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Updated: May 4, 2025
Your dear mother will write you to-night, and will enclose a little note of invitation from us both to your friend 'Shagganappi' how that good old North-West word brings back my youth! I think I like your friend, even before I see him, just because he has adopted that name." So it was all arranged that Shag should spend the Easter vacation at the palatial home of the Benningtons in Montreal.
"'If you don't like it, says the Indian, with a dead-quiet, plumb-straight look at the Head, 'you may call me what the people up along the Red River call me; I'm known there as the Shagganappi Shag, if you want to cut off part of the word. The other boys may call me Shag if they want to. Say, fellows, I liked him right there and then.
The boy smiled responsively. "It is a buckskin, a color; a shagganappi cayuse is a buckskin color. They say I look that way." "Ah, I understand," replied His Excellency, as his eyes rested on the dark cream brown tint of the boy's face. "Well, it is a good name; buckskin is a thing essential to white people and to Indians alike, from the Red River to the Rockies.
And the cayuse well, the horse is the noblest animal known to man. So try to be worthy of the nickname, my boy. Live to be essential to your people like the buckskin; to be noble like the horse. And now good-bye, Shagganappi, and remember that you are the real Canadian."
Then, once again addressing Fire-Flint, he asked, "I suppose all the traders use this term in speaking of your parents and of you?" "Of my parents, yes, sir," replied the boy. "And you?" questioned His Excellency, kindly. "They call me the 'Shagganappi," replied Fire-Flint. "I am afraid that is beyond me, my boy," smiled His Excellency. "Won't you tell me what it means?"
Lady Bennington was famous as one of the few women who always say and do the right thing at the right moment. The note ran: "Dear Shagganappi, "Do come with my boy at Eastertide; we want you come. "Your friend, Hal's mother, "CONSTANCE BENNINGTON."
Shag almost trembled with pleasure, but his delight knew no bounds when a week after their return to school he received a little copy of the photograph framed in silver and inscribed on the back with "To Shagganappi Larocque, with love from Hal's mother." "I don't know why you and your people are so good to me," he declared to Hal, when they both had duly admired the little picture.
But that day proved the beginning of a new life for Fire-Flint; Lord Mortimer had called him Shagganappi in a half playful way, had said the name meant good and great things.
He was content to fight it out, through all his life to come, as "The Shagganappi," and when the time came for him to go to the great Eastern college in Ontario he went with his mind made up that no boy living was going to shoulder him into a corner or out-do him in the race for attainment. "Hello, fellows, there is an Indian blown in from the North-West.
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