that, and the stream was in the hush of evening
and summer. He had seen us and was coming across to pay his respects to
my companion. When he was half-way across, a dog detached himself from
the outer circle of the fire and began to swim after the canoe. We saw
the current swing him forward, and the little beast's adjustment to it.
The canoe had come straight. It was now in the still water beneath, and
the dog in the centre of the stream--the point of a rippling wedge.

The Indian drew up his craft, and started to climb to us. The dog made
the bank, shook himself and followed upward, but not with a scamper like
a white man's dog, rather a silent keeping of distance. Just below us
the Indian halted, turned, picked up with both hands a rock the size of
a winter turnip and heaved it straight down at the beast's head. No
word.

The dog lurched sideways on the trail, so that the missile merely grazed
him. We heard a subdued protest of one syllable, as he turned and went
back. It was _all_ uninteresting night to me now--beauty,
picturesqueness, enchantment gone, with that repressed yelp. I didn't
even rise from my seat on the rock. I had looked too close. That night
the Canadian said:

"The Indian race is passing out. They do not resist. I go from camp to
camp in the Spring, and ask about the missing friends--young and old,
even the young married people. They point--back and upward--as if one
pointed over his shoulder toward a hill just descended.... It's
tuberculosis mainly. You see them here living a life designed to bring
anything but a corpse back to health. When the winter comes they go to
the houses, batten the windows, heap up the fires, and sit beside them,
sleep and have their food beside them, twenty in a room. Before Spring,
the touched ones cough, and are carried out. They seem to know that the
race is passing. They do not resist--they do not care to live
differently."

Had it not been for that hurled rock which broke open the old Indian's
nature for me, I should have preserved a fine picture perhaps, but it
would not have been grounded upon wisdom, and therefore would have
amounted to a mere sentiment. It was the same with the country town,
when the house-building forced me to look closely at the separate groups
of workmen that detached themselves from the whole, and came to build
the house. I think I can bring the meaning even clearer through another
incident:

... One of the young men here loved the sunli