he and Faith and Prudence listened to the wild stories she
told them of the wizards of her race. It was often in the kitchen, in
the darkening evening, while some cooking process was going on, that
the old Indian crone, sitting on her haunches by the bright red wood
embers which sent up no flame, but a lurid light reversing the shadows
of all the faces around, told her weird stories while they were
awaiting the rising of the dough, perchance, out of which the household
bread had to be made. There ran through these stories always a ghastly,
unexpressed suggestion of some human sacrifice being needed to complete
the success of any incantation to the Evil One; and the poor old
creature, herself believing and shuddering as she narrated her tale in
broken English, took a strange, unconscious pleasure in her power over
her hearers--young girls of the oppressing race, which had brought her
down into a state little differing from slavery, and reduced her people
to outcasts on the hunting-grounds which had belonged to her fathers.
After such tales, it required no small effort on Lois's part to go out,
at her aunt's command, into the common pasture round the town, and
bring the cattle home at night. Who knew but what the double-headed
snake might start up from each blackberry-bush--that wicked, cunning,
accursed creature in the service of the Indian wizards, that had such
power over all those white maidens who met the eyes placed at either
end of his long, sinuous, creeping body, so that loathe him, loathe the
Indian race as they would, off they must go into the forest to seek but
some Indian man, and must beg to be taken into his wigwam, abjuring
faith and race for ever? Or there were spells--so Nattee said--hidden
about the ground by the wizards, which changed that person's nature who
found them; so that, gentle and loving as they might have been before,
thereafter they took no pleasure but in the cruel torments of others,
and had a strange power given to them of causing such torments at their
will. Once Nattee, speaking low to Lois, who was alone with her in the
kitchen, whispered out her terrified belief that such a spell had
Prudence found; and when the Indian showed her arms to Lois, all
pinched and black and blue by the impish child, the English girl began
to be afraid of her cousin as of one possessed. But it was not Nattee
alone, nor young imaginative girls alone, that believed in these
stories. We can afford to smile at t