The embers grayed to ashes. The last spark was dead. The dance was done. The mists of morning rolled up from the valleys and unfurled their pale shrouds along the peaks, and the Indians, mere shadow-shapes, like phantoms in a dream, stole silently away and vanished with the night.
[ENCHANTED WATERS]
[CHAPTER II]
ENCHANTED WATERS
I
THERE is a lake in the cloistered fastnesses of Sin-yal-min, named by the Jesuit priests St. Mary's, but called by the Indians the Waters of the Forgiven. It is a small body of water overshadowed by abrupt mountains, fed by a beautiful fall and for some reason, impossible to explain, it is haunted by an atmosphere at once ghostly and sad. So potent is this intangible dread, this fear of something unseen, this melancholy begotten of a cause unknown, that every visitor is conscious of it. Most of all, the Indians, impressionable and fanciful as children, feel the weird spell and cherish a legend of it as nebulous as the mists that flutter in pale wraith-shapes across its enchanted depths.
The story goes that once, long ago, someone was killed upon the lake and the troubled spirit returns to haunt the scene of its mortal passing, but the murderer, smitten with remorse and repenting of his crime was finally forgiven by the Great Spirit, and the lake became known as the Waters of the Forgiven. The shadow of that crime has never lifted and it broods forever over the lake's dark face and upon the mountains that hold it in their cup of stone. There the echo is multiplied. If one calls aloud, a chorus of fantastic, mocking voices takes up the sound and it goes crying through the solitude like lost souls in Purgatory. The Waters of the Forgiven exhale their eternal sigh, their pensive gloom, even when the sun rides high in the blue, but to feel the fullness of its spectral melancholy, one must seek it out in the secrecy of night. Then, as the mellow moon rises over the mountain tops laying the pale fingers of its rays suggestively on rock and tree, touching them with magical illusion and transforming them to goblin shapes, one palpitates with strange fear, is impressed with impending disaster. As the moonlight flows in misty streams, sealing ravine and lake-deep in shadow the more intense for the contrast of white, discriminating light that runs quicksilver-like upon the ripples of the water and the quivering needles of the pine, the silence is broken by dismal howls. It is the lean, gray timber wolves. Their mournful cry is flung back again by the ghostly pack that no eye sees and no foot can track. Mountain lions yell shrilly and are answered by distant ones of their kind and inevitably that other lesser cry comes back again and again as though the phantom chorus could never forget nor leave off the burden of that lament. Out of the pregnant darkness into the spectral moonlight shadowy creatures come to the shore to drink. The deer, the bear, sometimes the mountain lion and the elk stalk forth and quench their thirst. These things are strange enough, savage enough to inspire fear, but it is not they, nor the grisly mountains that create the terror which is a phantasm, the dread which is not of flesh nor earth.
No Indian, however brave, pitches his tipi by this lake nor crosses its waters, for among the tangle of weeds in its black, mysterious bosom, water sirens are believed to dwell. Ever watchful of human prey they gaze upward from their mossy couches and if a boatman venture out in his frail canoe, they rise, entwining their strangling, white arms about him, pressing him with kisses poisonous as the serpent's sting, breathing upon him their blighting, deadly-sweet breath that dulls his senses into the oblivion of eternal sleep.