Mr. Ridsdale silently crossed the room.

“Then good night to you. Yates will be back directly, and when he has packed your things, where shall he take them?”

“Ah—er—say, the St. Pancras Hotel.”

“And I may send your cheque to that address? Thank you. Good night!”

The Veil of Flying Water
By Theodore Goodridge Roberts
1st Canadian Expeditionary Force

I

In those days an active man could not keep on friendly terms with everybody. If he acted honestly by his own clan, or his own village, he was sure to be in bad odour with some other clan or tribe. So it was with Walking Moose, a young chief of that clan of the Maliseets that had a white salmon for its totem.

This Walking Moose was chief of a sub-tribe that had its habitation and hunting-grounds far to the west, within twenty miles of the source of old Woolastook. Here the great river, beloved of Gluskap and his children, which advances seaward so placidly throughout the latter half of its course, dashes between walls of rock and gloomy curtains of spruce-trees that cling with brown, exposed roots that suggest the gripping fingers of giants. Rapids of twisting green and writhing white clang and shout in its narrow valley. Here and there are amber pools and green-black eddies; here and there a length of shallows that flashes silver and gold at noon; and here is that roaring place where the river leaps a sheer fall of thirty feet in one unbroken white curve—the Veil of Flying Water.

This is a rough country, full of shaggy forests and broken hills alive with game, and swift water alive with fish; and in the days of Walking Moose the Mohawks had their black lodges of undressed hides close to its western borders. The Mohawks were the age-old enemies of the Maliseets. Before Walking Moose grew to manhood and power, the peace-loving Maliseets had been content to flee down river and seek the protection of the larger villages whenever word came to them that the Mohawks contemplated a raid. Walking Moose was not content to flee periodically from his good hunting-grounds, however, and so the enmity of the raiders became bitter against him. Walking Moose hemmed three sides of his village with a tangle of fallen trees—the river kept the fourth side—lopped the upper and outer branches of these prostrate trees to within three or four feet of the trunks, and sharpened the ends and hardened them with fire. Also, he dug pits and covered them with brush, and set up many sharp posts in unexpected places. These things were good, but Walking Moose was not satisfied. He brought twenty families from one of the more sheltered villages, built lodges for them within his defences, and gave them equal rights of hunting with the older villagers. During that summer the Mohawks came three times, and three times they went away without so much as a scalp or a back-load of smoked salmon. During the winter Walking Moose’s men were busy at making shields and weapons; and late in March, when the depths of snow were covered with a tough crust, a war party of the people of the White Salmon went swiftly to the westward and fell upon and destroyed a village of the Mohawks. But the only men who died at the hands of the victors were those who fell fighting. No prisoners were made on that occasion. The women and children were not harmed, the lodges and storehouses were spared. Only the weapons of the warriors were taken.

“We do not want your food and furs,” said Walking Moose, “for we have plenty of our own. We do not want your women, for we have better women of our own.”