Michel stood at the end of the hearth with a roll of pagessanung or plum-leather in his fist.  His cheeks had a hard garnered redness like polished apples.  The Chippewa widow set her husband carefully against the wall.  The husband was a bundle about two feet long, containing her best clothes tied up in her dead warrior’s sashes and rolled in a piece of cloth.  His armbands and his necklace of bear’s-claws appeared at the top as a grotesque head.  This bundle the widow was obliged to carry with her everywhere.  To be seen without it was a disgrace, until that time when her husband’s nearest relations should take it away from her and give her new clothes, thus signifying that she had mourned long enough to satisfy them.  As the husband’s relations were unable to cover themselves, the prospect of her release seemed distant.  For her food she was glad to depend on her labor in the Cadotte household.  There was no hunter to supply her lodge now.

The widow let down Archange’s hair and began to brush it.  The long mass was too much for its owner to handle.  It spread around her like a garment, as she sat on her chair, and its ends touched the floor.  Michel thought there was nothing more wonderful in the world than this glory of hair, its rings and ripples shining in the firelight.  The widow’s jaws worked in unobtrusive rumination on a piece of pleasantly bitter fungus, the Indian substitute for quinine, which the Chippewas called waubudone.  As she consoled herself much with this medicine, and her many-syllabled name was hard to pronounce, Archange called her Waubudone, an offense against her dignity which the widow might not have endured from anybody else, though she bore it without a word from this soft-haired magnate.

As she carefully carded the mass of hair lock by lock, thinking it an unnecessary nightly labor, the restless head under her hands was turned towards the portable husband.  Archange had not much imagination, but to her the thing was uncanny.  She repeated what she said every night:—­

“Do stand him in the hall and let him smell the smoke, Waubudone.”

“No,” refused the widow.

“But I don’t want him in my bedroom.  You are not obliged to keep that thing in your sight all the time.”

“Yes,” said the widow.

A dialect of mingled French and Chippewa was what they spoke, and Michel knew enough of both tongues to follow the talk.

“Are they never going to take him from you?  If they don’t take him from you soon, I shall go to the lodges and speak to his people about it myself.”

The Chippewa widow usually passed over this threat in silence; but, threading a lock with the comb, she now said,—­

“Best not go to the lodges awhile.”

“Why?” inquired Archange.  “Have the English already arrived?  Is the tribe dissatisfied?”

“Don’t know that.”

“Then why should I not go to the lodges?”

“Windigo at the Sault now.”