made literature or
music.
Instead, she was El-Soo, daughter of Klakee-Nah, a chief, and she lived
in the Holy Cross Mission where were no artists, but only pure-souled
Sisters who were interested in cleanliness and righteousness and the
welfare of the spirit in the land of immortality that lay beyond the
skies.
The years passed. She was eight years old when she entered the Mission;
she was sixteen, and the Sisters were corresponding with their superiors
in the Order concerning the sending of El-Soo to the United States to
complete her education, when a man of her own tribe arrived at Holy Cross
and had talk with her. El-Soo was somewhat appalled by him. He was
dirty. He was a Caliban-like creature, primitively ugly, with a mop of
hair that had never been combed. He looked at her disapprovingly and
refused to sit down.
"Thy brother is dead," he said shortly.
El-Soo was not particularly shocked. She remembered little of her
brother. "Thy father is an old man, and alone," the messenger went on.
"His house is large and empty, and he would hear thy voice and look upon
thee."
Him she remembered--Klakee-Nah, the headman of the village, the friend of
the missionaries and the traders, a large man thewed like a giant, with
kindly eyes and masterful ways, and striding with a consciousness of
crude royalty in his carriage.
"Tell him that I will come," was El-Soo's answer.
Much to the despair of the Sisters, the brand plucked from the burning
went back to the burning. All pleading with El-Soo was vain. There was
much argument, expostulation, and weeping. Sister Alberta even revealed
to her the project of sending her to the United States. El-Soo stared
wide-eyed into the golden vista thus opened up to her, and shook her
head. In her eyes persisted another vista. It was the mighty curve of
the Yukon at Tana-naw Station. With the St. George Mission on one side,
and the trading post on the other, and midway between the Indian village
and a certain large log house where lived an old man tended upon by
slaves.
All dwellers on the Yukon bank for twice a thousand miles knew the large
log house, the old man and the tending slaves; and well did the Sisters
know the house, its unending revelry, its feasting and its fun. So there
was weeping at Holy Cross when El-Soo departed.
There was a great cleaning up in the large house when El-Soo arrived.
Klakee-Nah, himself masterful, protested at this masterful condu
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