The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone.  As the guest of the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself, whose grave that was.  Women, who are neither politicians nor politic, have a plain way of uttering harsh facts.  She did not speak about the author of her boy’s death in soft words, that little white haired mother.  She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal courts.  “To think,” she exclaimed bitterly, “to think that Fordie, descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster, this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways!  No, we have never taken Government aid and we never shall!  I like to know that my Indian girls are safe.”  What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you will find it flanked by two others, a man’s on one side with the figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity’s with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character of her early life.

Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure for the stone.  A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the dead; and the children’s voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the funeral hymn around the grave.  Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the painter’s brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.  After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker, the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother’s voice sang clarion to the end.  She heard the low melting trill of the blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay—­true and counterfeit, peace and discord—­had God put right and wrong in the world for the friction of the conflict between, to develop souls?  Had one been set over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual eye to know?

Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket.  One young pall bearer faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother’s hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight for ever.  Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of mountain laurel.  Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.