a wild
and half Indian mother who said that!

It was almost twenty years ago that the romance began in the lives of
John and Meleese Cummins. Meleese was then ten years old; and she still
remembers as vividly as though they were but memories of yesterday the
fears and wild tales of that one terrible winter when the "Red
Terror"--the smallpox--swept in a pitiless plague of death throughout
the northern wilderness. It was then that there came down from the
north, one bitter cold day, a ragged and half-starved boy, whose mother
and father had died of the plague in a little cabin fifty miles away,
and who from the day he staggered into the home of Henry Janesse,
became Meleese's playmate and chum. This boy was John Cummins.

When Janesse moved to Fort Churchill, where Meleese might learn more in
the way of reading and writing and books than her parents could teach
her, John Cummins went with her. He went with them to Nelson House, and
from there to Split Lake, where Janesse died. From that time, at the
age of eighteen, he became the head and support of the home. When he
was twenty and Meleese eighteen, the two were married by a missioner
from Nelson House. The following autumn the young wife's mother died,
and that winter Meleese began her remarkable work among her "people."

In their little cabin on the Gray Loon, one will hear John Cummins say
but little about himself; but there is a glow in his eyes and a flush
in his cheeks as he tells of that first day he came home from a
three-days journey over a long trap line to find his home cold and
fireless, and a note written by Meleese telling him that she had gone
with a twelve-year-old boy who had brought her word through twenty
miles of forest that his mother was dying. That first "case" was more
terrible for John Cummins than for his wife, for it turned out to be
smallpox, and for six weeks Meleese would allow him to come no nearer
than the edge of the clearing' in which the pest-ridden cabin stood.
First the mother, and then the boy, she nursed back to life, locking
the door against the two husbands, who built themselves a shack in the
edge of the forest. Half a dozen times Meleese Cummins has gone through
ordeals like that unscathed. Once it was to nurse a young Indian mother
through the dread disease, and again she went into a French trapper's
cabin where husband, wife and daughter were all sick with the malady.
At these times, when the "call" came to Meleese from a fa