re dead on
this table--yes! It was Godfrey that straked him out all alone on this
table. You mind Great Godfrey, Aleck McTavish."

"Well I do, Mr. McNeil; and your mother yonder,--a grand lady she
was." McTavish spoke with curious humility, seeming wishful, I
thought, to comfort McNeil's sorrow by exciting his pride.

"Ay--they'll tell hereafter that she was just exactly a squaw," cried
the big man, angrily. "But grand she was, and a great lady, and a
proud. Oh, man, man! but they were proud, my father and my Indian
mother. And Godfrey was the pride of the hearts of them both. No
wonder; but it was sore on the rest of us after they took him apart
from our ways."

Aleck McTavish spoke not a word, and big Angus, after a long pause,
went on as if almost unconscious of our presence:--

"White was Godfrey, and rosy of the cheek like my father; and the blue
eyes of him would match the sky when you'll be seeing it up through a
blazing maple on a clear day of October. Tall, and straight and grand
was Godfrey, my brother. What was the thing Godfrey could not do? The
songs of him hushed the singing-birds on the tree, and the fiddle he
would play to take the soul out of your body. There was no white one
among us till he was born.

"The rest of us all were just Indians--ay, Indians, Aleck McTavish.
Brown we were, and the desire of us was all for the woods and the
river. Godfrey had white sense like my father, and often we saw the
same look in his eyes. My God, but we feared our father!"

Angus paused to cough. After the fit he sat silent for some minutes.
The voice of the great rapid seemed to fill the room. When he spoke
again, he stared past our seat with fixed, dilated eyes, as if tranced
by a vision.

"Godfrey, Godfrey--you hear! Godfrey, the six of us would go over the
falls and not think twice of it, if it would please you, when you were
little. Oich, the joy we had in the white skin of you, and the fine
ways, till my father and mother saw we were just making an Indian of
you, like ourselves! So they took you away; ay, and many's the day the
six of us went to the woods and the river, missing you sore. It's then
you began to look on us with that look that we could not see was
different from the look we feared in the blue eyes of our father. Oh,
but we feared him, Godfrey! And the time went by, and we feared and we
hated you that seemed lifted up above your Indian brothers!"

"Oich, the masters they got to teach him!"