of the Chippewa housekeeper. At first Archange would not let him come
into her room. She dictated to him through door or window. But when he
grew fat with good food and was decently clad under Madame Cadotte's
hand, the great promotion of entering that sacred apartment was
allowed him. Michel came in whenever he could. It was his nightly
habit to follow the Chippewa widow there after supper, and watch her
brush Archange's hair.

Michel stood at the end of the hearth with a roll of pagessanung or
plum-leather in his fist. His cheeks had a hard garnered redness like
polished apples. The Chippewa widow set her husband carefully against
the wall. The husband was a bundle about two feet long, containing
her best clothes tied up in her dead warrior's sashes and rolled in a
piece of cloth. His armbands and his necklace of bear's-claws appeared
at the top as a grotesque head. This bundle the widow was obliged to
carry with her everywhere. To be seen without it was a disgrace, until
that time when her husband's nearest relations should take it away
from her and give her new clothes, thus signifying that she had
mourned long enough to satisfy them. As the husband's relations
were unable to cover themselves, the prospect of her release seemed
distant. For her food she was glad to depend on her labor in the
Cadotte household. There was no hunter to supply her lodge now.

The widow let down Archange's hair and began to brush it. The long
mass was too much for its owner to handle. It spread around her like
a garment, as she sat on her chair, and its ends touched the floor.
Michel thought there was nothing more wonderful in the world than this
glory of hair, its rings and ripples shining in the firelight. The
widow's jaws worked in unobtrusive rumination on a piece of pleasantly
bitter fungus, the Indian substitute for quinine, which the Chippewas