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Updated: May 4, 2025
From the sides of the mountains and in the valleys water poured forth in rippling, singing floods. There bakneesh glowed on bared rocks. Moose-birds, and jays, and wood-thrushes flitted about the camp, and the air was filled with the fragrant smells of new life bursting from earth, and tree, and shrub.
And he found himself wondering, suddenly, how this girl could be a sister to Pierre Couchee. He saw in her no sign of French or half-breed blood. Her hair was fine and soft, and waved about her ears and where it fell loose upon the back. The color in her cheeks was as delicate as the tints of the bakneesh flower.
And then he saw the thing which for a moment he had forgotten the long, rough box at the woman's back. His fingers dug deeper into his palms, and with a gasping breath he turned away. A hundred paces back in the spruce he had found a bare rock with a red bakneesh vine growing over it.
The walls of the grub-shack were completely hidden behind pine-branches, and festoons of brilliant red bakneesh encircled the room and depended from the chains of the big, swinging lamps.
With his knife he cut off an armful, and when he returned with it into the light of the fire the bakneesh glowed like a mass of crimson flowers. The woman had risen to her feet, and looked at him speechlessly as he scattered the vine over the box. He turned to her and said, softly: "In honor of the dead!" The color had faded from her face, but her eyes shone like stars.
She had not undressed, and her hair was still done up in its soft coils, with the crimson bakneesh shining in it. She came to him hesitatingly, until she stood with her two hands upon his arm, gazing into his tense face with that same question in her eyes. "Jan, you were not pleased with me to-night," she whispered. "Tell me, why?" "I was pleased with you, Melisse," he replied.
And she was his wife ! He turned back to the fire, and he saw again the red bakneesh hanging over his tent flap, and the words she had scrawled with the end of a charred stick, "In honor of the living." That meant him. Something thick and uncomfortable rose in his throat, and a blur that was not caused by snow or wind filled his eyes. She had made a magnificent fight. And she had won.
She stood in the doorway of a log cabin that was overgrown with woodvine and mellow with the dull red glow of the climbing bakneesh, with the warmth of the late summer sun falling upon her bare head. Cummins' shout had brought her to the door when we were still half a rifle shot down the river; a second shout, close to shore, brought her running down toward me.
With a low cry he sprang back toward the other tent, and then, as sudden as his movement, there flashed upon him the significance of the bakneesh wreath. The woman was saying to him what she had not spoken in words. She had come out in the night while he was asleep and had hung the wreath where he would see it in the morning.
Thus did Father John turn traitor to his spoken words, though his calm and smiling face gave no betrayal of it when Nada and Roger returned to the cabin an hour later, their arms filled with red bakneesh vines and early wildflowers. Nada's cheeks were as pink as the bakneesh, and her eyes as blue as the rock-violets she wore on her breast.
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