"I got no husban"," she replied, somewhat defiantly.
"Then--" he began, but his voice faltered.
She came and stood between him and the couch.
Something of the look of a she-panther came into her face, her figure, her att.i.tude. Her eyes lost their mournfulness and blazed a black-red at him. Her whole body seemed ready to spring.
"You not touch the girl child!" she half snarled. "I not let you touch her; she _mine_, though I have no husban"!"
"I don"t want to touch her, Catharine," he said gently, trying to pacify her. "Believe me, I don"t want to touch her."
The woman"s whole being changed. A thousand mother-lights gleamed from her eyes, a thousand measures of mother-love stormed at her heart. She stepped close, very close to him and laid her small brown hand on his, then drawing him nearer to her said: "Yes you _do_ want to touch her; you not speak truth when you say "no." You _do_ want to touch her!" With a rapid movement she flung back the blankets, then slipping her bare arm about him she bent his form until he was looking straight into the child"s face--a face the living miniature of his own! His eyes, his hair, his small kindly mouth, his fair, perfect skin. He staggered erect.
"Catharine! what does it mean? What does it mean?" he cried hoa.r.s.ely.
"_Your child_--" she half questioned, half affirmed.
"Mine? Mine?" he called, without human understanding in his voice.
"Oh, Catharine! Where did you get her?"
"The sh.o.r.es of Kootenay Lake," she answered.
"Was--was--she _alone_?" he cried.
The woman looked away, slowly shaking her head, and her voice was very gentle as she replied: "No, she alive a little, but _the other_, whose arms "round her, she not alive; my people, the Kootenay Indians, and I--we--we bury that other."
For a moment there was a speaking silence, the young Wingate, with the blessed realization that half his world had been saved for him, flung himself on his knees, and, with his arms locked about the little girl, was calling:
"Margie! Margie! Papa"s little Margie girl! Do you remember papa?
Oh, Margie! Do you? Do you?"
Something dawned in the child"s eyes--something akin to a far-off memory. For a moment she looked wonderingly at him, then put her hand up to his forehead and gently pulled a lock of his fair hair that always curled there--an old trick of hers. Then she looked down at his vest pocket, slowly pulled out his watch and held it to her ear. The next minute her arms slipped round his neck.
"Papa," she said, "papa been away from Margie a long time."
Young Wingate was sobbing. He had not noticed that the big, rough foreman had gone out of the shack with tear-dimmed eyes, and had quietly closed the door behind him.
It was evening before Wingate got all the story from Catharine, for she was slow of speech, and found it hard to explain her feelings.
But Brown, who had returned alone to the camp in the morning, now came back, packing an immense bundle of all the tinned delicacies he could find, which, truth to tell, were few. He knew some words in Kootenay, and led Catharine on to reveal the strange history that sounded like some tale from fairyland. It appeared that the reason Catharine did not attempt to go to the camp that morning was that Margie was not well, so she would not leave her, but in her heart of hearts she knew young Wingate would come searching to her lodge. She loved the child as only an Indian woman can love an adopted child. She longed for him to come when she found Margie was ill, yet dreaded that coming from the depths of her soul. She dreaded the hour he would see the child and take it away. For the moment she looked upon his face, the night he rode over to engage her to cook, months ago, she had known he was Margie"s father. The little thing was the perfect mirror of him, and Catharine"s strange wild heart rejoiced to find him, yet hid the child from him for very fear of losing it out of her own life.
After finding it almost dead in its dead mother"s arms on the sh.o.r.e, the Indians had given it to Catharine for the reason that she could speak some English. They were only a pa.s.sing band of Kootenays, and as they journeyed on and on, week in and week out, they finally came to Crow"s Nest Mountain. Here the child fell ill, so they built Catharine a log shack, and left her with plenty of food, sufficient to last until the railway gang had worked that far up the Pa.s.s, when more food would be available. When she had finished the strange history, Wingate looked at her long and lovingly.
"Catharine," he said, "you were almost going to fight me once to-day. You stood between the couch and me like a panther. What changed you so that you led me to my baby girl yourself?"
"I make one last fight to keep her," she said, haltingly. "She mine so long, I want her; I want her till I die. Then I think many times I see your face at camp. It look like sky when sun does not shine--all cloud, no smile, no laugh. I know you think of your baby then. Then I watch you many times. Then after while my heart is sick for you, like you are my own boy, like I am your own mother. I hate see no sun in your face. I think I not good mother to you; if I was good mother I would give you your child; make the sun come in your face. To-day I make last fight to keep the child. She"s mine so long, I want her till I die. Then somet"ing in my heart say, "He"s like son to you, as if he your own boy; make him glad--happy. Oh, ver" glad! Be like his own mother. Find him his baby.""
"Bless the mother heart of her!" growled the big foreman, frowning to keep his face from twitching.
It was twilight when they mounted the horses one of the men had brought up for them to ride home on, Wingate with his treasure-child hugged tightly in his arms. Words were powerless to thank the woman who had saved half his world for him. His voice choked when he tried, but she understood, and her woman"s heart was very, very full.
Just as they reached the rim of the canyon Wingate turned and looked back. His arms tightened about little Margie as his eyes rested on Catharine--as once before she was standing in the doorway, alone; alone, and above and about her were the purple shadows, the awful solitude of Crow"s Nest Mountain.
"Brown!" he called. "Hold on, Brown! I can"t do it! I can"t leave her like that!"
He wheeled his horse about and, plunging back through the snow, rode again to her door. Her eyes radiated as she looked at him.
Years had been wiped from his face since the morning. He was a laughing boy once more.
"You are right," he said, "I cannot keep my little girl in that rough camp. You said it was no place for a girl child. You are right. I will send her into Calgary until my survey is over.
Catharine, will you go with her, take care of her, nurse her, guard her for me? You said I was as your own son; will you be that good mother to me that you want to be? Will you do this for your white boy?"
He had never seen her smile before. A moment ago her heart had been breaking, but now she knew with a great gladness that she was not only going to keep and care for Margie, but that this laughing boy would be as a son to her for all time. No wonder Catharine of the Crow"s Nest smiled!
A Red Girl"s Reasoning
"Be pretty good to her, Charlie, my boy, or she"ll balk sure as shooting."
That was what old Jimmy Robinson said to his brand new son-in-law, while they waited for the bride to reappear.
"Oh! you bet, there"s no danger of much else. I"ll be good to her, help me Heaven," replied Charlie McDonald, brightly.
"Yes, of course you will," answered the old man, "but don"t you forget, there"s a good big bit of her mother in her, and," closing his left eye significantly, "you don"t understand these Indians as I do."
"But I"m just as fond of them, Mr. Robinson," Charlie said a.s.sertively, "and I get on with them too, now, don"t I?"
"Yes, pretty well for a town boy; but when you have lived forty years among these people, as I have done; when you have had your wife as long as I have had mine--for there"s no getting over it, Christine"s disposition is as native as her mother"s, every bit--and perhaps when you"ve owned for eighteen years a daughter as dutiful, as loving, as fearless, and, alas! as obstinate as that little piece you are stealing away from me to-day--I tell you, youngster, you"ll know more than you know now. It is kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet, blood for blood. Remember, what you are, she will be," and the old Hudson Bay trader scrutinized Charlie McDonald"s face like a detective.
It was a happy, fair face, good to look at, with a certain ripple of dimples somewhere about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the very sunniness of their owner"s soul. There was not a severe nor yet a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson"s Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture, to a.s.sist the local agent through the tedium of a long census-taking.
As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth he had studied Indian archaeology and folk-lore, as a man he consummated his predilections for Indianology, by loving, winning and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who himself had married a native woman twenty years ago. The country was all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman"s heart had gone out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the higher tribes of North American Indians.
Like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in mental and social habits, she had developed from absolute pagan indifference into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored face, were the joy of old Robinson"s declining years.
He had given their daughter Christine all the advantages of his own learning--which, if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl had a fair common education, and the native adaptability to progress.
She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life would find it difficult to determine her nationality.
She looked very pretty to Charles McDonald"s loving eyes, as she reappeared in the doorway, holding her mother"s hand and saying some happy words of farewell. Personally she looked much the same as her sisters, all Canada through, who are the offspring of red and white parentage--olive-complexioned, gray-eyed, black-haired, with figure slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable expression in her whole face that turns one so heart-sick as they glance at the young Indians of to-day--it is the forerunner too frequently of "the white man"s disease," consumption--but McDonald was pathetically in love, and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.
There had not been much of a wedding ceremony. The priest had cantered through the service in Latin, p.r.o.nounced the benediction in English, and congratulated the "happy couple" in Indian, as a compliment to the a.s.sembled tribe in the little amateur structure that did service at the post as a sanctuary.
But the knot was tied as firmly and indissolubly as if all Charlie McDonald"s swell city friends had crushed themselves up against the chancel to congratulate him, and in his heart he was deeply thankful to escape the flower-pelting, white gloves, rice-throwing, and ponderous stupidity of a breakfast, and indeed all the regulation gimcracks of the usual marriage celebrations, and it was with a hand trembling with absolute happiness that he a.s.sisted his little Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that, hitched to an underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betraying nothing of visible emotion, and then the pony, rough-shod and s.h.a.ggy, trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were kept up until the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts deliriously happy, jogged on over the uneven trail.