“My wife—­she is not then talking with any one on the gallery?” Louizon’s voice betrayed gratified revenge.

“I do not know.  But there is a woman in this canoe who might talk on the gallery and complain to the priest against a man who has got her stoned on his account.”

Louizon did not understand this, even when he looked at the heap of dirty blanket in the canoe.

“Who is it?” he inquired.

“The Chippewas call her a windigo.  They were all chasing her for eating you up.  But now we can take her back to the priest, and they will let her alone when they see you.  Where is your canoe?”

“Down here among the bushes,” answered Louizon.  He went to get it, ashamed to look the young seignior in the face.  He was light-headed from hunger and exposure, and what followed seemed to him afterwards a piteous dream.

“Come back!” called the young seignior, and Louizon turned back.  The two men’s eyes met in a solemn look.

“Jean Boucher says this woman is dead.”

Jean Boucher stood on the bank, holding the canoe with one hand, and turning her unresisting face with the other.  Jacques and Louizon took off their hats.

They heard the cry of the whip-poor-will.  The river had lost all its green and was purple, and purple shadows lay on the distant mountains and opposite ridge.  Darkness was mercifully covering this poor demented Indian woman, overcome by the burdens of her life, aged without being venerable, perhaps made hideous by want and sorrow.

When they had looked at her in silence, respecting her because she could no longer be hurt by anything in the world, Louizon whispered aside to his seignior,—­

“What shall we do with her?”

“Bury her,” the old canoeman answered for him.

One of the party yet thought of taking her back to the priest.  But she did not belong to priests and rites.  Jean Boucher said they could dig in the forest mould with a paddle, and he and his son would make her a grave.  The two Chippewas left the burden to the young men.

Jacques Repentigny and Louizon Cadotte took up the woman who, perhaps had never been what they considered woman; who had missed the good, and got for her portion the ignorance and degradation of the world; yet who must be something to the Almighty, for he had sent youth and love to pity and take care of her in her death.  They carried her into the woods between them.

THE KIDNAPED BRIDE.

(For this story, little changed from the form in which it was handed down to him, I am indebted to Dr. J.F.  Snyder of Virginia, Illinois, a descendant of the Saucier family.  Even the title remains unchanged, since he insisted on keeping the one always used by his uncle, Mathieu Saucier.  “Mon Oncle Mathieu,” he says, “I knew well, and often sat with breathless interest listening to his narration of incidents in the early settlement of the Bottom