Saul's eyes gathered up the view, as if they were, what they are, memory's absorbents, and said, sadly,—
"It is for the last time, Lucy!"
We went into corral the next evening by the side of a grassy mound covered with low-growing shrubs.
Afterwards Saul wandered out alone. I would have gone with him; but at the instant I put my face outside the tent-door, the memory of the Indian woman's caution came to me, and with it the opportunity to examine Luella's secret.
I entered my tent, lighted the little lamp that had travelled a thousand miles and never done service till now, and opened Luella's treasure. It was wrapped in soft white fur, bound about with the long, dried grass that grows beside the Huron. A scroll of parchment was rolled within it, faded, yellow, and old. I opened it, with a smile at my strange inheritance.
At the first glance, I thought I had before me some Indian hieroglyphics; but bringing back from the place of its long obscurity the little knowledge of the French language that I held in possession, I deciphered, that, "fourscore years before, beside the froth of the Huron Water, Father Kino had performed the marriage-rite upon Luella, daughter of Uncas, of the Dacotahs, and Richard Monten, of Montreal." Below the certificate of the priest of the Church were strange characters beyond my power to decipher.
With trembling I looked out for Saul's return. Here, upon the banks of the Neosho, I had learned the secret which my life in the East had hidden so long.
A certain kind, of guiltiness came over me, as Saul drew near, breaking down with every tread the sun-cured grass,—a sense of unworthiness, to hold in my hand a possession which essentially was his, and which he had not freely given me.
"I will not look into his eyes with a veil lying in the air," I said, very quietly to myself; and so, when my husband saw the burning of the little lamp and asked the cause, I told him all the story of the Indian woman, and put into his hand her gift to me. Saul's mind was preoccupied; he paid very little attention to the story; but when I gave him the white-furred scroll, and he opened it, then the grave professor——Well, it is better that I do not put into words what followed, even here, on the Big Blue.
An hour afterwards Saul spoke. He said,—