Panting from her long walk, Jenieve came out of the woods upon a grassy open cliff, called by the islanders Pontiac’s Lookout, because the great war chief used to stand on that spot, forty years before, and gaze southward, as if he never could give up his hope of the union of his people.  Jenieve knew the story.  She had built playhouses here, when a child, without being afraid of the old chief’s lingering influence; for she seemed to understand his trouble, and this night she was more in sympathy with Pontiac than ever before in her life.  She sat down on the grass, wiping the tears from her hot cheeks, her dark eyes brooding on the lovely straits.  There might be more beautiful sights in the world, but Jenieve doubted it; and a white gull drifted across her vision like a moving star.

Pontiac’s Lookout had been the spot from which she watched her father’s bateau disappear behind Round Island.  He used to go by way of Detroit to the Canadian woods.  Here she wept out her first grief for his death; and here she stopped, coming and going between her mother and grandmother.  The cliff down to the beach was clothed with a thick growth which took away the terror of falling, and many a time Jenieve had thrust her bare legs over the edge to sit and enjoy the outlook.

There were old women on the island who could remember seeing Pontiac.  Her grandmother had told her how he looked.  She had heard that, though his bones had been buried forty years beside the Mississippi, he yet came back to the Lookout every night during that summer month when all the tribes assembled at the island to receive money from a new government.  He could not lie still while they took a little metal and ammunition in their hands in exchange for their country.  As for the tribes, they enjoyed it.  Jenieve could see their night fires begin to twinkle on Round Island and Bois Blanc, and the rising hubbub of their carnival came to her like echoes across the strait.  There was one growing star on the long hooked reef which reached out from Round Island, and figures of Indians were silhouetted against the lake, running back and forth along that high stone ridge.  Evening coolness stole up to Jenieve, for the whole water world was purpling; and sweet pine and cedar breaths, humid and invisible, were all around her.  Her trouble grew small, laid against the granite breast of the island, and the woods darkened and sighed behind her.  Jenieve could hear the shout of some Indian boy at the distant village.  She was not afraid, but her shoulders contracted with a shiver.  The place began to smell rankly of sweetbrier.  There was no sweetbrier on the cliff or in the woods, though many bushes grew on alluvial slopes around the bay.  Jenieve loved the plant, and often stuck a piece of it in her bosom.  But this was a cold smell, striking chill to the bones.  Her flesh and hair and clothes absorbed the scent, and it cooled her nostrils with its strange ether, the breath of sweetbrier, which