teau company.

It had been a winter of tragedies. The rigors of the weather and the
scourge of the disease had been fought with Indian charm and with
Catholic prayer. Both were equally unavailing. If a man was taken sick
at the fort they put him in a warm room, brought him a jug of water
once a day, and left him to find out what his constitution was worth.
Generally he recovered; for the surgeon's supplies had been exhausted
early in the year. But the Indians, in their torment, rushed into the
river through the ice, and returned to roll themselves in their blankets
and die in ungroaning stoicism.

Every one had grown bitter and hard. The knives of the trappers were
sharp, and not one whit sharper than their tempers. Some one said that
the friendly Pawnees were conspiring with the Sioux, who were always
treacherous, to sack the settlement. The trappers doubted this. They and
the Pawnees had been friends many years, and they had together killed
the Sioux in four famous battles on the Platte. Yet--who knows? There
was pestilence in the air, and it had somehow got into men's souls as
well as their bodies.

So, at least, Father de Smet said. He alone did not despair. He
alone tried neither charm nor curse. He dressed him an altar in the
wilderness, and he prayed at it--but not for impossible things. When in
a day's journey you come across two lodges of Indians, sixty souls in
each, lying dead and distorted from the plague in their desolate tepees,
you do not pray, if you are a man like Father de Smet. You go on to the
next lodge where the living yet are, and teach them how to avoid death.

Besides, when you are young, it is much easier to act than to pray. When
the children cried for food, Father de Smet took down the rifle from
the wall and went out with it, coming back only when he could feed the
hungry. There were places where the prairie was black with buffalo, and
the shy deer showed their delicate heads among the leafless willows
of the Papillion. When they--the children--were cold, this young man
brought in baskets of buffalo chips from the prairie and built them
a fire, or he hung more skins up at the entrance to the tepees. If he
wanted to cross a river and had no boat at hand, he leaped the uncertain
ice, or, in clear current, swam, with his clothes on his head in a
bundle.

A wonderful traveller for the time was Father de Smet. Twice he had gone
as far as the land of the Flathead nation, and he could climb mo