Now I knew after the first start that she was a living girl holding a
living baby, and when my father, Thomas Williams, appeared at the door
of the room, it was certain I could not be in heaven. It came over me in
a flash that I myself was changed. In spite of the bandages my head was
as clear as if all its faculties were washed and newly arranged. I could
look back into my life and perceive things that I had only sensed as a
dumb brute. A fish thawed out after being frozen, and reanimated through
every sparkling scale and tremulous fin, could not have felt its
resurrection more keenly. My broken head gave me no trouble at all.

The girl and baby disappeared as soon as I saw my father; which was not
surprising, for he could not be called a prepossessing half-breed. His
lower lip protruded and hung sullenly. He had heavy brows and a shaggy
thatch of hair. Our St. Regis Iroquois kept to the buckskins, though
they often had hunting shirts of fulled flannel; and my father's
buckskins were very dirty.

A little man, that I did not know was in the room, shuffled across the
floor to keep my father from entering. Around the base of his head he
had a thin curtain of hair scarcely reaching his shoulders. His nose
pointed upward. Its tip was the shape of a candle extinguisher. He wore
horn spectacles; and knee breeches, waistcoat and coat of black like the
ink which fades to brown in a drying ink-horn. He put his hands together
and took them apart uncertainly, and shot out his lip and frowned, as if
he had an universal grudge and dared not vent it.

He said something in a language I did not understand, and my father made
no answer. Then he began a kind of Anglo-French, worse than the patois
we used at St. Regis when we did not speak Iroquois. I made out the talk