"Friend then?"
"No," grunted the arrow-head maker--"give away to big _enemy_!"
"What did he mean by that?" Father Xavier asked of Marie on their way
back to the mission. And the girl explained the superstition that
Indians of their own tribe never killed an enemy with ordinary weapons,
for fear that his soul would wait for theirs in the Happy Hunting
Grounds; but if he was shot with a devil-stone, the soul could not fly
upward, but would sink through all eternity, until it reached the
deepest spot of all the great lakes under the stony gaze of the Doom
Woman.
When he inquired further as to the whereabouts of the Doom Woman's
residence he ascertained that she was only a sharp cliff among "the
pictured rocks of sandstone" of the upper lake--a cliff that viewed from
either side maintained its resemblance to a female profile looking
sternly down at the water beneath it, which was here believed to be
unfathomable. The Doom Woman still exists. Strange to say, under its
sharp-cut features a steamer has since been wrecked and sunk, and its
expression of gloomy fate is now awfully appropriate. Marie had visited
"the great Sea Water" with her father. Nature's titanic and fanciful
frescoing and cameo-cutting had strongly wrought upon her impressionable
mind, and the old legends and superstitions of paganism had been by no
means effaced by the very slight veneer of Christianity which she had
received at the mission.
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