“No, my friend, you shall not carry this controversy away from this spot. It is Satan who buffets you so sorely, and if you will fight, it is with him the combat shall be. Which is the stronger, you, or that great dragon, that old serpent, whom Michael, of old, fought and conquered? Fight _him_ in the name of the Lord, and with Gideon if you will, but here and now relinquish all, yes, every iota of the desire for your brother’s blood. Destroy that letter,--yes, tear it in pieces here beside Lora’s grave, and bury the remembrance of it as you have buried her. You have left it to me, Myles, and I have been given this to say to you. Take it, in the name of God who hears us.” “I take it as I took her message,” replied Standish in a low voice, and rising to his knees, for he had been lying prone beside the grave, he sought about for a moment, and finding a bit of stick began carefully to remove one of the turfs at the foot of the new-made grave. Laying it at one side, he took the letter from under his knee, where he had held it, and quietly tore it into fragments, which he held in his left hand, while with the right he scooped a hollow in the loose loam beneath the sod; but in deepening the cavity his fingers encountered some foreign substance, and drawing it out, held up to the moonlight a little package enveloped in a strip of the cloth-like inner bark of the birch-tree, and bound around with cord twisted of fibres of the hackmatack. “Some of Hobomok’s work,” murmured Standish, carefully unrolling the bark, and disclosing a curiously shaped and much worn stone of a peculiarly hard and dense quality, fashioned at one end into a neck by which it could be securely carried, and at the other sharpened to a curved edge capable of cutting wood. “Why, ’t is Hobomok’s totem!” exclaimed Standish, turning it over and over. “He always wore it about his neck, and for all he calls himself a praying Indian, I sorely mistrusted he prayed as much to his totem as to any other god, nor would he ever let us see him use it, or take it in our hands, though the boys have urged him more than enough. The dear maid used to talk to him in her gentle way, and try to make a good Christian of him, just as she used to set up her dolls and play go to meeting with them, and with as great results. But now,--did he bury it here for a charm to keep away the afrits, or did he lay it at her feet to show that in her sweet patience of death she had conquered his unbelief even as she conquered that other savage, her father?” “Ask him,” suggested Bradford, but Standish, carefully replacing the totem in its covering, shook his head. “No, no! Hobomok is too much of a gentleman to pry into what is not meant for him to know, and I should be ashamed to let him know that I had surprised what he fain would have held a secret.