led villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never
taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian
girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered
mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you
will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure
of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old
Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people
say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant
character of her early life.

Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure
for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the
dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the
funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl
everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the
painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from
Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.
After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker,
the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain
marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils
breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's
voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the
blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit,
peace and discord--had God put right and wrong in the world for the
friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set
over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual
eye to know?

Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket. One young pall bearer
faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's
hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight
for ever. Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of
mountain laurel. Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the
shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken
the vista of a glad future? The Indian children filed in through the
gate of the Mission school. At the gate, the mother looked up the
Saddle back. She had no time for the pampered luxury of self consciou