The Colfax chronicle. [volume] (Colfax, Grant Parish, La.) 1877-1981, 1879-12-20

little grove the rest of her life. Work
ing steadily with great labor she built
the hut. Then she built her fire. She
sat, poor woman, and pounded two sui
phurous stones together to produce
sparks, which she hoped would fall on
the bits of punk she had gathered. For
a whole day she pounded the stones,
and the rare patience was at last re-
warded. That night, for the first time
in two months, Wakuzza ate cooked
meat.
Her entire capital for her start in her
new life consisted of the bit of iron hoop,
the awl, few deer sinews, her youth,
her perfect physique, and q solitude
She shared grouse and rabbits; she
trapped beaver and porcupine; once she
shared deer. She made, and orna-
mented highly, dresses of skin and fur.
She was at rest, happy and cheerful.
When the gentle wind blew through the
spruce boughs she said it sounded to her
like the cooling of her dead baby, and
then she was very happy. The tracks
that had been her betrayal she had
made in hunting for signs OF game.
She was anxious to increase the number
of her deadfall traps.
Humbly she told her story as she,
again q captive, sat at the foreign camp
fire. Anxiously she looked from face to
face of the members of the exploring
party to see if she had their sympathy.
The story of the murder of her family
and of the crushing of her infants head
was received with shouts of laughter by
the Athabasca Indians. Turning her
dark eyes and handsome, grave face to
the Scotchman, she begged him to take
her for his slave, to say that he desired
her. Bending before him she, with the
intense language of the Indian tongue,
begged for salvation, as lost soul might
beg at Gods judgment bar. Colby the
red-haired Scot refused her. He did not
want another woman, he said. Cool
and unsympathetic, McAlpine was
wholly untouched by the grandeur and
richness of the woman's character, SO
fully revealed by her story, and by the
evidences of her hut, its comforts and
Injuries, and the cleanliness and pretti-
ness of her clothing, and the skill and
patience with which, unaided and alone,
she had triumphed over adverse cir
cumstances that would have been ia
tai to most men, and through all
had preserved a girls sweetness
and cheerfulness. 1t did not touch him.
Her helplessness did not move him. Her
rare beauty did not warm him-and he
has left it on record that she was the
finest Indian woman in face and figure
he had ever seen. He shut the door of
his Shetland heart against her-not with
slam, but quietly-because he could
make nothing by her. He had silently
ciphered her up, and there was no
money in her; on the other hand, some
expense, perhaps some trouble. Yet he
acknowledged the wonderful heroism of
her achievement, and saw that in the
rich success of her solitary life in the
arctic SHOWS she was almost super
humanity endowed. And her young
loneliness? He well knew that the In
dian men under his command would kill
each other to get her. Yet he did not
beckon her to him and put his arm
around her, and wave back the Atha-
bascan brutes, and say 6 This woman is
NINE" No. The factor from the Shet-
land isles could not see shilling in her,
and away back at the company's Jasper
House was a squaw that cooked and
sewed well enough.
McAlpine lighted his pipe. The wom-
an was left to her fate. Then the Indi-
an bucks, seeing that the mighty factor
would neither have nor protect her, de-
clared her their own prize, and imme-
diately proceeded to determine her own
ership, after the custom of their tribe,
by wrestling. They built a fire on the
ice, and there they wrestled. The beau.
tiful, grand, self-reliant woman was re
peatedly lost and won that night. When
the contest was ended and the winner
approached Wakuzza to take her she
once more turned to McAlpine and asked
him, "Will you not take me for your
slavep VIII you not save me from this
fate?n Cold and hard was his answer
81 don't want you" Instantly she
stood erect, and saying, al prefer
death to living with man of the tribe
who murdered my baby!" she drove
her knife into her brave, true heart, and
one of the noblest women of red skin
that America has given birth to lay dead
on the frozen snow of the arctic regions,
surrounded by a group of astonished
savages and calculating Scotchman,
who looked on unmoved. There was
no money in her. Your story is told,
Wakuzza.-Frank Wilteson, in Tie Nesc
York Sun.
Natural Bagpipes.