A man rapped sharply on a table, and the conversation droned away into silence.  Imber looked at the man.  He seemed one in authority, yet Imber divined the square-browed man who sat by a desk farther back to be the one chief over them all and over the man who had rapped.  Another man by the same table uprose and began to read aloud from many fine sheets of paper.  At the top of each sheet he cleared his throat, at the bottom moistened his fingers.  Imber did not understand his speech, but the others did, and he knew that it made them angry.  Sometimes it made them very angry, and once a man cursed him, in single syllables, stinging and tense, till a man at the table rapped him to silence.

For an interminable period the man read.  His monotonous, sing-song utterance lured Imber to dreaming, and he was dreaming deeply when the man ceased.  A voice spoke to him in his own Whitefish tongue, and he roused up, without surprise, to look upon the face of his sister’s son, a young man who had wandered away years agone to make his dwelling with the whites.

“Thou dost not remember me,” he said by way of greeting.

“Nay,” Imber answered.  “Thou art Howkan who went away.  Thy mother be dead.”

“She was an old woman,” said Howkan.

But Imber did not hear, and Howkan, with hand upon his shoulder, roused him again.

“I shall speak to thee what the man has spoken, which is the tale of the troubles thou hast done and which thou hast told, O fool, to the Captain Alexander.  And thou shalt understand and say if it be true talk or talk not true.  It is so commanded.”

Howkan had fallen among the mission folk and been taught by them to read and write.  In his hands he held the many fine sheets from which the man had read aloud, and which had been taken down by a clerk when Imber first made confession, through the mouth of Jimmy, to Captain Alexander.  Howkan began to read.  Imber listened for a space, when a wonderment rose up in his face and he broke in abruptly.

“That be my talk, Howkan.  Yet from thy lips it comes when thy ears have not heard.”

Howkan smirked with self-appreciation.  His hair was parted in the middle.  “Nay, from the paper it comes, O Imber.  Never have my ears heard.  From the paper it comes, through my eyes, into my head, and out of my mouth to thee.  Thus it comes.”

“Thus it comes?  It be there in the paper?” Imber’s voice sank in whisperful awe as he crackled the sheets ’twixt thumb and finger and stared at the charactery scrawled thereon.  “It be a great medicine, Howkan, and thou art a worker of wonders.”

“It be nothing, it be nothing,” the young man responded carelessly and pridefully.  He read at hazard from the document:  “In that year, before the break of the ice, came an old man, and a boy who was lame of one foot.  These also did I kill, and the old man made much noise—­”

“It be true,” Imber interrupted breathlessly.  “He made much noise and would not die for a long time.  But how dost thou know, Howkan?  The chief man of the white men told thee, mayhap?  No one beheld me, and him alone have I told.”