Saxe slept, I say; and at dawn woke to his problem. The intelligence that works for us while we sleep waked him into the conviction that he must, at any cost, buy the woman. He said that, as he strode over to the chief’s hut, he was thinking only of what price he ought to put on the child that would be such a fantastic mixture of breeds. He did not want the woman, but he felt that the purchase was inevitable. This, I am convinced, was only the New English leaven working him up to martyrdom. It would be unmitigatedly dreadful to have the woman on his hands, and therefore he ought probably to buy her. The chief greeted him with temper, and soon Saxe learned why. The woman had left the hut before dawn, taking with her her master’s largest knife. She was found later in her own little hovel, dead, with a clean stab to her heart. Suicide is virtually unknown among savages, and the village was astir. Saxe asked to see the body at once, but that, it seems, was not etiquette: he had to wait until it was prepared for burial. For an instant, he said, he thought of bargaining for the body, but forebore. He had a difficult return journey to make, and the point was, after all, to see it. When they permitted him to enter the hut, the face had been piously disfigured beyond recognition. He told me that he lifted the tattooed hand and kissed it: he did not know why. It was clear that if the woman had--preposterously--been Mary, she would not have wished it; and if she were the other, it was almost indecent. But he could not help it. This impulse of his seems to have been his only recognition of Mary Bradford. In life and in death, she suppressed every sign of herself with consummate art. We were a fevered group that waited for Saxe day after day at the Mission; and he seemed to have been gone an intolerably long time. The broken leg that had kept me from going with him was almost well when he returned. Yet he had taken the shortest way back. It was also the unhealthiest. He said that he had heard war rumors that made him avoid the more frequented trail, but I fancy he rather hoped that the swamps he clung to would give him fever. In that sense--and in that sense only--Saxe could perhaps be said to have committed suicide. He stumbled into the Mission dining-room at noon one day. “And Mary?” we all cried, rising. “Oh, did you expect to see Mary?” he asked politely, but with evident astonishment.