Still talking eagerly, Lemaire snatched together a few things, got an arm round Barrett, lifted him up to his feet, got him reeling to the canoe, laid him in the bottom, and helped the old Indian push off. There was no second paddle. There was no need of it. The current took them at once.
The cold was increasing, as the wind died and the snow thinned. Lemaire ceased to be conscious of the passing of time, but within himself the stubborn life burned; he was strongly curious to know the end, to discover what it was the wilderness had in store for him after five years, to read the riddle of that relationship with himself which had called him from the cities to this.
He was aware, at last, of a vast, golden light. The clouds were parting behind the snow, and the sunset was gleaming through. It turned the snow into a mist of rose and molten gold. The old Indian feebly turned the canoe. It crept toward the shore.
“The lodges of my people,” muttered the old Indian. He stood erect, and pointed with his bleached paddle. “They are very many—a very strong tribe.”
Lemaire also looked, and saw.
Silently, the canoe took the half-frozen sand. Silently, very slowly, Lemaire stepped out. The old Indian waited for him. It seemed that the whole world was waiting for him.
He, like a man in a dream, moved slowly into the midst of a level stretch of sand, and stood there. All about him, covering the whole level, were the ridgepoles of wigwams, but the coverings had long fallen away and rotted, and the sunset glowed through the gaunt poles. Lemaire stretched out his hand, and touched the nearest; they fell into dust and rot. . . . Under his feet he crushed the bones of the dead—the dead, who had died fifty years before, and had waited for him here ever since, under the blown sand and the ground willows . . . . “They’ve a song about it, down along the Lamennais. For of all that tribe, only one family, they say, escaped. All the others died . . . . they died like flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees stood for years . . . . No one ever went to that place any more. It was cursed . . . . because of my grandfather . . . .”
He went back to the canoe. Whining like an old animal, the old Indian was busied above Barrett. “The lodges of my people,” he muttered, “a very strong tribe, and kind to the white men.”
Very gently, Lemaire put aside the blind old hands that touched Barrett’s unconscious face. “Don’t wake him,” he said.