"Sacre bleu--you keel--keel ze leetle Melisse!" he cried shrilly,
snatching up the half-frozen child, "Mon Dieu, she ees not papoose!
She ees ceevilize--ceevilize!" and he ran swiftly with her into the
cabin, flinging back a torrent of Cree anathema at the dumbly
bewildered Maballa.

Jan left the rest of his musk-ox to the wolves and foxes. He went out
into the snow, and found half a dozen other snow-wallows in which the
helpless Melisse had taken her chilling baths. He watched Maballa with
a new growing terror, and fifty times a day he said to her:

"Melisse ees not papoose! She ees ceevilize--lak HER!" And he would
point to the lonely grave under the guardian spruce.

At last Maballa went into an ecstasy of understanding. Melisse was not
to be taken out and rolled in the snow; so she brought in the snow and
rolled it over Melisse!

When Jan discovered this, his tongue twisted itself into sounds so
terrible, and his face writhed so fiercely, that Maballa began to
comprehend that thereafter no snow at all, either out doors or in, was
to be used in the physical development of the little Melisse.

This was the beginning of the problem, and it grew and burst forth in
all its significance on the day before Cummins came in from the
wilderness.

For a week Maballa had been dropping sly hints of a wonderful thing
which she and the factor's half-breed wife were making for the baby.