in to meet
us. That spiritual face--such a face as you might see among the
preachers of Westminster or Oxford--and the little shy Indian girl-wife
and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not
to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the
story of heartache and tragedy--I asked myself, as we stood in our tent
door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under
a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their
beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those
northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.

I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and
town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with
the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school
where he taught he had met his Fate--the thing he probably
scouted--that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its
elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of
mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you
never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer
encampments, where white vices have not polluted the very air. He fell
in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go
back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian
hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white
sots who ever seek hiding in the very wilderness. He married her and
had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took
a position with the company and lived no doubt in such happiness as
only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease
which gave her such unearthly beauty ripened. She died. What was to
become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be
wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them
with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he
must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's
daughter--the little half-breed girl--and chained himself to his rock
of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he
lives to-day. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer;
only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery
island two hundred miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come
to the Ridge, or the Indian agent a