Grant County herald. [volume] (Lancaster, Wis.) 1850-1968, 1925-07-29

We're ms seemed to weigh upon MN
like useless burdens.
The talk of the Indians was al
ways the same. Even 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.
From the door of the store-room
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 a
sense of inferiority on his own part.
Tnsensibly he had become friendly
with them and kind in his mode of
treatment, fact which they had
heen quick to appreciate.
At the going out of the ice during
the previous spring, and a few days
after Curran had departed to be
gone a long time, Nimissuts, or
Thunder, an old chief among the
Nascaupees, 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
rage
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 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
lashed 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 vague notion of surcease
to his dreadful loneliness. Her
grace and beauty seemed to fill the
log 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 a 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 to return to
civilization where the darker faces
Of other races were held in reproach!
But what prospect was there of
his ever leading again the grubbing,
narrow life of the cities? Here the
loneliness was killing, but the Won
drous freedom of it all-the great
ness of the waters and the depths of
the forests-still held him in thrall.
Only a companion was needed
whose presence would bring bright
ness and affection and constant, ten
der care.
He sought the girl openly and
spoke with her before all. He sat
before the campfire of old Nimissuts,
smoking his pipe, while the girl bus
led herself beading moccasins or
making clothing for her small half
brothers and sisters.
His eyes must have carried some
message to the girl, for Ameou be-
gan to be glad when he came.
Onc evening Anisku, the young
wife of Nimissuts, was speaking to
her husband, who was placidly smok
ing long pipe.
"Hast thou noticed ?" she asked.
"My eyes are old, yet still able to
see," he replied.
"Uapishiu, he of the yellow hair"
she continued, giving Lorimer the
name by which the Indians usually
called him, "is looking for a mate,
and his eyes have fallen upon
Ameou. He wants her for his wife"
The old man nodded but made no
answer.
"Her hunting ground is good and
worth many pelts year. See that
thou demandest enough for her when
the time comes" said the woman,
who was of practical mind.
81 have been thinking that these