The Cobbler In The Devils Kitchen | Page 2

was as pleasant as silence itself, diverted his mind
from a distant thump of Indian drums. He knew how lazy, naked
warriors lay in their lodges, bumping a mallet on stretched deer-hide
and droning barbarous monotones while they kicked their heels in air.
If he despised anything more than the way the French diverted
themselves, it was the way the Indians diverted themselves.
Without a sound there came into Owen's view on the right an Indian

girl. He was at first taken by surprise at her coming over the moss of
the spring. The shaggy cliff, clothed, like the top of his cave, with
cedars, white birch, and pine, afforded no path to the beach in that
direction. All his clients approached by the lake margin at the left.
Then he noticed it was Blackbird, a Sac girl, who had been pointed out
to his critical eye the previous summer as a beauty. Owen admitted she
was not bad-looking for a squaw. Her burnished hair, which had got her
the name, was drawn down to cheeks where copper and vermilion
infused the skin with a wonderful sunset tint. She was neatly and
precisely dressed in the woman's skirt and jacket of her tribe, even her
moccasins showing no trace of the scramble she must have had down
some secret cliff descent in order to approach the cobbler unseen.
He greeted her with the contemptuous affability which an Irishman
bestows upon a heathen. Blackbird was probably a good communicant
of some wilderness mission, but this brought her no nearer to a son of
Ireland.
"Good-day to the quane! And what may she be wanting the day?"
Blackbird's eyes, without the snake-restlessness of her race, dwelt
unmoving upon him. Owen surmised she could not understand his or
any other kind of English, being accustomed to no tongue but her own,
except the French which the engagés talked in their winter camps. She
stood upright as a pine without answering.
It flashed through him that there might be trouble in the village; and
Blackbird, having regard for him, as we think it possible any human
being may have for us, was there to bid him escape. With coldness
around the roots of his hair, he remembered the massacre at Fort
Michilimackinac--a spot almost in sight across the strait, where south
shore approaches north shore at the mouth of Lake Michigan. He laid
down his boot. His lips dropped apart, and with a hush of the sound--if
such a sound can be hushed--he imitated the Indian war-whoop.
Blackbird did not smile at the uncanny screech, but she relaxed her face
in stoic amusement, relieving Owen's tense breathing. There was no

plot. The tribes merely intended to draw their money, get as drunk as
possible, and depart in peace at the end of the month with various
outfits to winter posts.
"Begorra, but that was a narrow escape!" sighed Owen, wiping his
forehead on his sleeve. He was able to detect the deference that
Blackbird paid him by this visit. He sat on his bench in the Kitchen, a
sunny idol in a shrine, indifferent to the effect his background gave
him.
His mouth puckered. He put up his leather stained hand coyly, and
motioned her unmoving figure back.
"Ah, go 'way! Wasn't it to escape you and the likes of you that I made
me retrate to the shore? Nayther white, full haythen, half, nor quarther
nade apply. To come makin' the big eyes at me, and the post swarmin'
wid thim that do be ready to marry on any woman at the droppin' of the
hat!"
Mobile blue water with ripple and wash made a background for the
Indian girl's dense repose. She could by lifting her eyes see the
pock-marked front of Owen's Kitchen, and gnarled roots like exposed
ribs in the shaggy heights above. But she kept her eyes lowered; and
Owen stuck his feet under his bench, sensitive to defects in his
foot-wear, which an artist skilled in making and mending moccasins
could detect.
Blackbird moved forward and laid a shining dot on the stone he used as
his table; then, without a word, she turned and disappeared the way she
came, over the moss of the spring rivulet.
Owen left his bench and craned after her. He did not hear a pebble roll
on the stony beach or a twig snap among foliage.
"Begorra, it's the wings of a say-gull!" said Owen, and he took up her
offering. It was a tiny gold coin. Mackinac was full of gold the month
the Indians were paid. It came in kegs from Washington, under the
escort of soldiers, to the United States Agency, and was weighed out to

each red heir despoiled of land by white conquest, in his due proportion,
and immediately grasped