Father Xavier looked at it in wondering admiration, and at last asked Black Beaver what he called it. "It is a devil-stone," replied the Indian. "More here," and he opened the deeper basket in which were stored the unground and uncut stones, and placed a superb gem in Father Xavier's hand. He had ground it sufficiently to show that it was in two layers, white and green; in this there was no touch of red, but in every other respect it was the handsomer stone. "Will you sell it to me?" asked the priest. "How much?" The Indian smiled with an expression strangely like that of his daughter, and put it back with alacrity in his basket, saying, "Me no sell big devil-stone. No money buy." "What do you mean to do with it?" asked Father Xavier. "Make arrow-head--very hungry--no blood;" and he indicated the absence of the red tint. "Very hungry--kill very much--never have enough!" "Then you mean to keep it and use it yourself?" "No," said the other. "Me no hunt game--hunt stones." "What will you do with it?" asked the puzzled priest. "Give it away," said Black Beaver--"give away to greatest--" "Chief?" asked Father Xavier. Black Beaver shook his head. "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.