d him. "The Bear's Tooth"
took a wife in the Indian way, unwilling to marry, and removed, as it
seemed, away from our influence, to a claim forty miles up the river
from our mission station.
But God dealt with him and afflicted him in the loss of his babes, and
of his stock, so that he said, "It seems as though I could acquire
nothing. Explain it to me; the Indians say it is because I follow your
teaching." I taught him from the book of Job, and the words of Christ.
His soul was hungry, and when he came once in two weeks for his
government rations, he sought the bread of life at the mission. Finally,
after nearly eight years, one summer day he came and sat on a bench in
the shade of the house in a little flower garden, and after we had
talked awhile, he said to the missionary: "Good Voice, now I can; I will
be faithful to my own wife, I will keep Sunday, I will pray and avoid
the dances and other heathen customs; when you think best I will come
down and be received into the church." That was a glad moment. To clasp
the hand of the first Gros-Ventre brother in Christ, won through a
strange tongue and from a people who had sat in darkness for eighteen
hundred years since the great light shone in Galilee!
I said, "Bring your wife and friends with you to Christ." He went home
but soon returned, saying sorrowfully: "My wife and my friends are none
of them willing. If I join I think it must be alone." "Well," I said,
"let it be so," and it was. His clothes were second-hand and old, and he
had no natural attractiveness of appearance; but in a simple, manly,
determined way, he made his confession and was baptized before an
audience of Indians in the little mission chapel, (July, 1887), a poor
Indian, but another Daniel standing alone.
Then, as the man of Gergesa, he went home to tell his neighbors what God
had done for him. He had a Bible in Dakota, of which language he
understood something, and a few Gros-Ventre translations in writing, and
some attempts at hymns, and some pictures. With these he preached, in
neighbors' houses, and then he would report to me of his reception, and
ask me questions about the Christian life. A veritable man "Friday" had
come to me; I was no longer alone. Then why did his health fail, and he
forty miles away where I could not see him? But so God willed. Soon they
brought me the word: Your friend has gone. I gathered up his last words,
questioning his wife and lame old father. He wanted to see
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