tions
for breakfast well under way, she went to the door and called aloud in
the crisp, chill air to "Dill," as Gilfillan was christened by
Fifine,--the name being adopted by all the family,--insisting that he
should not cook his own breakfast but join them.

"There are going to be 'flim-flams,'" she shouted triumphantly. Then
with a toss of the head--"Short eating!"

It had chanced that one day when the lonely pioneer had dined with his
fellow-stationers he had remarked approvingly of certain dishes of
French cookery acquired from her Grand'maman's receipts--"I dunno what
ye might call them flim-flams, Mrs. MacLeod, but they make powerful
short eatin'."

He and she and Fifine had become fast friends, and it was indeed a happy
chance that had thrown the lonely man into this cordial and welcoming
atmosphere of home. Even his terribly ghastly head Odalie had begun to
forget, so deeply did she pity him for other things,--for the loss of
wife and children and friends in the terrible Yadkin massacre; for the
near approach of age,--and stalwart as he was, it was surely coming on;
for the distortions of his queer religion, which was so uncouth as to be
rendered hardly the comfort it might have been otherwise.

"I can't see how you can mention it," she said one day, with wincing
eyes, when he was telling Hamish, who manifested that blood-thirsty
imagination peculiar to boys, how he was conscious throughout the whole
ordeal of scalping; how the tomahawk hit him a clip; how the Indian, one
whom he had trusted, put his foot on his breast for a better purchase on
the knife.

"Why, Mrs. MacLeod," Dill replied, "it makes me thankful to think he
took nothing but the scalp. If he had mended his holt a little he could
have took my whole head, and where would I have been now!"

"By the grace of God you would be a saint in Paradise," said Odalie,
presenting the orthodox view.

"Yes," he admitted, "I've always feared there might be more in that
notion of the Injuns about the scalpless being shut out of heaven than
we know about--revelation, mebbe."

"No, no!" and horrified at this interpretation she made her meaning
clear.

After that she undertook the _role_ of missionary in some sort, and in
quiet unobtrusive ways suggested bits of orthodox doctrine of much
solace to his ruminating spirit, and sometimes on dreary, icebound days
he and she and Fifine sat on the crudely fashioned benches before the
fire and sang psalms and hymn