yed her directions.

March was wearing away tediously. The river was not yet open, and the
belated boats with needed supplies were moored far down the river. Many
of the reduced settlers were dependent on the meat the Indians brought
them for sustenance. The mud made the roads almost impassable; for the
frost lay in a solid bed six inches below the surface, and all above
that was semiliquid muck. Snow and rain alternated, and the frightful
disease did not cease its ravages.

The priest got little sleep. Now he was at the bed of a little
half-breed child, smoothing the straight black locks from the narrow
brow; now at the cot of some hulking trapper, who wept at the pain, but
died finally with a grin of bravado on his lips; now in a foul tepee,
where some grave Pawnee wrapped his mantle about him, and gazed with
prophetic and unflinching eyes into the land of the hereafter.

The little school that the priest started had been long since abandoned.
It was only the preservation of life that one thought of in these days.
And recklessness had made the men desperate. To the ravages of disease
were added horrible murders. Moral health is always low when physical
health is so.

Give a nation two winters of grippe, and it will have an epidemic of
suicide. Give it starvation and small-pox, and it will have a contagion
of murders. There are subtle laws underlying these things,--laws which
the physicians think they can explain; but they are mistaken. The reason
is not so material as it seems.

But spring was near in spite of falling snow and the dirty ice in the
river. There was not even a flushing of the willow twigs to tell it by,
nor a clearing of the leaden sky,--only the almanac. Yet all men
were looking forward to it The trappers put in the feeble days of
convalescence, making long rafts on which to pile the skins dried over
winter,--a fine variety, worth all but their weight in gold. Money was
easily got in those days; but there are circumstances under which money
is valueless.

Father de Smet thought of this the day before Easter, as he plunged
through the mud of the winding street in his bearskin gaiters. Stout
were his legs, firm his lungs, as he turned to breathe in the west wind;
clear his sharp and humorous eyes. He was going to the little chapel
where the mission school had previously been held. Here was a rude
pulpit, and back of it a much-disfigured virgin, dressed in turkey-red
calico. Two cheap candles in th