The little camp quickly settled into an orderly routine. The girls wrangled among themselves about the dish-washing and Gustus was inclined to complain over the number of potatoes he was obliged to peel, but beyond this the camp work caused little friction.
Miss Towne was well supplied with French books and made, the young folks thought, an ideal chaperone. She was tired after her year's work and spent almost all her time in a hammock. She saw to it that the girls were in bed by ten o'clock and that all were accounted for at meal time. Apparently, beyond this, she left her charges to their own devices. She had taught in the High School too long not to know that spying and nagging are more demoralizing than no chaperoning at all.
There was a very early pairing off in the camp. Kent devoted himself to Olga, Gustus to Margery and Charlie to Lydia. Kent and Olga kept the camp supplied with fish. Excepting at meal time and the bathing hour, they spent the day in a birchbark canoe on the lake. Gustus and Margery were the least strenuous of the party and caused Miss Towne, as a consequence, more uneasiness than the rest. They spent long hours sitting side by side in a hammock, talking, heaven knows of what! In the evening when the camp-fire was lighted they were always being routed out of the shadows by the others and teased into joining the story telling and singing.
Charlie undertook to show to Lydia the reservation as the Indians knew it. If Lydia was a little puzzled by his eagerness to make her understand conditions on the reservation, she gave little thought to the riddle. This adventure was affecting her deeply. There was the sudden freedom and relaxation from home responsibilities. There was the daily and intimate companionship with young people, than whom none were better dressed than she!—and there were the pines.
She knew and loved the woods at home. But they were second growth hardwood and birch, and had little in common with the splendor of the pines. Waking early in the morning, she would creep from the tent and steal beyond sound and sight of the camp. There in the cathedral beauty of the pines she would stand drawing deep breaths and staring as if her eyes must pierce through the outward solemn loneliness of the forest, to its deeper meaning. She often wondered if in his search for God, John Levine had ever stood so.
Tramping through the woods with Charlie, she did not talk much, nor did he. They visited one or two neat Indian farms, but for the most part Charlie led her from one wick-i-up to the other, deep set in recesses of the wood, where the only whites to intrude on the Indians were the occasional government wood cruisers. These wick-i-ups were hovels, usually in the last stages of poverty and desolation. A squaw, braiding reed mats, a buck returning with a string of fish, a baby burrowing in the moss—all of them thin, ragged and dirty, and about them the hallowed beauty and silence of the primeval pines; this was the picture Lydia carried of most of the dwellers in these huts. Sometimes the wick-i-up was occupied by a solitary Indian, nearly always sick and always old.
Once they came upon a white haired squaw crawling feebly from her doorway toward a fish that lay at the foot of a tree. Charlie picked up the fish and he and Lydia helped the old woman back to her hut. In the hut was an iron pot and a pile of reed mats. That was all.
"She says," explained Charlie, "that she's been sick all winter and she'd have starved to death only one of her neighbors drops a fish for her there, every day or so."
"Let's get some food for her at the camp," said Lydia eagerly.
Charlie shook his head. "What's the use! It would just prolong her agony. She's nearly dead now. The old can go. It's the young ones' starving that hurts me."