untain
passes as well as any guide of the Rockies. He had built a dozen
missions, lying all the way from the Columbia to the Kaw. He had always
a jest at his tongue's end, and served it out with as much readiness as
a prayer; and he had, withal, an arm trained to do execution. Every
man on the plains understood the art of self-preservation. Even in
Cainsville, over by the council ground of the western tribes, which was
quite the most civilized place for hundreds of miles, life was uncertain
when the boats came from St. Louis with bad whiskey in their holds. But
no one dared take liberties with the holy father. The thrust from his
shoulder was straight and sure, and his fist was hard.

Yet it was not the sinner that Father de Smet meant to crush. He always
supplemented his acts of physical prowess with that explanation. It
was the sin that he struck at from the shoulder--and may not even an
anointed one strike at sin?

Father de Smet could draw a fine line, too, between the things which
were bad in themselves, and the things which were only extrinsically
bad. For example, there were the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon. Mam'selle
herself was not above reproach, but her soups were. Mademoiselle Ninon
was the only Parisian thing in the settlement. And she was certainly to
be avoided--which was perhaps the reason that no one avoided her. It
was four years since she had seen Paris. She was sixteen then, and she
followed the fortunes of a certain adventurer who found it advisable to
sail for Montreal. Ninon had been bored back in Paris, it being dull
in the mantua-making shop of Madame Guittar. If she had been a man she
would have taken to navigation, and might have made herself famous by
sailing to some unknown part of the New World. Being a woman, she took
a lover who was going to New France, and forgot to weep when he found an
early and violent death. And there were others at hand, and Ninon sailed
around the cold blue lakes, past Sault St. Marie, and made her way
across the portages to the Mississippi, and so down to the sacred rock
of St. Louis. That was a merry place. Ninon had fault to find neither
with the wine nor the dances. They were all that one could have desired,
and there was no limit to either of them. But still, after a time, even
this grew tiresome to one of Ninon's spirit, and she took the first
opportunity to sail up the Missouri with a certain young trapper
connected with the great fur company, and so found h