athen
Crees" marvelled that these white men, praying to the same God, should
dwell so far apart. Wing You, who had wandered over from Ramsay's Camp
on the Pine River, explained it all to Dunraven: "Flenchman and
Englishman," said Wing. "No ketchem same Glod. You--Clee," continued the
wise Oriental, "an' Englishman good flend--ketchem same Josh; you call
'im We-sec-e-gea, white man call 'im God."

And so, having the same God, only called by different names, the Crees
trusted the factor, and the factor trusted the Crees. Their business
intercourse was on the basis of skin for skin, furs being the recognized
coin of the country.

"Why do you not pay them in cash, take cash in turn, and let them have
something to rattle?" asked the cure one day.

"They won't have it," said the factor. "Silver Skin, brother to
Dunraven, followed a party of prospectors out to Edmonton last fall and
tried it. He bought a pair of gloves, a red handkerchief, and a pound of
tobacco, and emptied his pockets on the counter, so that the clerk in
the shop might take out the price of the goods. According to his own
statement, the Indian put down $37.80. He took up just six-thirty-five.
When the Cree came back to God's country he showed me what he had left
and asked me to check him up. When I had told him the truth, he walked
to the edge of the river and sowed the six-thirty-five broadcast on the
broad bosom of the Peace."

And so, little by little, the patient priest got the factor's
view-point, and learned the great secret of the centuries of success
that has attended the Hudson's Bay Company in the far North.

And little by little the two men, without preaching, revealed to the
Indians and the Oriental the mystery of Life--vegetable life at
first--of death and life beyond. They showed them the miracle of the
wheat.

On the first day of June they put into a tiny grave a grain of wheat.
They told the Blind Ones that the berry would suffer death, decay, but
out of that grave would spring fresh new flags that would grow and blow,
fanned by the balmy chinook winds, and wet by the dews of heaven.

On the first day of September they harvested seventy-two stalks and
threshed from the seventy-two stalks seven thousand two hundred grains
of wheat. They showed all this to the Blind Ones and they saw. The cure
explained that we, too, would go down and die, but live again in another
life, in a fairer world.

The Cree accepted it all in absolute silence