"Your animal must have been very hungry?"
"When it was fed it felt quite sleepy, so I left it and came to you, dear Secret Helper."
"Do you remember," she spoke wistfully, "in the long-ago time when we were little? How seldom we could both leave our poor animals at the same hours! How rare our Dreamland meetings! Oh, the long waitings for you at the Tuft of Moss!"
"Yes, Dream. I'd leave my animal on board of the old barge in London River, but before I made the Tuft of Moss the sun was up over these western mountains, and your mother shaking your animal to turn out for the day's work.
"Then, you remember, I was on board the Beaver off the Horn, when your nights and mine began to close in together, so that I saw you every night watch below. Ever since I came ashore we've had whole nights together—three years now."
"Don't be so stupid, Storm. The times of the Sun Spirit are not changed. The Ruler cannot change. Only our Sun-power grows."
Now, Storm would hold as dogma that the sun keeps different hours in Oregon and in England, and therefore the Spirit in the Sun must pass from London River to the Kootenay, a matter of six hours. This to Rain's mind was false doctrine, a flagrant heresy. The Holy Spirit in the Sun must shine alike, with equal hours at the same time, upon the unjust in England and on the just west of the Rocky Mountains. Here was a point in theology on which they always quarreled, without being a bit the wiser or one whit the better. Neither had grasped the thought that the Great Spirit is everywhere, and shines even within ourselves, while the good sun keeps appointed seasons, days and hours.
If none of us were theologians, all of us might be Christians.
After the squabble, Rain and Storm agreed that anyway their "medicine" grew stronger. That word may need explaining in its Indian sense. A physician in the French is "médecin," his treatment in the English "medicine." But when a French voyageur would use the word among the Western Indians, they understood quite in a different way, for to them a doctor's drug was magic, so the word "medicine" applied in time to all things magical, mysterious, in contact with worlds unseen.
To Storm and Rain their medicine, which grew stronger day by day, was the power which we call psychic, meaning awareness and activity outside the bodily senses. The gift is common, its cultivation rare, for to these lovers it was given in great strength and quick development. Not knowing how to explain the whole of this deep mystery, I venture only to suggest that Rain's mother, a sacred woman of the Blackfeet, and Storm's mother, a Quaker mystic among the English, had met together in the planes of spirit-being, and by their love were helping these children onward.