said it were better if you had been born an
idiot than with an evil spirit; and that your hand would be against the
loins that bore you. But Pierre, ah Pierre, you love your mother, do you
not?'" ... And he standing now, his eye closed with the gate-chink in
front of Fort o' God, said quietly: "She was of the race that hated
these--my mother; and she died of a wound they gave her at the Tete
Blanche Hill. Well, for that you die now, Yellow Arm, if this gun has a
bullet cold enough."

A bullet pinged through the sharp air, as the Indians swarmed towards
the gate, and Yellow Arm, the chief, fell. The besiegers paused; and
then, as if at the command of the fallen man, they drew back, bearing
him to the camp, where they sat down and mourned.

Pierre watched them for a time; and, seeing that they made no further
move, retired into the store, where the Idiot muttered and was happy
after his kind. "Grah got pipe--blow away--blow away to Annie--pretty
soon."

"Yes, Grah, there's chance enough that you'll blow away to Annie pretty
soon," remarked the other.

"Grah have white eagles--fly, fly on the wind--oh, oh, bubble, bubble!"
and he sent the filmy globes floating from the pipe that a camp of
river-drivers had given the half-breed winters before.

Pierre stood and looked at the wandering eyes, behind which were the
torturings of an immense and confused intelligence; a life that fell
deformed before the weight of too much brain, so that all tottered from
the womb into the gutters of foolishness, and the tongue mumbled of
chaos when it should have told marvellous things. And the half-breed,
the thought of this coming upon him, said: "Well, I think the matters of
hell have fallen across the things of heaven, and there is storm. If for
one moment he could think clear, it would be great."

He bethought him of a certain chant, taught him by a medicine man in
childhood, which, sung to the waving of a torch in a place of darkness,
caused evil spirits to pass from those possessed, and good spirits to
reign in their stead. And he raised the Idiot to his feet, and brought
him, maundering, to a room where no light was. He kneeled before him
with a lighted torch of bear's fat and the tendons of the deer, and
waving it gently to and fro, sang the ancient rune, until the eye of
the Idiot, following the torch at a tangent as it waved, suddenly became
fixed upon the flame, when it ceased to move. And the words of the chant
ran through