It was a terrible
day, the beginning of the second great storm of that winter. There was food
for another twenty-four hours, and Roscoe packed it, together with his
blankets and a little tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a
contagious disease. Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for
others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian's balsam shelter he
planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red
cotton cloth--the plague-signal of the North.
Then he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing
that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that
his one chance was to keep the wind at his back.
* * * * *
This was the beginning of the wonderful experience which Roscoe Cummins
afterward described in his book "The First People and the Valley of Silent
Men." He prepared another manuscript which for personal reasons was never
published, the story of a dark-eyed girl of the First People--but this is
to come. It has to do with the last tragic weeks of this winter of 1907, in
which it was a toss-up between all things of flesh and blood in the
Northland to see which would win--life or death--and in which a pair of
dark eyes and a voice from the First People turned a sociologist into a
possible Member of Parliament.
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