nd left strong heirs.

Of homes, and native freedom, and the heart
To live and strive and die, if need be,
In standing manfully by honour's part
To guard the country that has made us free."

CHAPTER VI

BITTER WATERS

I

They could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were
bitter.--_The Pentateuch_.

"Tweet, my little plover! Thy lips are like unto the bleeding
strawberry."

Wasi, the father, smiled indulgently on this child-play, cooing
chatter, and sweet-flavoured words of his girl-wife as she fondled
their wonder-eyed baby.

And in truth, it was a round dimpled baby--a cunning, cuddling papoose
that looked for all the world like a live bronze. Wasi did well to
smile.

The older Braves had sneered at Wasi, "the Yellow Pine," for had he
not, they asked, breathed the breath of his squaw till his heart was
even as faint and soft as a squaw's heart. But Wasi of the swart face
heeded not their gibes for he loved Ermi with the flaming love known
only to men of hot heart and greedy senses.

"Lazy one, to sleep till sun is high," merrily chided Ermi. "Little
Ninon has been awake since the dawn raised the meadow-larks."

Wasi rose hastily, for he would take the trail early to the sun-dance,
and it was four suns' journey to the North.

Once, Ermi had gone when she was ten spring-tides old, but the
cruelties of the scene with its shrill jubilations, had bitten
themselves into her memory. Her brother had been one of the candidates
for the coveted title of "Brave," and she had seen the wooden skewers
thrust through the muscles of his chest by which he was suspended to a
tree and from which he only freed himself by tearing away the flesh.
Since then, she had been to the mission school at St. Albert, and the
nuns had taught her that the body was holy, "a temple," they called it,
and that the sun-dance was sinful exceedingly.

Father Lament at the cathedral had christened her Agatha, for she had
come to them in February on the day of the virgin-martyr of Sicily.
But Wasi was a Pagan, and called her Ermi.

Ermi busied herself laying out Wasi's beaded moccasins, his bow of
cherry-wood with its leathern thong, and his arrows of Albertan
willows, that were winged with eagle feathers and tipped with iron.

All the while she sang a quaint song about love.

"Why singest thou thus!" asked Wasi. "'Tis the foolish song of the
hunters from the south-land."

But Ermi laughed as she sang--