quently, in a skirmish with the Blackfeet, they fell
into the hands of the latter, among whom they had lived for some time,
when they were ransomed by the missionaries, at the price of certain
trading-privileges negotiated by the latter for the tribe.

When adopted by the Jesuits, the children had lost all remembrance of
their parentage; nor had they any names except the Indian ones
bestowed upon them by their captors. The good fathers christened them,
however, arranging them alphabetically, by the names of Alixe and
Bloyse, and confiding them to the especial charge of the wife of a
trader connected with the station, who had no family of her own. They
were fair-haired children, probably of German or Norwegian origin, and
had grown up to be robust young women of seventeen, when Walker saw
them for the first time, as he stopped at the Dalles on his way from
Fort Nez-Perces about one hundred and twenty-five miles higher up the
Columbia.

Walker, whose business detained him for some time at the mission,
decided upon marrying one of the fair-haired sisters,--he did not much
care which, they were so singularly alike. Alixe happened to be the
one, however, to whom he tendered a share in his fortunes, which she
accepted in the random manner of one to whom it was of but little
consequence whether she said "Yes" or "No." Bloyse would have followed
him, and him only, to the end of all; but he never knew it at the
right time, though the women of the fort could have told him.

It was late one afternoon when he was married to Alixe, in the chapel
of the mission. That was the night of the massacre. Two hours after
the wedding, the Blackfeet, combined with some allied tribe, came down
like wolves upon the fort. There was treachery, somewhere, and they
got in. In the thick of the fight, and when all seemed hopeless,
Walker shot down a tall Indian who was dragging his bride away to
where the horses of the tribe were picketed. In a second he had leaped
upon a horse, and, holding the young girl before him, galloped away in
the direction of a stream running into the Columbia,--a stream of
fierce torrents, navigable only at one place, and that by
flat-bottomed boats or scows, in which passengers warped themselves
across by a grass rope stretched from bank to bank. Once over this
river, he could easily reach a friendly camp, where he and his bride
would have been in safety.

The moon had risen when he reached the ferry. Turning the horse