Father Xavier laid down his book. He was all attention. "Where did your father get them?" he asked.
"In the mountains climb, in the mines dig, in the lake dive, he seek them all the time summer."
"What does he do with them?"
"Cuts them like mon père," and Marie imitated in pantomime the use of the hammer and chisel. "Cut them all time winter, very many."
"What does he do that for?" asked the priest, surprised.
"All the same you," replied the girl—"make arrow-heads."
"Oh! he makes arrow-heads, does he? Mine are not arrow-heads, but I should like to see what your father does. Does he live far from here?"
"Marie take you to-night in canoe."
"Very well, after supper."
She had often taken him out upon the lake before, for she managed their birch-bark canoe with more skill than himself, and it was convenient to have some one to paddle while he fished or read or dreamed. She rowed him swiftly up the lake for several miles, then, fastening the canoe, led the way through a trail in the forest. The sun was setting, and "the whispering pines and the hemlocks" of the forest primeval formed a tapestry of gloom around the paternal wigwam as they reached it. Black Beaver, her father, reclined lazily in the door, watching the coals of the little fire in front of his tent. He was always lazy. It was difficult to believe that he ever climbed or dug or dived for agates as Marie had said, so complete a picture he seemed of inaction. The girl spoke a few words to him in their native dialect, and he grumblingly rose, shuffled into the interior of the wigwam, and brought out two baskets. One was a shallow tray filled with the finished heads in great variety of material and color. There were white carnelian, delicately striped with prophetic red, blood-stone deep-colored and hard as ruby, agates of every shade and marking, flinty jasper, emerald-banded malachite, delicate rose color, and purple ones made from shells, and various crystals with whose names Father François Xavier was unfamiliar. There was one shading from dark green through to red, only a drop of the latter color on the very tip of the arrow where blood would first kiss blood. Father Xavier looked at it in wondering admiration, and at last asked Black Beaver what he called it.