"True enough. God's times are not ours. But see what he has made of her!"
I thought of my Cloud-Mother walking enclosed from the world upon a height of changeless youth. She could not feel another shock. She was past both ambition and poverty. If she had ever felt the sweet anguish of love—Oh! she must have understood when she kissed me and said: "I will come to you sometime!"—the anguish—the hoping, waiting, expecting, receiving nothing, all were gone by. Even mother cares no longer touched her. Paul was grown. She could not be made anything that was base. Unseen forces had worked with her and would work with her still.
"You told me," I said to Madame Ursule, "the Indians were afraid of her when they burned the settlement. Was the change so sudden?"
"Madame Jordan's story was like this: It happened in broad daylight. Two men went into the woods hunting bee trees. The Indians caught and killed them within two miles of the clearing—some of those very Winnebagoes you treated with for your land. It was a sunshiny day in September. You could hear the poultry crowing, and the children playing in the dooryards. Madeleine's little Paul was never far away from her. The Indians rushed in with yells and finished the settlement in a few minutes. Madame Jordan and her family were protected, but she saw children dashed against trees, and her neighbors struck down and scalped before she could plead for them. And little good pleading would have done. An Indian seized Paul. His father and the old servant lay dead across the doorstep. His mother would not let him go. The Indian dragged her on her knees and struck her on the head. Madame Jordan ran out at the risk of being scalped herself, and got the poor girl into her cabin. The Indian came back for Madeleine's scalp. Madeleine did not see him. She never seemed to notice anybody again. She stood up quivering the whole length of her body, and laughed in his face. It was dreadful to hear her above the cries of the children. The Indian went away like a scared hound. And none of the others would touch her."
After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body.
Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty. She rowed alone upon the river, and went where she pleased. The men in La Baye would step aside for her. Strangers disturbed her by bringing the consciousness of something unusual.
Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at twilight, talking about lovers. Eagle was near them on a stool.
"That girl," exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong disapproval, "is one of the kind that will let another girl take her sweetheart and then sit around and look injured! Now if she could get him from me she might have him! But she'd have to get him first!"
Eagle listened in the attitude of a young sister, giving me to understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning.
We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow. The river was frozen and its channel padded thick. As for the bay, stretches of snow fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the world.