As we turned from the ceremony, Onanguisse came forward.  He was not painted, but he wore a mantle of embroidered buffalo skin, and his hair, which was dressed high with eagle’s feathers, was powdered with down from the breasts of white gulls.  He stood in front of the woman.

“Listen,” he said.  “I speak to the white thrush.  She cannot understand my words, but her heart has called to my heart, and that will teach her to know my meaning.  Brethren, bear witness.  An eagle cares naught for a partridge, but an eagle calls to an eagle though there be much water and many high rocks between.  You know the lodge of Onanguisse.  It has fire, but no warmth.  I am old, and age needs love to warm it, but I am alone.  First my wife, then my two sons, last of all, at the time the chestnuts were in blossom, my daughter Mimi,—­the Master of Life called them one by one.  I have washed my face, and I have combed my hair, yet who can say I have not mourned?  My life has been as dead as the dried grass that thatches the muskrat’s lodges.  When have any of you seen Onanguisse smile?  Yet think not that I stretch out my hands to the country of souls.  I will live, and sit at the council fire till many of you who are before me have evaporated like smoke from a pipe.  For I am of the race of the bear, and the bear never yields while one drop of blood is left.  And the Master of Life has been kind.  He has brought me at last a woman who has an eagle’s eyesight and a bear’s endurance.  She is worthy to be of my family.  I have waited for such an one.  Her speech is strange, but her blood answers mine.  It is idle to mourn.  I will replace the dead with the living.  This woman shall be no more the white thrush.  She shall be Mimi, the turtle dove, the daughter of Onanguisse.  Brethren, bear witness.  Mimi is no longer dead.  She stands here.”  He stepped closer to the woman.  “I give you this cloak that you may wrap me in your memory,” he went on.  “I hereby confirm my words;” and thereupon, he threw over her shoulders a long, shining mantle made of the small skins of the white hare.  It was a robe for an empress.

I stepped forward, then stood still, and resolved to trust the woman as she had asked.

“You are adopted,” I prompted softly, with no motion of my lips.

She understood.  Wrapped in her white cloak, she curtsied low before Onanguisse.  Then she turned to me.  “Tell him,” she said, “that my heart is wiser than my tongue; the one is dumb, but the other answers.  Say to him that I see his face, and it tells me that he has lived wisely and with honor.  I am now of his family.  I, too, will strive to live wisely, that he need not be shamed.  Say to him that I will not forget.”  She stopped with her glance upon the old chief, and her eyes held something I had not seen in them before.  With me, their self-reliance had sometimes been hard, almost provocative, as if the spirit behind them defied