“You are perfectly contented—­happy, are you?”

Again the same smile, as she answered in the affirmative by an inclination of the head.

“You would not change it for a residence at home with your own people if you could?”

The same sweet denial in pantomime.

“Do you not become lonely sometimes, Cora, hundreds of miles away from the scenes of your childhood?”

“Have I not my husband and boy?” she asked, half reproachfully, as the tears welled up in her eyes.  “Can I ask more?”

“I have feared sometimes, when I’ve been in the village, that perhaps you were lonely and sorrowful, and often I have hurried my footsteps that I might be with you a few moments sooner.  When preaching and talking to the Indians, my thoughts would wander away to you and the dear little fellow there.  And what husband could prevent them?” said Harvey, impulsively, as he drew his wife to him, and kissed her again and again.

“You must think of the labor before you.”

“There is scarcely a moment of my life in which I don’t, but it is impossible to keep you and him from my mind.  I am sorry that I am compelled to leave you alone so often.  It seems to me that Teddy has acted in a singular manner of late.  He is absent every afternoon.  He says he goes hunting and yet he rarely, if ever, brings anything back with him.”

“Yesterday he returned shortly after you left, and acted so oddly, I did not know what to make of him.  He appeared very anxious to keep me at a distance, but once he came close enough for me to catch his breath, and if it did not reveal the fumes of liquor then I was never more mistaken in my life.”

“Impossible! where could he obtain it?”

“The question I asked myself and which I could not answer; nevertheless his manner and the evidence of his own breath proved it beyond all doubt to my mind.  You have noticed how set he is every afternoon about going away in the woods.  Such was not his custom, and I think makes it certain some unusual attraction calls him forth.”

“What can it all mean?” asked the missionary of himself.  “No; it cannot be that he brought any of the stuff with him and concealed it in the boat.  It must have been discovered.”

“Every article that came with us is in this house.”

“Then some one must furnish him with it, and who now can it be?”

“Are there not some of your people who are addicted to the use of liquor?”

“Alas! there are too many who cannot withstand the tempter; but I never yet heard of an Indian who knew how to make it.  It is only when they visit some of the ports, or the Red river settlement, that they obtain it.  Or perhaps a trader may come this way, and bring it with him.”

“And could not Teddy have obtained his of such a man?”

“There has been none here since last autumn, and then those who visited the village had no liquor with them.  They always come to the village first so that I could not avoid learning of their presence.  Let me see, he has been away since morning?”