When the three mourners landed again on their own side of the river, Jimmy and Mary-Lou looked at Loseis at a loss. What to do next?
Rousing herself, Loseis said wearily: “Jimmy, you must fix up the counter in the store. Fix it with split poles until we can make some plank. Mary-Lou, fetch a hatchet and come with me.”
On the river shore some hundred yards downstream, hidden by a clump of willows in case Jimmy Moosenose should be inclined to spy on what they were doing, Mary-Lou under Loseis’ instructions built a tiny raft out of dead branches. To the raft Loseis fixed a little pole to the top of which she tied a streamer of black. She launched the raft on the current, and with big, childish eyes watched it float around the bend.
“I am not sending for Conacher to come to me,” she said haughtily to Mary-Lou. “But when a white man dies it is customary to let men know. . . . To-night I will push off another one. One or the other he will see.”
Within an hour the Slavis returned as mysteriously as they had departed. They must have had an outlook posted to report upon the burial of Blackburn. To Loseis their actions seemed perfectly senseless; for Jimmy had said it was the spirit of Blackburn that they dreaded, yet as soon as his body was hidden underground their fears departed. They set up the tepees in their former places, and went about their usual occupations as if nothing had happened. Loseis’ breast burned with anger; and she wanted to go down and give them a piece of her mind. However, Jimmy dissuaded her.
“No good! No good!” he said. “It is over now. They not understand white man’s ways.”
There was a sharp ring of anxiety in his voice that caused Loseis to stare in haughty surprise. She thoroughly despised the Slavis. However, she said nothing. She and Mary-Lou went off to their house to sleep.
Down on the flat it was the women who were erecting the tepee poles, and drawing the covers over them. They no longer used skins for this purpose, Blackburn having persuaded them of the superior advantages of the canvas that he sold. In the same way the whole tribe had learned to wear white men’s clothes out of the store. While the women worked, the men sat in groups smoking and talking in that queer clicking tongue that few white men have ever mastered. Their talk was light and punctuated with laughter; but it was clear from their uneasy glances towards the white man’s buildings that they were not speaking their hearts. As a matter of fact the Indians are quite as adept in insincere small talk as their white brethren.
From time immemorial the Slavis have been known as a small, weak people; and this particular branch, cut off from their fellows on the distant shores of Blackburn’s River had further degenerated as a result of too close inter-marriage. They were a weedy lot, and like all weak peoples, shifty-eyed. As is always the case, the men showed up worse; hollow chests and spindle shanks were the rule; the whole tribe could not produce one stalwart, handsome youth. But they were not poverty-stricken. They all wore good clothes, and lived in new, weather-proof tepees. They hunted the best fur country in all the North, and for twenty years Blackburn had jealously guarded it for them.
From where they sat Jimmy Moosenose could be seen splitting poles in front of the store, and carrying them in. Without appearing to, the men were all watching him. The groups of talkers fell silent. They could not meet each other’s eyes. A curious look of dread flickered in their faces; that which had directed the whole course of their lives for so many years had been suddenly removed, and they were all at a stand.