d improved his status among the
native trappers more than could have been possible by any other single
act.

Beorn was reverenced as a kind of minor deity; no wish of his, however
silently expressed, was ever denied by an Indian. When he had chosen
Peggy's mother to be his wife, it had been done merely by the raising
of his hand. Straightway the girl's father had driven her
panic-stricken forth from his camp, compelling her to go to this
strange bridegroom, lest a curse should fall upon his tribe. To her,
if absence of cruelty is kindness, he had been uniformly kind. Love is
not necessary to an Indian marriage, so she had not been too unhappy.
At Peggy's birth, having first borne him a son, she had died. The
little girl had been brought up and cared for by the silent man; the
shy tenderness she expressed for him went far to prove that she, at
least, had discovered something more vital within him than could be
expected to reside in the body of a man whose soul was dead. His
sending of her to the school in Winnipeg had shown that he was not so
forgetful as he seemed to be of the outside world which he had left.
This last act had come as a great surprise to all who knew him; but
they had contrived to retain their old opinion of him by asserting
that this was the doing of Pere Antoine.

Only on rare occasions had Beorn let any of his secrets out; when he
got drunk he recovered his power of speech, or, as the Indians said,
for a little space his soul returned. This had happened less and less
frequently of recent years. It was well remembered by old-timers at
God's Voice how once, in the early morning in Bachelors' Hall, at the
end of a night's carousal, when the trappers and traders from the
distant outposts had made their yearly pilgrimage to the fort bringing
in their twelve months' catch of furs, Beorn, under the influence of
rum, had risen uninvited, and, to the consternation of his intoxicated
companions, had trolled forth a verse from a fighting mining ballad.
As well might the statue of Lord Nelson climb down from its monument
in Trafalgar Square and, with the voice of a living man, commence to
address a London crowd. The verse which he sang ran as follows; to the
few who were aware, it solved the mystery of an important portion of
his hidden early history:

"The Ophir on the Comstock
Was rich as bread and honey;
The Gould and Curry, farther south,
Was raking out the money;
The Savage and