ards took to the attic, locking the door.

But while Melinda Cree submitted to the shackles of civilization, she
did not entirely give up the ways of her own people. She kept a conical
tent of poles and birch bark in her back yard, in which she slept during
summer. And she was noted as wise and skilled in herbs, guarding their
secrets so jealously that the knowledge was likely to die with her.
Once she appeared at the bedside of a dying islander, and asked, as the
doctor had withdrawn, to try her own remedies. Permission being given,
she went to the kitchen, took some dried vegetable substance from her
pocket, and made a tea of it. A little was poured down the sick man's
throat. He revived. He drank more, and grew better. Melinda Cree's
decoction cured him, and the chagrined doctor visited her to learn what
wonderful remedy she had used.

"It was nothing but some little bushes," responded the Indian woman.

"If you tell me what they are, I will pay you fifty dollars," he
pleaded.

Melinda Cree shook her head. She continued to repeat, as he raised
the bid higher, "It was nothing but some little bushes, doctor; it was
nothing but some little bushes."

Clethera felt the same kind of protecting tenderness for this
self-restrained squaw that Honore had for his undersized parent, whom
he always called by the baptismal name. Melinda had been the wife of a
great medicine-man, who wore a trailing blanket, and white gulls' wings
bound around and spread behind his head. During his lifetime he was
often seen stretched on his back invoking the sun. A stranger observing
him declared he was using the signs of Freemasonry, and must know its
secrets.

With the readiness of custom, Honore and Clethera met each other at the
steps in the fence about dusk. She sat down on her side, and he sat
down on his, the broad top of the stile separating them. Honore was a
stalwart Saxon-looking youth in his early twenties. Wind and weather
had painted his large-featured countenance a rosy tan. By the employing
class Honore was considered one of the finest and most promising young
quarter-breeds on the island.

The fresh moist odor of the lake, with its incessant wash upon pebbles,
came to them accompanied by piercing sweetness of wild roses. For the
wind had turned to the west, raking fragrant thickets. Dusk was moving
from eastern fastnesses to rock battlements still tinged with sunset.
The fort, dismantled of its garrison, reared a whitewash