"Yes, she must be like HER, Jan—just as good and just as sweet and just as beautiful," interrupted Cummins gently.
There was a quick intaking of his breath as he hobbled back to his own cot, leaving Jan at play with the baby.
That night, in the dim, sputtering glow of an oil-lamp, John Cummins and Jan Thoreau solemnly set to work to thrash out the great problem that had suddenly entered into their existence. To these two there was no element of humor in what they were doing, for into their keeping had been given a thing for which God had not schemed them. The woman, had she been there, would have laughed at them, and in a dozen gentle breaths might have told them all that the world held in secret between mother and child; but, leaving them, she had passed on to them something that was life, like herself, and yet mystery.
Had fate given Maballa to Mélisse for a mother there would have been no mystery. She would have developed as naturally as a wolf-whelp or a lynx-kitten, a savage breath of life in a savage world, waxing fat in snow-baths, arrow-straight in papoose-slings, a moving, natural thing in a desolation to which generations and centuries of forebears had given it birthright. But Mélisse was like her mother. In the dreams of the two who were planning out her fate, she was to be a reincarnation of her mother. That dream left a ray of comfort in Cummins' breast when his wife died. It stirred happy visions within Jan. And it ended with a serious shock when Maballa brought into their mental perspective of things the possibilities of environment.
So far as Cummins knew, there was not a white woman nearer than Fort Churchill, two hundred miles away. In all that region he knew of only two full-white men, and they were Williams and himself. The baby Mélisse was hopelessly lost in a world of savagery; honest, loyal, big-souled savagery—but savagery for all that, and the thought of it brought the shadows of fear and foreboding to the two into whose lives the problem had just come.
Long into the night they talked seriously of the matter, while Mélisse slept; and the longer they talked, the greater loomed the problem before them. Cummins fancied that he already began to see signs of the transformation in Mélisse. She was passionately fond of the gaudy things Maballa gave her, which was a sign of savagery. She was charmed by confinement in the papoose-sling, which was another sign of it; and she had not died in the snow-wallows—which was still another.
So far back as he could remember, Cummins had never come into finger-touch of a white baby. Jan was as blissfully ignorant; so they determined upon immediate and strenuous action. Maballa would be ceaselessly watched and checked at every turn. The Indian children would not be allowed to come near Mélisse. They two—John Cummins and Jan Thoreau—would make her like the woman who slept under the sentinel spruce.
"She ees ceevilize," said Jan with finality, "an' we mus' keep her ceevilize!"
Cummins counted back gravely upon his fingers. The little Mélisse was four months and eighteen days old!
"To-morrow we will make her one of those things with wheels—like the baby-wagons they have in the South," he said. "She must not go in the papoose-slings!"