Marance laughed merrily, as she tripped away; then, turning, she said,—­

“But what if I never get back?  I may lose myself in these lonely places, and never be heard of again.”

“Oh, in that case,” replied I, hard driven for a compliment, “in that case, I must wait until Gilette”—­a younger sister—­“grows up.  She will be exactly like you:  I must only wait for Gilette.”

“You remind me of Pete Walker,” said the old man, as we shot away up the channel, our canoe ripping up the matted surface like the cue of a novice, when he runs a fatal reef along the sere and yellow cloth of some billiard-table erewhile in verdure clad.  “You are as bad as Pete Walker, who thought one sister must be as good as another, because they looked so much alike.”

And then, as we loitered about in the bays, the old man told me the story of Walker’s honeymoon, which was a sad and a short one.  This is the story.

Near that wild rapid of the Columbia River known as the “Dalles,” there was, years ago, a Jesuit mission, established in a small fort, built, like that at Nez-Perces, of mud.  The labors of the holy men composing the mission involved no inconsiderable amount of danger, devoted as they were to the hopeless task of reforming such sinners as the Sioux, the Blackfeet, the Gros-Ventres, the Flat-Heads, the Assiniboines, the Nez-Perces, and a few other such.

Some of these missionaries had sojourned for a long time with a branch of the Blackfoot tribe, among whom they found two young white girls, remarkable for their exact resemblance to each other, and therefore supposed to be twins.  I say supposed, because of their origin there was no trace.  All that was known about them was, that they were the sole survivors of a train of emigrants, attacked and murdered by the Nez-Perces, who, actuated by one of those whims characteristic of the red men, spared the lives of the two children, and adopted them into the tribe.  Subsequently, in a skirmish with the Blackfeet, they fell into the hands of the latter, among whom they had lived for some time, when they were ransomed by the missionaries, at the price of certain trading-privileges negotiated by the latter for the tribe.

When adopted by the Jesuits, the children had lost all remembrance of their parentage; nor had they any names except the Indian ones bestowed upon them by their captors.  The good fathers christened them, however, arranging them alphabetically, by the names of Alixe and Bloyse, and confiding them to the especial charge of the wife of a trader connected with the station, who had no family of her own.  They were fair-haired children, probably of German or Norwegian origin, and had grown up to be robust young women of seventeen, when Walker saw them for the first time, as he stopped at the Dalles on his way from Fort Nez-Perces about one hundred and twenty-five miles higher up the Columbia.