Frontier and pioneer life -- West (U.S.) -- Fiction
"Yes, and a dark doursome race they are. Lovatt: Fraser MacDonald was
his name; fought under Wolfe and joined the up country furhunters.
When he came back from his hunting one year, he found his wife had
eloped with an officer of the regiment; so he took to the north woods
an' married an Indian girl and his son was the man o' the iron arm, the
piper for little Sir George in the thirties, who blew the bag pipes up
Saskatchewan and over the mountains and down the Columbia and all round
them lakes where y'r Holy Cross Forest is. They were a' dark fearsome
men in their loves and hates. This man married late in life, he had
two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an' your Donald here. He never saw
his father alive. The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but
the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin' me up at
my Mission on Saskatchewan. She came huntin' heirs. Angus had married
an Indian woman; he'll never go back, nor his sons. They're livin'
under a tent to-day. What would they do wi' a castle and liveried
servants and tenants an' things? Donald, y'r sheep king man, married a
white girl. Some time after '85 she left him for the part he took in
the Rebellion. She died after the child's birth; and the father
claimed the daughter. He's known they'd have to come for his daughter
some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such
shameful thing as y' might think, if y've lived long enough in the
West, t' understand! He has educated the daughter for the place. As A
guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn't know who her mother was, or why
her father had to leave Canada. A guessed that much when y'r Indian
woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night! She
doesn't even know who that Indian woman is."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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