ar incident of his early missionary efforts
which he had at first treated with cold surprise, but to which later
reflection had given a new significance. After Gray Eagle's revelation
he had made a pilgrimage to the Indian country to verify the statements
regarding his dead father,--the Indian chief Silver Cloud. Despite
the confusion of tribal dialects he was amazed to find that the Indian
tongue came back to him almost as a forgotten boyish memory, so that
he was soon able to do without an interpreter; but not until that
functionary, who knew his secret, appeared one day as a more significant
ambassador. "Gray Eagle says if you want truly to be a brother to his
people you must take a wife among them. He loves you--take one of his!"
Peter, through whose veins--albeit of mixed blood--ran that Puritan ice
so often found throughout the Great West, was frigidly amazed. In
vain did the interpreter assure him that the wife in question, Little
Daybreak, was a wife only in name, a prudent reserve kept by Gray
Eagle in the orphan daughter of a brother brave. But Peter was adamant.
Whatever answer the interpreter returned to Gray Eagle he never knew.
But to his alarm he presently found that the Indian maiden Little
Daybreak had been aware of Gray Eagle's offer, and had with pathetic
simplicity already considered herself Peter's spouse. During his stay
at the encampment he found her sitting before his lodge every morning.
A girl of sixteen in years, a child of six in intellect, she flashed
her little white teeth upon him when he lifted his tent flap, content
to receive his grave, melancholy bow, or patiently trotted at his side
carrying things he did not want, which she had taken from the lodge.
When he sat down to work, she remained seated at a distance, looking at
him with glistening beady eyes like blackberries set in milk, and softly
scratching the little bare brown ankle of one foot with the turned-in
toes of the other, after an infantine fashion. Yet after he had left--a
still single man, solely though his interpreter's diplomacy, as he
always believed--he was very worried as to the wisdom of his course.
Why should he not in this way ally himself to his unfortunate race
irrevocably? Perhaps there was an answer somewhere in his consciousness
which he dared not voice to himself. Since his visit to the English
Atherlys, he had put resolutely aside everything that related to that
episode, which he now considered was an unhappy im