All-Story Weekly, Vol. 112, No. 1 — page 47: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ONE GIFT. “ That which is in your heart is revealed. You ask, and it is answered—out of a love that is more than the love of a father.” ‘““T- love her. She is shut off from her people. All paths are closed to her by her enemies. I am sick with longing for her. She has been driven into my arms.” “You would commit a folly.” Blind Heron went softly, but he made no effort to be silent. He approached the place where Blue Otter knelt. His staff touched cactus and rock, the burrow of an owl, a palmetto-bed. Fifty yards from where the younger man knelt Blind Heron stood and waited. He was there when Blue Otter opened his eyes and looked at him. ‘““The Great Spirit, His voice,” said the blind man. He stood there in the bright sunshine of the grove, with the breeze stirring his white hair about, and the wrinkles of his old face mpre deeply marked than ever on account of his long vigil. He wore nothing but his ragged shirt and a few old hand- kerchiefs knotted about his neck; but there was something about him that would have told any man that he spoke with the voice of the Master. Blue Otter did not change his position. He remained where he was. He looked for a long time at the old man with an expres- sion of sorrow, fear, hope, doubt. ‘‘ Since childhood I have heard of the one gift,” said Blue Otter softly, at last. “You have read my heart. You have spoken with the Voice. But if I said to you: ‘ Father, the one gift that I ask is the gift of this maiden—’ ” He could not go on in the presence of the Great Spirit’s messenger. The real mask of tragedy is the mask with a smile. Blind Heron smiled, but there was death in his words: “Take the maiden to her own people.” ‘ All paths—” ‘““ All paths but one. Take the maiden to her own people out across the Ka- Hetlee (the Everglades) .” ‘““My father knows that there is not enough water in the Ka-Hetlee.”’ “Tt is spoken.” “Most of the canoe-trails are already dry. ? 37 Blind Heron still smiled. In one aspect he looked happy. Again, his face was the face of a man with a broken heart. Even as Blue Otter gazed at him, Blind Heron began to fade—to fade away like a thing of smoke—first his legs and his staff, his fluttering shirt, then the shining white mist of hair, then the smiling, mystical, fateful mask of his face; and Blue Otter discovered that he was alone. ‘““T have heard a Voice,” said Blue Ot- ter simply, when he reappeared at the camp on the edge of the pond. The sun was where he said it would be at the time of his return. Muriel did not tell him how anxiously she had kept watch on the moving fingers of light. Nor did she make any reference to the voices she herself had heard—the voices of her innermost being: ‘‘ Beware! He is the member of a lower race!” “It is I who am the member of an in- ferior race,” she almost sobbed in her heart, at Blue Otter’s announcement. There was a perfect dignity in his bear- ing, a perfect kindliness in his eyes and voice—all these accentuated by some hint of a hidden torture. ‘What did the voice say?” she asked. “Tt said: ‘ To-night, when it is so dark that the bad men cannot see you crossing the grass-water, you will start back with the white girl to her own people, over and beyond the Ka-Hetlee—the ’Glades.’”’ “How long will it take?” asked Muriel. ‘When there is water, three days.” “But if there be not enough water?” She was not altogether unfamihar with the traditions of the great morass. ‘Still you will come back to your peo- ple, notwithstanding,” he replied. “TI asked. It was spoken.” All that long day it was as if they were in the presence of the Speaker of that Voice to which he had referred. For Muriel San- gree, at least, it was a sentiment which was elusive, hard to express even in the subtle language of her self-communion, yet a feel- ing that she knew would henceforth ever be a part of herself, an added quality, a possession she would never lose. comiclboolk C©