Both the Imbrie boys fell in love with her according to their natures, thus further complicating the situation. Hooliam, the ignorant savage, could not aspire to her hand, of course, but the young doctor courted her, and she looked kindly on him. I do not consider that she was ever in love with him, though apart from the dark strain he was worthy of it as men go, a manly fellow!—but it was the hardness of his lot that touched her heart. Like many a good woman before her, she was carried away by compassion for the dogged youth struggling against such hopeless odds.
The father completed his work and took her out, and Ernest Imbrie followed them. They were married in the early spring at Fort Edward on the Campbell River, where the Starlings wintered. Ernest carried his bride back by canoe, hundreds of miles through the wilderness.
Their happiness, if indeed they were ever happy, was of brief duration. Whichever way you look at it, the situation was impossible. Ernest’s mother, the breed woman, acted like a fiend incarnate, I have been told, and I can quite believe it, having witnessed some of her subsequent performances. Then there was the brother-in-law always hanging around the house, nursing his evil passion for his brother’s wife. And in the background the ignorant, unfriendly Indians.
The catastrophe was precipitated by a gross insult offered to the girl by her husband’s brother. He broke into her room one night impudently assuming to masquerade as her husband. Her husband saved her from him, but in the shock to her nerves she experienced a revulsion against the lot of them—and small wonder!
Her husband of his own free will took her back to her father. That’s one of the finest things in the story, for there’s no question but that he loved her desperately. The loss of her broke his spirit, which had endured so much. He never went back home. He felt, poor fellow, as if he were cast out alike by reds and whites, and his instinct was to find a place where he could bury himself far from all humankind.
He was next heard of at Miwasa landing a thousand miles away, across the mountains. Here he got employment with a york boat crew and travelled with them down-stream some hundreds of miles north to Great Buffalo Lake. Here he obtained a canoe from the Indians, and, with a small store of grub, set off on his own. He made his way up the Swan River, an unexplored stream emptying into Great Buffalo Lake, as far as the Great Falls, and there he built himself a shack.
He could hardly have found a spot better suited to his purpose. No white man so far as known had ever visited those falls, and even the Indians avoid the neighbourhood for superstitious reasons. But even here he could not quite cut himself off from his kind. An epidemic of measles broke out among the Kakisa Indians up the river from him, and out of pure humanity he went among them and cured them. These Indians were grateful, strange to say; they almost deified the white man who had appeared so strangely in their country.
Meanwhile the wrong she had done him began to prey on his wife’s mind. She could not rest under the thought that she had wrecked his usefulness. Ernest Imbrie had, with the idea of keeping his mind from rusting out in solitude, ordered certain papers and books sent to him at Fort Enterprise. His wife learned of this address through his medical college, and in the spring of the year following her marriage, that is to say the spring of the year just past, she set off in search of him without saying anything to anybody of her intention.
She and her father were still at Fort Edward—have I said that the girl had no mother?—and Hooliam Imbrie had been there, too, during the winter, not daring to approach the girl precisely, but just hanging around the neighbourhood. One can’t help feeling for the poor wretch, bad as he was, he was hard-hit, too. He bribed a native servant to show him the letter giving his brother’s address, and when the girl set off, he instantly guessed her errand, and determined to prevent their meeting.
Now it is only a short distance from Fort Edward over the height of land to the source of the main southerly branch of the Spirit, and Hooliam was therefore able to proceed direct to Fort Enterprise by canoe (a journey of more than a thousand miles), pausing only to go up the Stanley to pick up his mother, who was ripe for such an adventure. At Carcajou Point, when they had almost reached Enterprise, they heard the legend of the White Medicine Man off on the unknown Swan River, and they decided to avoid Enterprise and hit straight across the prairie.