don't know, for there hasn't been no Sunday up here since mother went
away--has there?"

"Mebbe not."

The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his
temples.

"'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had
Sunday, wasn't it?"

The man made no reply; but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips
doubled in as though he endured physical pain. He got to his feet and
paced the floor. For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk from
this wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting less and
less able to bear it. The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of
speech, the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and
wise. The only white child within a compass of a hundred miles or so;
the lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted
to a sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at
camp-fires and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he
was swung in a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a
canoe; and more than all, the care of a good, loving--if
passionate--little mother: all these had made him far wiser than his
years. He had been hours upon hours each day alone with the birds, and
squirrels, and wild animals, and something of the keen scent and
instinct of the animal world had entered into his body and brain, so
that he felt what he could not understand.

He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought