Usually
reticent, he found great difficulty to-night in withdrawing his mind
from the subject that had taken such violent possession of it.
"The influence of the white race is spreading," he said. "Like the
poison vines of the forest it touches all who come near it with fatal
effect. The tribe of the Hurons is infected with it, and they are
becoming mere tillers of the soil--miserable earth-worms! Men were
made to be free as the bounding deer or the flowing stream, but they
have paled and weakened, they have become wretched grovellers on the
ground."
Wanda's large eyes held a smouldering fire of repressed indignation.
Her mother had been a Huron.
The story of that dark time, far back in the annals of Canada, when
the Huron hunting-grounds in this region were laid waste by the
destroyer, had been told her so often that her childish imagination
had been filled with horror, and a passionate sense of outraged
justice and impossible revenge stirred within her at the bare mention
of her mother's martyred tribe. She did not vent her feelings in
bitter or retaliatory speech--that is the weakness of fairer-faced
women--but through her brain rushed like a swift stream a vivid
recollection of the tragic tale as it fell from the lips of her Huron
mother upon her young horror-stricken heart.
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