Two Pioneers
IT was the year of the small-pox. The
Pawnees had died in their cold tepees
by the fifties, the soldiers lay dead in the
trenches without the fort, and many a gay
French voyageur, who had thought to go
singing down the Missouri on his fur-laden
raft in the springtime, would never again
see the lights of St. Louis, or the coin of
the mighty Choteau company.
It had been a winter of tragedies. The
rigors of the weather and the scourge of
the disease had been fought with Indian
charm and with Catholic prayer. Both
were equally unavailing. If a man was
taken sick at the fort they put him in a
warm room, brought him a jug of water
once a day, and left him to find out what his
constitution was worth. Generally he re-
covered; for the surgeon's supplies had
been exhausted early in the year. But the
Indians, in their torment, rushed into the
river through the ice, and returned to roll
themselves in their blankets and die in
ungroaning stoicism.
Every one had grown bitter and hard.
The knives of the trappers were sharp, and
not one whit sharper than their tempers.
Some one said that the friendly Pawnees
were conspiring with the Sioux, who were
always treacherous, to sack the settlement.
The trappers doubted this. They and the
Pawnees had been friends many years, and
they had together killed the Sioux in four
famous battles on the Platte. Yet -- who
knows? There was pestilence in the air,
and it had somehow got into men's souls as
well as their bodies.
So, at least, Father de Smet said. He
alone did not despair. He alone tried
neither charm nor curse. He dressed him
an altar in the wilderness, and he prayed at
it -- but not for impossible things. When
in a day's journey you come across two
lodges of Indians, sixty souls in each, lying
dead and distorted from the plague in their
desolate tepees, you do not pray, if you are
a man like Father de Smet. You go on to
the next lodge where the living yet are, and
teach them how to avoid death.
Besides, when you are young, it is much
easier to act than to pray. When the chil-
dren cried for food, Father de Smet took
down the rifle from the wall and went out
with it, coming back only when he could
feed the hungry. There were places where
the prairie was black with buffalo, and the
shy deer showed their delicate heads among
the leafless willows of the Papillion. When
they -- the children -- were cold, this young
man brought in baskets of buffalo chips
from the prairie and built them a fire, or he
hung more skins up at the entrance to the
tepees. If he wanted to cross a river and
had no boat at hand, he leaped the uncertain
ice, or, in clear current, swam, with his
clothes on his head in a bundle.
A wonderful traveller for the time was
Father de Smet. Twice he had gone as far
as the land of the Flathead nation, and he
could climb mountain passes as well as any
guide of the Rockies. He had built a dozen
missions, lying all the way from the Colum-
bia to the Kaw. He had always a jest at
his tongue's end, and served it out with as
much readiness as a prayer; and he had,
withal, an arm trained to do execution.
Every man on the plains understood the
art of self-preservation. Even in Cainsville,
over by the council ground of the western
tribes, which was quite the most civilized
place for hundreds of miles, life was uncer-
tain when the boats came from St. Louis
with bad whiskey in their holds. But no one
dared take liberties with the holy father.
The thrust from his shoulder was straight
and sure, and his fist was hard.
Yet it was not the sinner that Father de
Smet meant to crush. He always supple-
mented his acts of physical prowess with
that explanation. It was the sin that he
struck at from the shoulder -- and may not
even an anointed one strike at sin?
Father de Smet could draw a fine line,
too, between the things which were bad in
themselves, and the things which were only
extrinsically bad. For example, there were
the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon. Mam'selle
herself was not above reproach, but her soups
were. Mademoiselle Ninon was the only
Parisian thing in the settlement. And she
was certainly to be avoided -- which was per-
haps the reason that no one avoided her. It
was four years since she had seen Paris. She
was sixteen then, and she followed the for-
tunes of a certain adventurer who found it
advisable to sail for Montreal. Ninon had
been bored back in Paris, it being dull in the
mantua-making shop of Madame Guittar. If
she had been a man she would have taken
to navigation, and might have made herself
famous by sailing to some unknown part of
the New World. Being a woman, she took a
lover who was going to New France, and for-
got to weep when he found an early and vio-
lent death. And there were others at hand,
and Ninon sailed around the cold blue lakes,
past Sault St. Marie, and made her way
across the portages to the Mississippi, and
so down to the sacred rock of St. Louis.
That was a merry place. Ninon had fault
to find neither with the wine nor the dances.
They were all that one could have desired,
and there was no limit to either of them.
But still, after a time, even this grew tire-
some to one of Ninon's spirit, and she took
the first opportunity to sail up the Missouri
with a certain young trapper connected with
the great fur company, and so found her-
self at Cainsville, with the blue bluffs rising
to the east of her, and the low white
stretches of the river flats undulating down
to where the sluggish stream wound its way
southward capriciously.
Ninon soon tired of her trapper. For
one thing she found out that he was a
coward. She saw him run once in a buffalo
fight. That was when the Pawnee stood
still with a blanket stretched wide in a gaudy
square, and caught the head of the mad
animal fairly in the tough fabric; his mus-
tang's legs trembled under him, but he did
not move, -- for a mustang is the soul of an
Indian, and obeys each thought; the Indian
himself felt his heart pounding at his ribs;
but once with that garment fast over the
baffled eyes of the struggling brute, the
rest was only a matter of judicious knife-
thrusts. Ninon saw this. She rode past
her lover, and snatched the twisted bullion
cord from his hat that she had braided and
put there, and that night she tied it on the
hat of the Pawnee who had killed the buffalo.
The Pawnees were rather proud of the
episode, and as for the Frenchmen, they did
not mind. The French have always been
very adaptable in America. Ninon was
universally popular.
And so were her soups.
Every man has his price. Father de
Smet's was the soups of Mademoiselle Ninon.
Fancy! If you have an educated palate and
are obliged to eat the strong distillation of
buffalo meat, cooked in a pot which has
been wiped out with the greasy petticoat of
a squaw! When Ninon came down from
St. Louis she brought with her a great
box containing neither clothes, furniture,
nor trinkets, but something much more
wonderful! It was a marvellous compound-
ing of spices and seasonings. The aromatic
liquids she set before the enchanted men of
the settlement bore no more relation to
ordinary buffalo soup than Chateaubrand's
Indian maidens did to one of the Paw-
nee girls, who slouched about the settle-
ment with noxious tresses and sullen slavish
coquetries.
Father de Smet would not at any time
have called Ninon a scarlet woman. But
when he ate the dish of soup or tasted the
hot corn-cakes that she invariably invited
him to partake of as he passed her little
house, he refrained with all the charity of
a true Christian and an accomplished epicure
from even thinking her such. And he re-
membered the words of the Saviour, "Let
him who is without sin among you cast the
first stone."
To Father de Smet's healthy nature
nothing seemed more superfluous than sin.
And he was averse to thinking that any
committed deeds of which he need be
ashamed. So it was his habit, especially if
the day was pleasant and his own thoughts
happy, to say to himself when he saw one
of the wild young trappers leaving the cabin
of Mademoiselle Ninon: "He has been
for some of the good woman's hot cakes,"
till he grew quite to believe that the only
attractions that the adroit Frenchwoman
possessed were of a gastronomic nature.
To tell the truth, the attractions of Made-
moiselle Ninon were varied. To begin
with, she was the only thing in that wilder-
ness to suggest home. Ninon had a genius
for home-making. Her cabin, in which she
cooked, slept, ate, lived, had become a
boudoir.
The walls were hung with rare and beau-
tiful skins; the very floor made rich with
huge bear robes, their permeating odors
subdued by heavy perfumes brought, like
the spices, from St. Louis. The bed, in day-
time, was a couch of beaver-skins; the fire-
place had branching antlers above it, on
which were hung some of the evidences of
the fair Ninon's coquetry, such as silken
scarves, of the sort the voyageurs from the
far north wore; and necklaces made by the
Indians of the Pacific coast and brought to
Ninon by -- but it is not polite to inquire
into these matters. There were little moc-
casins also, much decorated with porcupine-
quills, one pair of which Father de Smet
had brought from the Flathead nation, and
presented to Ninon that time when she
nursed him through a frightful run of fever.
She would take no money for her patient
services.
"Father," said she, gravely, when he
offered it to her, "I am not myself virtuous.
But I have the distinction of having pre-
served the only virtuous creature in the
settlement for further usefulness. Some-
times, perhaps, you will pray for Ninon."
Father de Smet never forgot those prayers.
These were wild times, mind you. No
use to keep your skirts coldly clean if you
wished to be of help. These men were sub-
duing a continent. Their primitive qualities
came out. Courage, endurance, sacrifice,
suffering without complaint, friendship to
the death, indomitable hatred, unfaltering
hope, deep-seated greed, splendid gayety
-- it takes these things to subdue a conti-
nent. Vice is also an incidental, -- that is
to say, what one calls vice. This is because
it is the custom to measure these men as if
they were governed by the laws of civili-
zation, where there is neither law nor
civilization.
This much is certain: gentlemen cannot
conquer a country. They tried gentlemen
back in Virginia, and they died, partly from
lack of intellect, but mostly from lack of
energy. After the yeomen have fought the
conquering fight, it is well enough to bring
in gentlemen, who are sometimes clever
lawmakers, and who look well on thrones
or in presidential chairs.
But to return to the winter of the small-
pox. It was then that the priest and Ninon
grew to know each other well. They be-
came acquainted first in the cabin where
four of the trappers lay tossing in delirium.
The horrible smell of disease weighted the
air. Outside wet snow fell continuously
and the clouds seemed to rest only a few
feet above the sullen bluffs. The room was
bare of comforts, and very dirty. Ninon
looked about with disgust.
"You pray," said she to the priest, "and
I will clean the room."
"Not so," returned the broad-shouldered
father, smilingly, "we will both clean the
room." Thus it came that they scrubbed
the floor together, and made the chimney
so that it would not smoke, and washed the
blankets on the beds, and kept the wood-
pile high. They also devised ventilators,
and let in fresh air without exposing the
patients. They had no medicine, but they
continually rubbed the suffering men with
bear's grease.
"It's better than medicine," said Ninon,
after the tenth day, as, wan with watching, she
held the cool hand of one of the recovering
men in her own. "If we had had medicines
we should have killed these men."
"You are a woman of remarkable sense,"
said the holy father, who was eating a dish
of corn-meal and milk that Ninon had just
prepared, "and a woman also of Christian
courage."
"Christian courage?" echoed Ninon; "do
you think that is what you call it? I am
not afraid, no, not I; but it is not Christian
courage. You mistake in calling it that."
There were tears in her eyes. The priest
saw them.
"God lead you at last into peaceful ways,"
said he, softly, lifting one hand in blessing.
"Your vigil is ended. Go to your home
and sleep. You know the value of the
temporal life that God has given to man.
In the hours of the night, Ninon, think of
the value of eternal life, which it is also
His to give."
Ninon stared at him a moment with a
dawning horror in her eyes.
Then she pointed to the table.
"Whatever you do," said she, "don't
forget the bear's grease." And she went
out laughing. The priest did not pause
to recommend her soul to further blessing.
He obeyed her directions.
March was wearing away tediously. The
river was not yet open, and the belated
boats with needed supplies were moored
far down the river. Many of the reduced
settlers were dependent on the meat the
Indians brought them for sustenance. The
mud made the roads almost impassable; for
the frost lay in a solid bed six inches below
the surface, and all above that was semi-
liquid muck. Snow and rain alternated,
and the frightful disease did not cease its
ravages.
The priest got little sleep. Now he was
at the bed of a little half-breed child,
smoothing the straight black locks from
the narrow brow; now at the cot of some
hulking trapper, who wept at the pain, but
died finally with a grin of bravado on his
lips; now in a foul tepee, where some grave
Pawnee wrapped his mantle about him, and
gazed with prophetic and unflinching eyes
into the land of the hereafter.
The little school that the priest started
had been long since abandoned. It was only
the preservation of life that one thought of
in these days. And recklessness had made
the men desperate. To the ravages of dis-
ease were added horrible murders. Moral
health is always low when physical health
is so.
Give a nation two winters of grippe, and
it will have an epidemic of suicide. Give
it starvation and small-pox, and it will have
a contagion of murders. There are subtle
laws underlying these things, -- laws which
the physicians think they can explain; but
they are mistaken. The reason is not so
material as it seems.
But spring was near in spite of falling
snow and the dirty ice in the river. There
was not even a flushing of the willow twigs
to tell it by, nor a clearing of the leaden
sky, -- only the almanac. Yet all men
were looking forward to it The trappers
put in the feeble days of convalescence,
making long rafts on which to pile the
skins dried over winter, -- a fine variety,
worth all but their weight in gold. Money
was easily got in those days; but there
are circumstances under which money is
valueless.
Father de Smet thought of this the day
before Easter, as he plunged through the
mud of the winding street in his bearskin
gaiters. Stout were his legs, firm his lungs,
as he turned to breathe in the west wind;
clear his sharp and humorous eyes. He
was going to the little chapel where the
mission school had previously been held.
Here was a rude pulpit, and back of it a
much-disfigured virgin, dressed in turkey-
red calico. Two cheap candles in their tin
sticks guarded this figure, and beneath, on
the floor, was spread an otter-skin of perfect
beauty. The seats were of pine, without
backs, and the wind whistled through the
chinks between the logs. Moreover, the
place was dirty. Lenten service had been
out of the question. The living had neither
time nor strength to come to worship; and
the dead were not given the honor of a
burial from church in these times of terror.
The priest looked about him in dismay, the
place was so utterly forsaken; yet to let
Easter go by without recognition was not
to his liking. He had been the night before
to every house in the settlement, bidding
the people to come to devotions on Sunday
morning. He knew that not one of them
would refuse his invitation. There was no
hero larger in the eyes of these unfortunates
than the simple priest who walked among
them with his unpretentious piety. The
promises were given with whispered bless-
ings, and there were voices that broke in
making them, and hands that shook with
honest gratitude. The priest, remembering
these things, and all the awful suffering of
the winter, determined to make the ser-
vice symbolic, indeed, of the resurrection
and the life, -- the annual resurrection and
life that comes each year, a palpable miracle,
to teach the dullest that God reigns.
"How are you going to trim the altar?"
cried a voice behind him.
He turned, startled, and in the doorway
stood Mademoiselle Ninon, her short skirt
belted with a red silk scarf, -- the token of
some trapper, -- her ankles protected with
fringed leggins, her head covered with a be-
ribboned hat of felt, such as the voyageurs
wore.
"Our devotions will be the only decora-
tions we can hang on it. But gratitude is
better than blossoms, and humanity more
beautiful than green wreaths," said the
father, gently.
It was a curious thing, and one that he
had often noticed himself; he gave this
woman -- unworthy as she was -- the best
of his simple thoughts.
Ninon tiptoed toward the priest with one
finger coquettishly raised to insure secrecy.
"You will never believe it," she whis-
pered, "no one would believe it! But the
fact is, father, I have two lilies."
"Lilies," cried the priest, incredulously,
"two lilies?"
"That's what I say, father -- two marvel-
lously fair lilies with little sceptres of gold in
them, and leaves as white as snow. The bulbs
were brought me last autumn by --; that
is to say, they were brought from St. Louis.
Only now have they blossomed. Heavens,
how I have watched the buds! I have said
to myself every morning for a fortnight:
'Will they open in time for the good
father's Easter morning service?' Then I
said: 'They will open too soon. Buds,' I
have cried to them, 'do not dare to open yet,
or you will be horribly passée by Easter.
Have the kindness, will you, to save your-
selves for a great event.' And they did it;
yes, father, you may not believe, but no
later than this morning these sensible
flowers opened up their leaves boldly, quite
conscious that they were doing the right
thing, and to-morrow, if you please, they
will be here. And they will perfume the
whole place; yes."
She stopped suddenly, and relaxed her
vivacious expression for one of pain.
"You are certainly ill," cried the priest.
"Rest yourself." He tried to push her on
to one of the seats; but a sort of convulsive
rigidity came over her, very alarming to
look at.
"You are worn out," her companion said
gravely. "And you are chilled."
"Yes, I'm cold," confessed Ninon. "But
I had to come to tell you about the lilies.
But, do you see, I never could bring myself
to put them in this room as it is now. It
would be too absurd to place them among
this dirt. We must clean the place."
"The place will be cleaned. I will see to
it. But as for you, go home and care for
yourself." Ninon started toward the door
with an uncertain step. Suddenly she came
back.
"It is too funny," she said, " that red
calico there on the Virgin. Father, I have
some laces which were my mother's, who
was a good woman, and which have never
been worn by me. They are all I have to
remember France by and the days when I
was -- different. If I might be permitted --"
she hesitated and looked timidly at the priest.
"'She hath done what she could,'" mur-
mured Father de Smet, softly. "Bring your
laces, Ninon." He would have added:
"Thy sins be forgiven thee." But un-
fortunately, at this moment, Pierre came
lounging down the street, through the mud,
fresh from Fort Laramie. His rifle was
slung across his back, and a full game-bag
revealed the fact that he had amused him-
self on his way. His curly and wind-bleached
hair blew out in time-torn banners from the
edge of his wide hat. His piercing, black
eyes were those of a man who drinks deep,
fights hard, and lives always in the open air.
Wild animals have such eyes, only there is
this difference: the viciousness of an
animal is natural; at least one-half of the
viciousness of man is artificial and devised.
When Ninon saw the frost-reddened face
of this gallant of the plains, she gave a little
cry of delight, and the color rushed back
into her face. The trapper saw her, and
gave a rude shout of welcome. The next
moment, he had swung her clear of the
chapel steps; and then the two went down
the street together, Pierre pausing only long
enough to doff his hat to the priest.
"The Virgin will wear no fresh laces,"
said the priest, with some bitterness; but he
was mistaken. An hour later, Ninon was
back, not only with a box of laces, but also
with a collection of cosmetics, with which
she proceeded to make startling the scratched
and faded face of the wooden Virgin, who
wore, after the completion of Ninon's labors,
a decidedly piquant and saucy expression.
The very manner in which the laces were
draped had a suggestion of Ninon's still
unforgotten art as a maker of millinery, and
was really a very good presentment of Paris
fashions four years past. Pierre, meantime,
amused himself by filling up the chinks in
the logs with fresh mud, -- a commodity of
which there was no lack, -- and others of
the neighbors, incited by these extraordinary
efforts, washed the dirt from seats, floor, and
windows, and brought furs with which to make
presentable the floor about the pulpit.
Father de Smet worked harder than any
of them. In his happy enthusiasm he chose
to think this energy on the part of the others
was prompted by piety, though well he
knew it was only a refuge from the insuffer-
able ennui that pervaded the place. Ninon
suddenly came up to him with a white face.
"I am not well," she said. Her teeth
were chattering, and her eyes had a little
blue glaze over them. "I am going home.
In the morning I will send the lilies."
The priest caught her by the hand.
"Ninon," he whispered, "it is on my soul
not to let you go to-night. Something tells
me that the hour of your salvation is come.
Women worse than you, Ninon, have come
to lead holy lives. Pray, Ninon, pray to
the Mother of Sorrows, who knows the suf-
ferings and sins of the heart." He pointed
to the befrilled and highly fashionable Virgin
with her rouge-stained cheeks.
Ninon shrank from him, and the same
convulsive rigidity he had noticed before,
held her immovable. A moment later, she
was on the street again, and the priest,
watching her down the street, saw her enter
her cabin with Pierre.
.......
It was past midnight when the priest was
awakened from his sleep by a knock on the
door. He wrapped his great buffalo-coat
about him, and answered the summons.
Without in the damp darkness stood Pierre.
"Father," he cried, "Ninon has sent for
you. Since she left you, she has been very
ill. I have done what I could; but now she
hardly speaks, but I make out that she
wants you." Ten minutes later, they were
in Ninon's cabin. When Father de Smet
looked at her he knew she was dying. He
had seen the Indians like that many times
during the winter. It was the plague, but
driven in to prey upon the system by the
exposure. The Parisienne's teeth were set,
but she managed to smile upon her visitor
as he threw off his coat and bent over her.
He poured some whiskey for her; but she
could not get the liquid over her throat.
"Do not," she said fiercely between those
set white teeth, "do not forget the lilies." She
sank back and fixed her glazing eyes on the
antlers, and kept them there watching those
dangling silken scarves, while the priest, in
haste, spoke the words for the departing soul.
The next morning she lay dead among
those half barbaric relics of her coquetry,
and two white lilies with hearts of gold
shed perfume from an altar in a wilderness.
-THE END-
Elia W. Peattie's short story: Two Pioneers
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