THE cross cast its shadow around its feet, so high noon stood over Cross Village. It was behind the church, rising above the gable, of silver-colored wood stained by weather to an almost phosphorescent glint. Seen from the lake the cross towered the most conspicuous thing on the bluff. A whitewashed fence stretched between it and the cliff, and on this fence sat Moses Nazagebic, looking across Lake Michigan.

He heard a soft tap on the ground near him and knew that his wife's grandmother had come out to walk there. She was the only villager, except his wife, whose approach he could endure. His wife stood some distance apart, protecting him, as Miriam protected the first Moses. Other women, gathered in the grove along the bluff to spread the festival mid-day meal, said to one another:

“Moses has now mourned a week for Frank Chibam and his shipwrecked boat and the white men. We shall miss Lucy's fish-pie this year.”

“It was at last year's festival that Frank began to notice Catharine. They were like one family, those four and the grandmother, especially after Moses and Frank bought the sail-boat together. No wonder the poor fellow sits on the fence and says nothing while the tribes are racing horses.”

“But it is worst for poor Catharine, who was to have been a bride. See her sit like a stone in the sun! It is little any one can say to comfort Catharine.”

The women, who knew no English, used soft Chippewa or Ottawa gutturals. The men who ventured on the conquerors' language used it shorn and contracted, as white children do.

The annual festivities of the Cross Village were at their height. Yells and the tumultuous patter of racing hoofs fell on Moses' ear. A trial of horse speed was now in progress; and later in the day would come a trial of agility and endurance in the Ottawa and Chippewa dances. The race-course was the mile-long street, beginning at the old chapel and ending at the monastery. Young Indians, vividly clad in red calico shirts and fringed leggings, leaned over their horses' necks, whipping and shouting. Dust rose behind the flying cavalcade, and spectators were obliged to keep close to the small carved houses or risk being run down. Young braves denied the war-path were obliged to give themselves unbridled range of some sort.

The monastery brethren had closed their whitewashed gates, not because they objected to the yearly fÊte, nor because custom made the monastery the goal in horse-racing, but because there was in the festivities an abandoned spirit to be dealt with only by the parish priest. On ordinary days the brethren were glad to show those beneficial death's heads with which their departed prior had ornamented the inner walls of his tomb before he came to use it. The village knew it had been that good prior's habit to sit in a coffin meditating, while he painted skulls and cross-bones in that roofed enclosure which was to be his body's last resting-place. Young squaws and braves often peeped at the completed grave and its surrounding symbols of mortality. It was as good as a Chippewa ghost-story.

The priest let himself be seen all the morning. Without speaking a word, he was a check upon the riotous. Ottawa and Chippewa had a right to commemorate some observances of their forefathers. He always winked at their dances. And this day the one silent Indian on the fence troubled him more than all the barbaric horsemen.

Moses' wife had been to him. Lucy was very indignant at her cousin Catharine. Moses neither ate nor slept, and he groaned in the night as if he had toothache. He would not talk to her. The good father might not believe it, but Catharine was putting a spell on Moses, in revenge for Frank Chibam. Catharine blamed Moses for everything—the shipwreck, the drowning, perhaps even for the storm. She hounded him out of the house and then she hounded him in again, by standing and looking at him with fixed gaze. It was more than flesh could bear. The father must see that Moses and Lucy would have to leave Cross Village and go to the Cheneaux or Mackinac, taking the grandmother with them. It would be hard for Moses to live without a boat. But then, Lucy demanded triumphantly, what would Catharine do without a man or any relation left in the house?

The priest looked from Catharine, motionless as a rock in the sun by the church gable, to Moses on the fence with his back towards her. The grandmother, oblivious to both, felt her way along the ground with a stick, and Lucy watched, nearer the grove. These four had occupied one of the small unpainted wooden houses as a united family. It was a sorrow to the priest that they might now be divided, one of them bearing an unconfessed trouble on his mind. For if Moses Nazagebic was as innocent as his wife Lucy believed him to be of the catastrophe which he said had happened on Lake Superior, he would not fly from poor Catharine as from an avenger.

There were fences of silver flattened out on the water; farther from shore flitted changeable bars of green and rose and pale-blue, converging until they swept the surface like some colossal peacock's tail. The grandmother stumping with her stick came quite near the cliff edge and stopped there. She was not blind or deaf, but her mind had long been turned inward and backward. She saw daily happenings as symbols of what had been. She knew more tribal lore than any other Indian of Cross Village; and repeated, as she had repeated a hundred times before when scanning the log dock with its fleet of courtesying boats, the steep road, and the strip of sand below:

“Down there was the first cross set up, many years ago, by a man who came here in a large boat moved by wings like the wings of a gull. The man had a white face and long hair the color of the sun. When he first landed he fell on his knees and then began to count a string of beads. Then he sang a song and called the other men, some of whom were Indians, from the boat. They cut down trees, and he made them set up a large cross at the foot of the bluff. Since then that strip of sand has been sacred, though the cross is gone and a new one is set here by our priest.”

The old squaw indicated with her stick the silver-colored relic behind Moses Nazagebic. Her guttural chant affected none of her hearers, except that Catharine frowned at a sight which could divert Moses. The Ottawas and Chippewas are a hard-featured people. Catharine was, perhaps, the handsomest product of an ill-favored village. Haggard pallor now encroached on the vermilion of her cheek. She wore an old hat of plaited bark pulled down to her eyes, and her strong black hair hung in two neglected braids. The patience of aboriginal womanhood was not stamped on her as it was on Lucy. A panther could look no fiercer than this lithe young Indian girl, whose bridal finery was hid in the house and whose banns had been published in the mission church.

Trying to grapple with the trouble of Moses Nazagebic and Catharine, the priest also stood gazing at the dock, where children usually played, tumbling in to swim or be drawn out, only more roseate for the bath. The children were now gathered in the grove or along the race-course. Nothing moved below except lapping water. It was seldom that these lake-going people left their landing-place so deserted. Gliding down from the north where the cliff had screened it from view, came a small schooner. The priest, shaded by his broad hat, watched the passing craft with barely conscious recognition of it as an object until handkerchiefs fluttered from the deck and startled him.

The tall silver-white cross was so conspicuous that any one standing near it must be observed. The priest shook his handkerchief in reply. He had many friends along the coast and among the islands. But his long sight caught some familiar guise which made him directly signal and entreat with wide peremptory sweeps of the arm.

“Moses,” commanded the priest, “you must unfasten a boat and go with me. There are people on board yonder that I want to see.”

No other man being at hand, the request was a natural one, and Moses had been used to responding to such needs of the priest. But he cast a quick look at the black robe and sat sullenly until a stern repetition compelled him.

The priest had continued his signals, and the schooner came about and waited. It was not a long pull. Moses, rowing with his back towards the schooner, watched the face of his spiritual father.

“That will do,” said the priest, and almost instantly some one on the schooner deck hailed him:

“Good-day, your reverence! What can we do for you?”

And another voice that Moses knew well shouted:

“Hello, Moses, is that you? Where's Frank? Did you get back all right with the sail-boat?”

The Indian cowered over his oars without answering or turning his head.

“I have come out,” answered the priest, “to satisfy myself that I really see you here alive. We heard you were shipwrecked and drowned in Lake Superior.”

“Shipwrecked, your reverence! What nonsense! We had a fine voyage and dismissed the men at the Sault. But since then we decided to make another cruise to the head of Lake Michigan, and hired another skipper. There is Moses in the boat with you, and Frank came home with him. They knew we were not shipwrecked.”

“Will you land at Cross Village?”

“No, your reverence. We only tacked in to salute the cross in passing.”

“But where shall I find you if I have urgent business with you?”

“At Little Traverse Bay. We cannot stop here.”

The schooner was drifting away broadside, and the voice of the speaker came across a widening swell of water. Then she came up into her course, cutting a breastwork of foam in front of her as she passed on southward. With pantomime salutations the priest and the two men who had hired Moses Nazagebic and Frank Chibam took leave of each other.

It had been a brief conference, but Moses rowed back a convicted criminal. He did not look at his conscience-keeper in the end of the boat. His high-cheeked face seemed to have had all individuality blotted out of it. Dazed and blear-eyed, he shipped his oars and tied the boat to its stake. A great noise of drumming and shouting came from the grove above, for the dances were soon to begin.

The steep road was a Calvary height to Moses. He dragged his feet as he climbed and stumbled in the deep sand; he who was so lithe of limb and nimble in any action. He had felt Catharine's eyes on his back like burning-glasses as he sat on the fence. They reflected on him now in one glare all the knowledge that the priest had gained of his crime. It was easier to follow to instant confession than to stay outside longer where Catharine could watch him. His wife's grandmother passed him, tapping along the fence and repeating again the legend of the first cross in Cross Village. Even in that day men who had slain their brothers were expected to give satisfaction to the tribe. It was either a life for a life or the labor of long hunting to solace a bereaved family.

He knelt down in the place where he had often confessed such little sins as lying or convivial drunkenness. How slight and innocent these offences seemed as the hopeless weight of this burden crushed him. The stern yet compassionate face over him exacted every word.

The priest remembered that this had not been a bad Chippewa. He had lived a steady, honest life in his humble station, keeping the three women well provided with such comforts as they needed; he had fished, he had labored at wood-chopping, and in the season helped Lucy fill her birch-bark mococks with maple sugar for sale at the larger settlements. The anguish of Cain was in the man's eyes. Natural life and he had already parted company. The teeth showed between his relaxed lips.

“Moses Nazagebic,” said the priest, disregarding formula and dealing with the primitive sinner, “what have you done with Frank Chibam?”

“Father, I kill him.”

The brief English which the Indian men mastered and used in their trading at the settlements was Moses' refuge in confession. To profane his native language with his crime seemed the last enormity of all.

“It was a lie that there was a wreck in Lake Superior?”

“Yes, father.”

“It was a lie that you lost your sail-boat?”

“Yes, father.”

“Did you intend to kill Frank?”

Moses swallowed as if his throat were closing.

“No—no! We both drunk. We quarrel; Frank sitting on edge of boat. I come up behind and hit him with oar. I knock him into the water.”

“This was after the white men left you?”

“Yes, father. We have our money. We get drunk at Sault.”

“Where is his body?”

“In St. Mary's River. Not far above Drummond Island.”

“Are you sure he was drowned?”

“Oh, sure!” Moses' jaw dropped. “Frank he go down like a stone; and his spirit follow me ever since. His spirit tell Catharine. His spirit drive these men back so Cross Village know the truth. Good name, Chibam—that mean spirit. It follow me all the time. I get no rest till that spirit satisfied.”

“My unhappy son, you must confess and give yourself up to justice.”

“Justice no good. Justice hang. Frank Chibam want me go down like stone. Frank Chibam drive me back where he went down. But I not have my boat. Next thing Frank Chibam send me boat.”

“What did you do with Frank's and yours?”

“I leave it at Drummond Island, with Chippewa there; and tell him to give it to nobody but Frank Chibam. I never set foot on that boat again—Frank's spirit angrier there than anywhere else.”

“But how did you come home?”

“I get other Chippewa at Drummond to bring me to Mackinac. Then I get Chippewa at Mackinac to bring me to Cross Village. I tell last Chippewa I had a shipwreck. After Frank drowned I not know what to do. I had to come home. I thought if I said the boat was wrecked my people might believe me. I have to see Lucy.” His bloodshot eyes piteously sought the compassion of his confessor. One moment's lapse into a brutal frenzy which now seemed some other man's had changed all things for him.

Never before had penitent come to that closet in such despair. Moses had repented through what seemed to him a long nightmare of succeeding days. There was no hope for him. He was called a Christian Indian, but the white man's consolations and ideas of retribution were not the red man's.

He heard the priest arrange a journey for him to give himself up to the law. The priest was a wise man, but this was uselessly clogging the wheels of fate. He did not want to sit in a jail with Frank Chibam's spirit. Such company was bad enough in the open sunlight. It was plain that neither Frank nor Catharine would be appeased by any offering short of their full measure of vengeance.

Having settled it that Moses' penance for his crime must be to give himself up to the law, the priest left him in the chapel and went out to press some sail-boat into service. It would be almost impossible to take any Indian from the festivities. The death of the most agile dancer and the withdrawal of the most ardent horse-racer had very mildly checked the usual joy.

Moses in his broken state was, perhaps, capable of sailing a boat, but it would be wiser to have another skipper aboard in crossing the strait to Mackinac.

It was fortunate, on the other hand, that the fÊte had prevented fishermen from hailing the passing schooner. The men were known by all the villagers, having stayed at the Cross Village inn, a place scarcely larger than a Chippewa cabin, kept by the only white family. These tribe remnants were gentle in their semi-civilization, yet the priest dreaded to think what might become of Moses if they discovered his lie and denied him the indulgence accorded to accidental man-killers.

To borrow a sail-boat would be easy enough while sympathy lasted for his penitent. He remembered also that Lucy could help sail it, and it would be best to take her to Mackinac for the parting with her husband.

The cross was stretching its afternoon shadow, and wind sweet with the moisture of many tossing blue miles flowed across the bluff. There never had been a fairer day for the yearly dances. Under his trouble the priest was conscious of trivial self-reproach that he had not told the passers it was fÊte day. But he reflected that few could love this remote little aboriginal world as he loved it, in joy or tragedy. The glamour of the North was over it through every season. At bleak January-end, in wastes of snow, the small houses were sealed and glowing with fires, and sledges creaked on the crust, while the shout of Indian children could be heard. Then the ice-boat shot out on the closed strait above and veered like a spirit from point to point, almost silent and terribly swift. On mornings after there had been a dry mist from the lake, this whole world was bridal-white, every twig loaded with frost blooms, until the far-reaching glory gave it a tropical beauty and lavishness and the frost fell like showers of flower petals.

His people stood respectfully out of his way as he entered the grove. The “throb, throb” and “pat, pat” of drum and feet were farther off, where young men were dancing in a ring. He could see their lithe bodies sway between tree boles. Old squaws sat with knees up to their chins, and old men smoked, pressing close to the spectacle. The priest was sensitive enough to feel a stir of uneasiness at his invasion of the aboriginal temple, and he was not long in having a boat put at his disposal.

The next thing was to induce Moses and Lucy to accompany him quietly down to the dock. He spoke to Lucy at her door. She sat in dull dejection, her basket-work and supply of sweet grass on the floor beside her.

“Come, Lucy! I have business in Mackinac, and Moses and you must take me there.”

“Did that schooner bring you news, father?”

“Yes.”

“But it is late.”

“We may remain there to-night. Take such things with you as your husband might need for a week.”

Lucy obediently put her basket-work away and prepared for the journey. She was conscious of triumph over Catharine, from whom the priest was about to rescue Moses. She put on her best sweet-grass hat and made up her bundle.

The priest brought Moses out of the chapel with a pity and tenderness that touched Lucy, and the three went down the steep road. Her grandmother was sitting in the sun by the gable and did not notice them. The old woman was telling herself the story of Nanabojou. The sail-boat which they were to take was anchored off the end of the dock. Moses rowed out after it and brought it alongside. He was busy raising the sails and the priest and Lucy had already taken their seats when the little craft answered to a light bound over the stern, and Catharine sat resolutely down, looking at Moses Nazagebic.

Moses let the sails fall and leaped out. He tied the rope to the dock.

“Get into the boat again, Moses!” commanded the priest. “And Catharine, you go back!”

Moses shook his head. His spirit was broken, but it was a physical impossibility for him to sail a boat to Mackinac with Catharine aboard.

The priest knew he might as well attempt to control gulls. French clamor or Anglo-Saxon brutality would be easy to persuade or compel, in comparison with this dense aboriginal silence. He took patience and sat still, reading his breviary. The boat ground softly against logs, and Lucy hugged her bundle, determined on the journey. Moses remained with his back to them, dangling his legs over the end of the dock. Catharine kept her place, grasping the edges of the craft. It was plain if Moses Nazagebic went to Mackinac it would be in the hands of officers sent to bring him at a later period. So the day dropped down in splendor, lake and sky becoming one dazzle of gold so bright the eye might not dwell on it. The party of four returned, and Catharine walked last up the hill. Religion and penance were nothing to a Chippewa girl who had distinct intentions of vengeance.

She kept an eye on her victim while she milked the cows as they came from the woods to keep their nightly appointment. The priest owned some lack in himself that he could not better handle the destinies around him. They hurt him, as rock would bruise tender flesh.

Barbaric instrumentation and shouting did not keep him awake after darkness closed in. He would have lain awake if a dog had not stirred in Cross Village. He heard the wind change and strike the east side of his house with gusts of rain. Fires must die down to wet ashes in the grove. He knew the cross stood white and tall in scudding mist, and on the crosses in the cemetery chaplets and flowers made of white rags hung bedraggled. He foresaw the kind of day which would open before his poor penitent and be a symbol of the life that was to follow.

It was the priest himself who introduced Moses to this day, opening the door and standing unheeding under the overflow of the eaves. The hiss of rain could be heard, and daylight penetrated reluctantly abroad. Moses sat drooped forward with his elbows on his knees by the open fire. Lucy hurried to answer the summons, believing the priest had found some new haven for Moses while her cousin was out of the house.

But there stood Catharine behind the priest, the spell of her fierceness broken, and at her side was Frank Chibam, undrowned and amiably grinning, his dark red skin stung by the weather, indeed, but otherwise little changed by water.

“Tell Moses I want him!” said the priest. “And Catharine, you go into the house!”

This time Catharine nimbly obeyed. As for Lucy, she made no outcry. She merely satisfied herself it was Frank Chibam before hurrying her husband to the spectacle.

Moses stepped out bareheaded into the rain, and his jaw dropped. The priest closed the door behind him.

Frank took his hand. Moses felt the young man's firm sinew and muscle. He looked piteously at the priest, his head sagging to one side, his face working in a spasm.

“I should have prepared him, Frank. This comes too suddenly on him.”

They took Moses between them and walked with him along the fence at the foot of the cross. The raindrops moved down his face like tears. He did not speak, but listened with a child's intentness, first to one and then to the other, leaning his arm on his partner's shoulder.

“I don't understand why he was so certain he had killed you, Frank. He told me he struck you with an oar and saw you go down in the water like a stone.”

“Whiskey, father,” explained Frank in trader's brief English. “Plenty very bad whiskey. It make me sick for a week. The boom knocked us both down, and I fell into the water. The fisherman from one of the little islands who pull me out say that. Moses, he drunker than me; he too drunk to bring the boat home.”

“The poor fellow told lies to cover the crime he thought he had committed. He has suffered, Frank. And I have suffered. We will say nothing about Catharine. Why didn't you come sooner?”

“I take the boat and go fishing. I say, 'Moses, that lazy Chippewa, leave the boat for me to bring home; I make him wait for it.'”

“Did you quarrel at all?”

“Maybe so,” said Frank. “Whiskey not let you remember much. But I could kill Moses easier than he could kill me.”

“He has suffered enough. But you, my son, ought to do heavy penance.”

“Not put off wedding?” suggested Frank, uneasily.

“I had not thought of unusual methods; it might be good discipline for Catharine, too. But we have lost enough cheer on your account.”

“I never spend my money for whiskey any more, father. If some man ask me to take a drink, I drink with him, but not get drunk—no.”

Moses laughed, his face shortening in horizontal lines.

“That Frank Chibam. Frank make me pay for all the whiskey. He not drowned. I not kill him. His spirit only an evil dream.”

“The evil dream is now past, Moses,” said the priest.

“Wake up, my brother!” said Frank in Chippewa. “I have a boatful of fish. You must come and help me with them. The good father will go back to his books when he sees you are yourself once more.”

Under the rain-cloud the lake had turned to blue-black velvet water pricked with thousands of tossing white-caps. Near shore it seemed full of submerged smoke. And the rack tore itself, dragging low across the west. Moses, remembering the last sunset and its sickening splendors, felt that he had never seen so fine a day. He worked bareheaded and with his sleeves above his elbows among the fish. Gulls were flying, each making a burnished white glare against that background of weather. Looking up, the Chippewa could see the cross at the top of the bluff, standing over him in holy benediction. He felt lighter-bodied than a gull. And the anguish of that wretch who had sat on the fence believing himself a murderer was forgotten.

In the house his wife was exacting what in elder times would have been typified by an intricate piece of wampum, from her repentant cousin. Catharine brought in wood and carried water. Catharine was not permitted to make the great fish-pie, but could only look on. She served humbly. She had wronged her kinspeople by evil suspicion, and must make atonement. No words were lost between her and Lucy. She must lay her hand upon her mouth and be tasked until the elder woman was appeased. It was not the way of civilized women, but it was the aboriginal scheme, which the priest found good.

Lucy was not yet ready to demand the truth about the two white men and the shipwrecked boat. Her entire mind was given to humbling Catharine and impressing upon that forward young squaw that her husband was in no way accountable for the disappearance and vagrancy of Frank Chibam.

The grandmother basked at the hearth corner while this silent retribution went on unseen. She was repeating again the story of the first cross in Cross Village. She did not know that anything had happened in the house.