w
children dashed against trees, and her neighbors struck down and scalped
before she could plead for them. And little good pleading would have
done. An Indian seized Paul. His father and the old servant lay dead
across the doorstep. His mother would not let him go. The Indian dragged
her on her knees and struck her on the head. Madame Jordan ran out at
the risk of being scalped herself, and got the poor girl into her cabin.
The Indian came back for Madeleine's scalp. Madeleine did not see him.
She never seemed to notice anybody again. She stood up quivering the
whole length of her body, and laughed in his face. It was dreadful to
hear her above the cries of the children. The Indian went away like a
scared hound. And none of the others would touch her."

After I heard this story I was thankful every day that Eagle could not
remember; that natural happiness had its way with her elastic body.

Madame Ursule told me the family learned to give her liberty. She rowed
alone upon the river, and went where she pleased. The men in La Baye
would step aside for her. Strangers disturbed her by bringing the
consciousness of something unusual.

Once I surprised Marie and Katarina sitting close to the fire at
twilight, talking about lovers. Eagle was near them on a stool.

"That girl," exclaimed Katarina, speaking of the absent with strong
disapproval, "is one of the kind that will let another girl take her
sweetheart and then sit around and look injured! Now if she could get
him from me she might have him! But she'd have to get him first!"

Eagle listened in the attitude of a young sister, giving me to
understand by a look that wisdom flowed, and she was learning.

We rose one morning to find the world buried in snow. The river was
frozen and its channel padded thick. As for the bay, stretches of snow
fields, with dark pools and broken gray ridges met ice at the end of the
world.

It was so cold that paper stuck to the fingers like feathers, and the
nails tingled with frost. The white earth creaked under foot, and when a
sled went by the snow cried out in shrill long resistance, a spirit
complaining of being trampled. Explosions came from the river, and elm
limbs and timbers of the house startled us. White fur clothed the inner
key holes. Tree trunks were black as ink against a background of snow.
The oaks alone kept their dried foliage, which rattled like many
skeletons, instead of rustling in its faded redness, because there