“When you were here, honored General, and I had the priviledge to entertain you with a little fish and tea, more worthy fare being beyond my powers in the wilderness, I told you I am to all intent a full-blooded negro born in Martinique, though maybe I have a very little French and Portuguese and Spanish blood, too, not much.

“My wife was a good Ojibway woman and now my dear dauter Sidonie has married a Frenchman, Louis Payzold, and while I am proud of the negroes, they are such a brave passionat people, the Southern States have made a curse of life to the dark people and I do not want to have Sidonie or her children to be known as blacks and to suffer as my people do suffer there and planely told they are beasts. I ask for her little ones only a chance. So please always refer to me now as French.

“I am getting a little old for wilderness work and my purposes are almost done and do not want to think of my grandchildren under the lash, so please not say anything about my color and how black it is, honored General Sibley.

“Though Indian ladies seem to admire the color very much and all the warriors say I am first white man ever come to their country. Mes estimes les plus distinguées.

“X. Pic.”

Dr. Werweiss spoke:

“He sounds like a grand old fellow—lot nobler than the Sieur de Saint Lusson or any of the other Parisian courtiers who showed up on the frontier. If your soldier friend has the guts to take it, and the imagination, he can be pretty proud of his ancestor.

“You know, it’s true, what he says. Only red men and white men were recognized by the Indians on the Northern frontier, and so Negroes like Xavier and the Bongas were the first ‘white men’ to carry civilization—meaning the bottle, the bomb, and the Bible—to the poor heathen. They were like Perry opening up Japan, and if the results have been just as disastrous, that wasn’t their fault.

“What a kingly set of names the whole bunch of them had: Sidonie marrying a Louis, and we found that their son, though we found nothing more about him, was royally named Alexandre!”

It was the chain as Gramma Julie had given it to him: Xavier, Sidonie, Louis Payzold, Alexandre, and, if he told the world of it, that chain bound him, bound Biddy.

If he told.

* * * * *

–-And I was so certain (he thought on the interurban car back to Minneapolis) that Xavier had a short, golden beard!

–-Me, with my red hair, even a drop of blackness? Or Biddy? Still, Gramma Julie is dark enough. O God, even to have to think about it!

–-What’s this about colored people “passing,” if they’re light enough? I certainly shall. Why should I be so conceited as to imagine that God has specially called me to be a martyr? And pretty vicious kind of a martyr, that would sacrifice his mother and his daughter to his holy vanity! Everything can be just as it was. It has to be, for Biddy’s sake. You wouldn’t deliberately turn your own mother into an outcast, would you?