thing in your sight all the time."

"Yes," said the widow.

A dialect of mingled French and Chippewa was what they spoke, and
Michel knew enough of both tongues to follow the talk.

"Are they never going to take him from you? If they don't take him
from you soon, I shall go to the lodges and speak to his people about
it myself."

The Chippewa widow usually passed over this threat in silence; but,
threading a lock with the comb, she now said,--

"Best not go to the lodges awhile."

"Why?" inquired Archange. "Have the English already arrived? Is the
tribe dissatisfied?"

"Don't know that."

"Then why should I not go to the lodges?"

"Windigo at the Sault now."

Archange wheeled to look at her face. The widow was unmoved. She
was little older than Archange, but her features showed a stoical
harshness in the firelight. Michel, who often went to the lodges,
widened his mouth and forgot to fill it with plum-leather. There was
no sweet which Michel loved as he did this confection of wild plums
and maple sugar boiled down and spread on sheets of birch bark. Madame
Cadotte made the best pagessanung at the Sault.

"Look at the boy," laughed Archange. "He will not want to go to the
lodges any more after dark."

The widow remarked, noting Michel's fat legs and arms,--

"Windigo like to eat him."

"I would kill a windigo," declared Michel, in full revolt.

"Not so easy to kill a windigo. Bad spirits help windigos. If man kill
windigo and not tear him to pieces, he come to life again."

Archange herself shuddered at such a tenacious creature. She was less
superstitious than the Chippewa woman, but the Northwest had its human
terrors as dark as the shadow of witchcraft.

Though a Chippewa was bound to dip his hand in the war kettle and
taste the flesh of enemies after victory, there was nothing he
considered more horrible than a confirmed cannibal. He believed that
a person who had eaten human flesh to satisfy hunger was never
afterwards contented with any other kind, and, being deranged and
possessed by the spirit of a beast, he had to be killed for the safety
of the community. The cannibal usually became what he was by stress
of starvation: in the winter when hunting failed and he was far from
help, or on a journey when provisions gave out, and his only choice
was to eat a companion or die. But this did not excuse him. As soon as
he was detected the name of "windigo" was given him, and if he did not
betake h