It was against the tenets of the Doukhobors to employ legal counsel to defend them, and so the trial was quickly finished.  The young woman was the only one amongst them who could understand the English language, and she answered the judge’s questions, and when the sentence had been passed, the others in their anxiety to hear from her how long a term they had been condemned to, almost mobbed her, and in the struggle the black shawl covering her head fell to the floor.

“Look, Jim, look!” shouted Joe to his brother above the din the Doukhobors made, while at the same time he pointed towards the young woman’s head, upon which one braid of white hair stood plainly out against a black braid on each side of it.  “She is the first human being I ever saw or heard of that had the birth-mark of the McDonald’s.”  Then a vague suspicion flashed through his mind and he asked the officer to bring the woman over to where he was standing so he could question her concerning her past.

While the judge and the barristers were engaged in writing the commitment papers, Joe asked the woman to tell him who was her mother, and when she pointed at a wrinkled hag, he had the policeman stand the latter beside her daughter, who now acted as interpreter.  Now Joe had Jim’s daughter stand beside the younger woman, and when the old hag noted the resemblance between the two she paled and commenced to weep.  Aided by the policeman, and the promise that if the Doukhobor woman told the truth concerning the young woman’s parentage she would not be molested, and greatly influenced by the fact that her sect, like the Quakers, consider telling an untruth a mortal sin, she told the following story: 

While she and her husband in company with many others of their sect were crossing the Atlantic, during the stormy winter voyage, her only child, a little girl, died and was buried at sea.  They landed in America and were loaded aboard an immigrant train, which several days later stopped in a snow covered prairie.  Looking out of the coach window, the bereaved mother saw a little tot, just the size of their own “Maritzka”, playing in the snow below the window, and yearning for her departed baby she had climbed from the train and petted the little child, who instead of being frightened by the strange woman, permitted her to kiss its rosy cheeks, and while she felt the tot’s chubby hands and soft limbs, the mother love which she used to lavish upon her own Maritzka got the upper hand of her, and noting that no one was guarding this smiling baby girl, and that no homes were near, she could not resist the temptation to have this child replace the one God had taken from her.  Realizing that the child’s clothing did not match her own, she quickly undressed the tot, and after she had wrapped it in her shawl she climbed aboard the train, which at this moment commenced to pull away.  While she dressed the child in the clothes which had belonged to her own child, she discovered that she had overlooked a locket that hung around its neck, and that ever since that day had kept this place.  She now caused her kidnapped daughter to take off and hand this locket to Joe, and when he opened it he found his late father’s and his mother’s picture in it, and an inscription that read, “Henry McDonald to Ethel, his wife.”