It was almost twenty years ago that the romance began in the lives of John and Meleese Cummins.  Meleese was then ten years old; and she still remembers as vividly as though they were but memories of yesterday the fears and wild tales of that one terrible winter when the “Red Terror”—­the smallpox—­swept in a pitiless plague of death throughout the northern wilderness.  It was then that there came down from the north, one bitter cold day, a ragged and half-starved boy, whose mother and father had died of the plague in a little cabin fifty miles away, and who from the day he staggered into the home of Henry Janesse, became Meleese’s playmate and chum.  This boy was John Cummins.

When Janesse moved to Fort Churchill, where Meleese might learn more in the way of reading and writing and books than her parents could teach her, John Cummins went with her.  He went with them to Nelson House, and from there to Split Lake, where Janesse died.  From that time, at the age of eighteen, he became the head and support of the home.  When he was twenty and Meleese eighteen, the two were married by a missioner from Nelson House.  The following autumn the young wife’s mother died, and that winter Meleese began her remarkable work among her “people.”

In their little cabin on the Gray Loon, one will hear John Cummins say but little about himself; but there is a glow in his eyes and a flush in his cheeks as he tells of that first day he came home from a three-days journey over a long trap line to find his home cold and fireless, and a note written by Meleese telling him that she had gone with a twelve-year-old boy who had brought her word through twenty miles of forest that his mother was dying.  That first “case” was more terrible for John Cummins than for his wife, for it turned out to be smallpox, and for six weeks Meleese would allow him to come no nearer than the edge of the clearing’ in which the pest-ridden cabin stood.  First the mother, and then the boy, she nursed back to life, locking the door against the two husbands, who built themselves a shack in the edge of the forest.  Half a dozen times Meleese Cummins has gone through ordeals like that unscathed.  Once it was to nurse a young Indian mother through the dread disease, and again she went into a French trapper’s cabin where husband, wife and daughter were all sick with the malady.  At these times, when the “call” came to Meleese from a far cabin or tepee, John Cummins would give up the duties of his trap line to accompany her, and would pitch his tent or make him a shack close by, where he could watch over her, hunt food for the afflicted people and keep up the stack of needed firewood and water.