Charlevoix county herald. (East Jordan, Mich.) 189?-1953, 1914-07-04

was to adorn fair women of civiliza-
ton, and the sorting of goods for
trade. Later on he would have to
ponder over the credits to be allowed
departing trappers and hand out the
provisions.
1t may be well to remember that
Tshemuak was place in which the
company reckoned that every pound
of flour cost it about sixteen cents,
owing to the expense of carrying it
over hundreds of miles of which
every one represented the fierce toll
of men built like sons of Anak.
The winters, however, we're terri
be. 1t was not question of the low
temperature.
Men easily get used to that, with
proper clothing and plenty of fuel
stored close to the dwelling.
When the snow is too deep for
hunting, and the few worn and dog
cared magazines, read scores Of
times down to the smallest adver-
tisement, fail to interest any more,
life becomes burden. At such
times even the old pipe tastes bitter.
1t is often taken up merely as an
excuse for something to do, only to
be laid aside half smoked.
The darkness of the northland
make very short days that are all
too long, and nights which seem to
be without end.
1t was then that the irking of
Lorimer's soul would become almost
too great to bear. The strength of
body and the education of mind that
were his seemed to weigh upon him
like useless burdens.
The talk of the Indians was al
ways the same. EveH during the
open season, when a brigade came
or a visitor whose arrival was a
thing to be long remembered and
commented on, the same uneasiness
persisted, and the day after their
departure brought vain longings.
1t is possible that at that time he
was struggling against the slow
growing madness which. is born in
the waste places. 1t may have been
the simple longing which comes
sooner or later to every man that
babe him look wistfully into the open
tents Of Indians preparing to sum-
mer at the post.
He watched the women at work.
and the babies fastened to padded
boards, swinging from limbs of
nearby trees or the ridge poles of
tents. He looked upon those at their
mothers breasts, and followed the
play of boys armed with blunt head
ed arrows, and the work of small
girls who were helping the women
with the household toll.
Al. a.
he watched the movements of young
women and studied their faces, not
ing how they handled short axes or
sewed shoepacks or bent over the
fires among the pots and pans.
During his first months in the will
derne.s Lorimer imagined that the
Indians were an inferior, degraded
lot. In some instances he was,
doubtless, correct, yet some were
handsome, splendidly built people, so
far superior to himself in all that.
concerned life in the woods that he
sometimes had to acknowledge
sense of inferiority on his own part.
Insensibly he had become friendly
with them and kind in his mode Of
treatment, a fact which they had
been quick to appreciate.
At the going out of the ice during
the previous spring, and few days
after Curran had departed to be
gone a long time, Nimissuts, or
Thunder, an old chief among the
Nascaupees, a tribe related to the
Montagnais and speaking the same
language, arrived with his wife, who
had young children, and his daugh-
ter Ameou, born Of another mar
riage.
The girl had come into the store
room with her father. Each carried
a bale of fur. Lorimer ceased
weighing out salt to look at the at
tractive young woman.
He remembered that during the
previous year she was little more
than a well-grown child, showing
signs of soon blossoming into wom-
anhood. But now, like many plants
of the north whose growing seems
to take place with GREATNESS haste
for fear the summer shall prove too
short, she had added to her stature
until she was tall and gracefully
rounded. Her soft, dark, long
dashed eyes no longer looked at him
with the frankness of childhood, but
were downcast in maidenly modesty.
To Lorimer she appeared as a
sweet, fresh vision which brought to
his mind a vague notion of surcease
to his dreadful loneliness. Her
grace and beauty seemed to fill the
loo building with something that had
never yet penetrated it. Her soft
voice was like music more charming
than any he had ever heard.
For days he watched her, and dur
ing the nights her image came be-
fore him. He wondered what his
world would say to marriage with
the girl; how such an event would
make his return to it forever i'm
possible.
Other white men had married In
dian girls who had made good wives,
yet such alliances meant the deep
burial of any desire 70 return to a
civilization where the darker faces