“Old Maria told her.”

Father Richmond got up and opened the door.

“What is it?”

“It’s a new-born Indian baby.”  The Father looked down as if it might be on the threshold.  “Brother Paul found it below at the village all done up ready to be abandoned.”

“Tell Sister Winifred I’ll see about it in the morning.”

“She says—­pardon me, Father—­she says that is like a man.  If I do not bring the little Indian in twenty minutes she will come herself and get it.”

Father Richmond laughed.

“Good-night, my son”; and he went downstairs with the others.

* * * * *

“Colonel, you asleep?” the Boy asked softly.

“No.”

He struggled in silence with his mucklucks.  Presently, “Isn’t it frightfully strange,” he mused aloud.  “Doesn’t it pull a fella up by the roots, somehow, to see Americans on this old track?”

The Colonel had the bedclothes drawn up to his eyes.  Under the white quilt he made some undistinguishable sound, but he kept his eyes fastened on his pardner.

“Everything that we Americans have done, everything that we are, is achieved by the grace of goin’ bang the other way.”  The Boy pulled off a muckluck and threw it half across the room.  “And yet, and yet—­”

He sat with one stocking-foot in his hand and stared at the candle.

“I wonder, Colonel, if it satisfies anybody to be a hustler and a millionaire.”

“Satisfies?” echoed the Colonel, pushing his chin over the bed-clothes.  “Who expects to be satisfied?”

“Why, every man, woman and child on the top o’ the earth; and it just strikes me I’ve never, personally, known anybody get there but these fellas at Holy Cross.”

The Colonel pushed back the bedclothes a little farther with his chin.

“Haven’t you got the gumption to see why it is this place and these men take such a hold on you?  It’s because you’ve eaten, slept, and lived for half a year in a space the size of this bedroom.  We’ve got so used to narrowing life down, that the first result of a little larger outlook is to make us dizzy.  Now, you hurry up and get to bed.  You’ll sleep it off.”

* * * * *

The Boy woke at four o’clock, and after the match-light, by which he consulted his watch, had flickered out, he lay a long time staring at the dark.

Silence still reigned supreme, when at last he got up, washed and dressed, and went downstairs.  An irresistible restlessness had seized hold of him.

He pulled on his furs, cautiously opened the door, and went out—­down, over the crisp new crust, to the river and back in the dimness, past the Fathers’ House to the settlement behind, then to the right towards the hillside.  As he stumbled up the slope he came to a little burial-ground.  Half hidden in the snow, white wooden crosses marked the graves.  “And here I shall be buried,” she had said—­“here.”  He came down the hill and round by the Sisters’ House.