And during the years he is absorbing this education he is unceasingly instructed in every branch of warfare, of canoe-making, of fashioning arrows, paddles and snow-shoes.  He studies the sign language, the history and legends of his nation; he familiarizes himself with the “archives” of wampum belts, learning to read them and to value the great treaties they sealed.  He excels in the national sports of “lacrosse,” “bowl and beans,” and “snow snake,” and when, finally, he goes forth to face his forest world he is equipped to obtain his own living with wisdom and skill, and starts life a brave, capable, well-educated gentleman, though some yet call him an uncivilized savage.

Jack o’ Lantern

I

Everybody along the river knew old “Andy” Lavergne; for years he had been “the lamplighter,” if such an office could exist in the rough backwoods settlement that bordered that treacherous stream in the timber country of northern Ontario.  He had been a great, husky man in his time, who could swing an axe with the best of the lumbermen, but an accident in a log jam had twisted his sturdy legs and hips for life, and laid him off active service, and now he must cease to accompany the great gangs of choppers in the lumber camps, and do his best to earn a few honest dollars about the settlement and the sawmill.  So the big-hearted mill hands paid him good money for doing many odd jobs, the most important of which was to keep a lantern lighted every dark night, both summer and winter, to warn them of the danger spot in the Wildcat river, that raced in its treacherous course between the mill and their shanty homes on the opposite shore.

This danger spot was a perfect snarl of jagged rocks, just below the surface of the black waters that eddied about in tiny whirlpools, deadly to any canoe in summer, and still more deadly in winter, for the ice never formed here as in the rest of the river.  Only a thin, deceptive coating ever bridged that death hole, and the man who mistook it for solid ice would never live to cross that river again.  So, on the high bank above this death trap old Andy lighted his lantern, year in and year out.  Sometimes he was accompanied by his old grey horse, who followed him about like a dog.  Sometimes little Jacky Moran, his young neighbor, went to help him on very stormy or windy nights.  Sometimes both Jacky and the horse would go, and as a reward for his assistance old Andy would always lift the boy to the grey’s back and let him ride home.  Then one wet spring old Andy got rheumatism in his poor, twisted legs, and the first night he was unable to leave his shanty Jacky came whistling in at nightfall and offered to take the lantern up stream alone.  Andy consented gratefully, and, with the horse at his heels, Jacky set out for the bank above the dangerous spot.