman as the bold Asa, but the words were an insult to the innocent eyes, the little unsullied feet, the lips pure as thought of God, which the mother's eyes called up.
"Very soon, you will go also," added Taopi, but it bewildered Ermi the more to know that the little piece of ground on which she stood was crumbling too.
Another moon waned and yet she served the household. In her brain the fire still burned on. Without, on the plains, the wind made a black discord like the sobbing cry of a starved wolf, and, sometimes, it was most like the whine of a whip-thong. Manitou walked about the earth and the leaves faded and fell from the trees. Manitou blew with his breath, and the river became like flint. At the wave of his arms the animals hid away in the ground and the birds forsook their nests in the wild rice and flew far off to the south-land.
But all the days the baby called to Ermi, and often it wailed. One day the voice wooed her unto the snow, out into the sheeted storm that turned the air into a white darkness. Streaks of bitter wind screamed across the prairie. The snow cut her face with stinging lash and the cowering cold cut into her very bones. But still, without ceasing, the baby called to her. Now and then, she almost clasped it, and her soul swooned, but something intangible, impalpable ever waved her back.
And then Ermi understood that the night was closing in and that she had come a long, long way. She would go back to Wasi, for she had forgotten about the other woman. The fire would be low, he would need her and she must find him, however weary the trail.
But even as she resolved, the woman sank limply to where one finds dreams and soft reveries and where church bells toll the vesper hour. Her hands clasped her rosary, but she did not pray. She only maundered softly the foolish song of the hunters from the southland—
"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed;
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light——"
Once at school, she could not solve a problem and so she broke the slate. She remembered it quite well; it was a question in the rule of three. "How foolish!" she mused, and Ermi smiled as she remembered.
The morning dawned brightly in the coulee where a stone covered a little grave. There was nothing to be seen, nor anything to suggest that it was here Ermi had lain down to dreams. The snow had hidden her well in its white bosom, but somewhere, somehow, Ermi, the Indian woman, was working out the pitiful problem of life on another slate.