From this he awoke with a start, his ears filled with the sound of singing. Beyond the fire lay Raven upon his face, apparently sound asleep. The singing came from the direction of the Indian camp. Noiselessly he rose and stole up the trail to a point from which the camp was plainly visible. A wonderful scene lay before his eyes. A great fire burned in the centre of the camp and round the fire the whole band of Indians was gathered with their squaws in the background. In the centre of the circle stood a tall man with a venerable beard, apparently reading. After he had read the sound of singing once more rose upon the night air.
“Stonies, all right,” said Cameron exultantly to himself. “And at evening prayers, too, by Jove.”
He remembered hearing McIvor tell how the Stonies never went on a hunting expedition without their hymn books and never closed a day without their evening worship. The voices were high-pitched and thin, but from that distance they floated up soft and sweet. He could clearly distinguish the music of the old Methodist hymn, the words of which were quite familiar to him:
“There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel's veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood.
Lose all their guilty stains.”
Over and over again, with strange wild cadences of their own invention, the worshippers wailed forth the refrain,
“Lose all their guilty stains.”
Then, all kneeling, they went to prayer. Over all, the misty moon struggling through the broken clouds cast a pale and ghostly light. It was, to Cameron with his old-world religious conventions and traditions, a weirdly fascinating but intensely impressive scene. Afar beyond the valley, appeared in dim outline the great mountains, with their heads thrust up into the sky. Nearer at their bases gathered the pines, at first in solid gloomy masses, then, as they approached, in straggling groups, and at last singly, like tall sentinels on guard. On the grassy glade, surrounded by the sentinel pines, the circle of dusky worshippers, kneeling about their camp fire, lifted their faces heavenward and their hearts God-ward in prayer, and as upon those dusky faces the firelight fell in fitful gleams, so upon their hearts, dark with the superstitions of a hundred generations, there fell the gleams of the torch held high by the hands of their dauntless ambassador of the blessed Gospel of the Grace of God.
With mingled feelings of reverence and of pity Cameron stood gazing down upon this scene, resolved more than ever to attach himself to this camp whose days closed with evening prayer.
“Impressive scene!” said a mocking voice in his ear.
Cameron started. A sudden feeling of repulsion seized him.