The river piled hillocks of water in a strong north wind, and no officer crossed from the stockade.  Neither did any neighbor leave his own fire.  It seldom happened that the Grignons were left with inmates alone.  Eagle sat by me and watched the blaze streaming up the chimney.

If she was not a unit in the family group and had no part there, they were most kind to her.

“Take care!” the grandmother cried with swift forethought when Marie and Katarina marshaled in a hopping object from the kitchen.  “It might frighten Madeleine.”

Pierre Grignon stopped in the middle of a bear hunt.  Eagle was not frightened.  She clapped her hands.

“This is a pouched turkey!” Marie announced, leaning against the wall, while Katarina chased the fowl.  It was the little negro, his arms and feet thrust into the legs of a pair of Pierre Grignon’s trousers, and the capacious open top fastened upon his back.  Doubled over, he waddled and hopped as well as he could.  A feather duster was stuck in for a tail, and his woolly head gave him the uncanny look of a black harpy.  To see him was to shed tears of laughter.  The pouched turkey enjoyed being a pouched turkey.  He strutted and gobbled, and ran at the girls; tried to pick up corn from the floor with his thick lips, tumbling down and rolling over in the effort; for a pouched turkey has no wings with which to balance himself.  So much hilarity in the family room drew the Pawnee servants.  I saw their small dark eyes in a mere line of open door, gazing solemnly.

When the turkey was relieved from his pouching and sent to bed, Pierre Grignon took his violin.  The girls answered with jigs that ended a reel, when couples left the general figure to jig it off.

When Eagle had watched them awhile she started up, spread her skirts in a sweeping courtesy, and began to dance a gavotte.  The fiddler changed his tune, and the girls rested and watched her.  Alternately swift and languid, with the changes of the movement, she saluted backward to the floor, or spun on the tips of rapid feet.  I had seen her dance many times, but never with such abandon of joy.

Our singular relationship was established in the house, where hospitality made room and apology for all human weakness.

Nobody of that region, except the infirm, stayed indoors to shiver by a fire.  Eagle and the girls in their warm capotes breasted with me the coldest winter days.  She was as happy as they were; her cheeks tingled as pink as theirs.  Sometimes I thought her eyes must answer me with her old self-command; their bright grayness was so natural.

I believed if her delusions were humored, they would unwind from her like the cloud which she felt them to be.  The family had long fallen into the habit of treating her as a child, playing some imaginary character.  She seemed less demented than walking in a dream, her faculties asleep.  It was somnambulism rather than madness.  She had not the expression of insane people, the shifty eyes, the cunning and perverseness, the animal and torpid presence.