"Why should you be glad?" she replied. "I am sure you must be offended that a woman should have dared to speak so plainly to you." "I deserve all that you have said, and more too," he added after a pause. "In which trail are you in the future going to walk?" she asked. This straight, searching question brought vividly before his vision the dream, and the two ways which there he saw, and he felt that a crisis in his life had come; and he said, after a pause: "I should like to walk in the way marked out by the book of heaven." "And so would I," she replied, with intense earnestness; "but it seems hard to do so, placed as I am. You think me brave here thus reproving you, but I am a coward in the village. I have called it love for my uncle's life that has kept me back from defying the conjurers, and telling everybody I want to go in the way the Good Spirit has given us; but it is cowardice, and I am ashamed of myself, and then I know so little. O, that we had a missionary among us with the book of heaven, as they have at Norway House and elsewhere, that we might learn more about the way, and be brave and courageous all the time!" This despairing cry is the voice of millions dissatisfied with the devil dances and worship of idols. The call is for those who can tell them where soul comfort can be found, and a sweet assurance brought into their hearts that they are in the right way. Hardly knowing what answer to make, but now interested in the woman as never in one before, he asked: "What name does your uncle call you?" Wishing to find out her name he put it this way, as it is considered the height of rudeness to ask a person her name. When several persons are together, and the name of one is desired by one of the company, the plan is always to ask some third person for the desired information. "Astumastao," she replied. And then feeling with her keen womanly instincts that the time had come when the long interview should end, she quickly threw her game, which had been dropped on the ground, over her shoulder again, and gliding by him, soon disappeared in the forest trail. CHAPTER SIX. HUNTING WILD GEESE. To Oowikapun this interview was of great value, and while he could not but feel a certain amount of humiliation at the cowardice he had been forced to admit, and felt also that it was a new experience to be thus talked to by a woman, yet his conscience told him that she was right and he deserved the reproofs she had given. So with something more to think about, he resumed his onward journey, and ere he stopped that night and made his little camp he was many miles nearer his home.