Noy. 16, 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
hie 

1d insulted Neil Cameron’s wife. Her eldest 
ty heard her scream, ran up and clinched Ray- 
Ise, up-ended him and broke his right arm. It 
AS a mighty lucky job for Rayfuse. Neil was 
e of the ablest in the mines, and like 
st able men he never wanted a row, but when 
was forced on him he was a holy terror. 
About a week after this while Neil and father 
bre talking over the best. way to get rid of 
|: squatters who’d moved into the mines, they 
jard a terrible racket on the street outside. 
| ther went to the door, and saw old Mary 
jusher running for her life with all the Ray- 
Be gang and their friends following her with 
Icks and stones. She had lost her hat, her 
fay hair was all bloody where a stone had 
luck her, and her face was bruised black and 
lie. Father held the office door open and she 
a in like a chipmunk gets into a hole in the 
tyund when a dog’s after him. 
1° “Get right back out of this,’ says father to 
“crowd, ‘You’ll find it’s a very different mat- 
| fighting men to hunting old crippled women. 
hie first one that throws a stone or comes any 
larer has to deal with us.’ 
'“*She’s a witch. She’s overlooked us, 
re going to drown her in the Palmerston pit,’ 
’eams Mrs. Rayfuse. ‘There’s no law against 
lswning a witch, and you know it. There’s 
! boy crippled for life, and my old man who'll 
é¢ do a day’s work before fall, and all through 
)-- Give her up to us or we'll drown her and 
41 both.’ “f 
By this time my brother and I heard the 
‘ket. I was eighteen and he was sixteen. We 
j1 to the office. ‘Slip in and get us four shovel 
jadles, says father. ‘There’s twenty of you, 
41 four of us,’ says he to the crowd. ‘The first 
¢n or woman who lays a hand on Mary Crusher 
i; to walk over us to do it—you contemptible 
svards, stealing and insulting decent women 
11 then laying the blame on a poor old cripple 
sen you come to grief through your own wrong 
ing.’ 
+T tell you it was a joke to see those mongrels 
!t when they saw the old man and Neil meant 
They just slunk off home like so many 
ipped curs. Father-and Neil picked the old 
{man up and carried her to our house. Mother 
ssed the cut on her head, as the doctor was 
tay from home, and no one knew when he'd 
| back. We kept her for over a week and 
ther nursed her as if she was her own sister. 
$the mean time the men who belonged to the 
ies got out papers against the squatters. They 
i quite a trial over it, but the*end of the mat- 
| was that the parties who chased Mary Crusher 
j-e fined from ten to twenty dollars each. 
ay had no money to pay their fines with, and 
y concluded they’d better get out. 
}Mary got well and. went back to her shanty, 
begging, and her prospecting. Every now 
i! then she’d come to the mines with a big 
nk of yellow iron pyrites, or peacock copper 
}ch she’d found on the barrens and mistaken 
| gold. In the spring some of us boys would 
Jout to her place with a tent and some garden 
}s. We'd scratch up a bit of ground and 
) her put in her bit of garden. In the fall 
} moose hunters, who came out over Stillwater 
¢rens would leave her a few pounds of meat 
+ what groceries they hadn’t used up in the 
dds. 
}Ine Saturday evening the mail came in and 
fer got word that old man Mitchell was dead. 
men 

and 
yiiness. 



His nephews wanted to know all about his prop- 
erty and his gold mine. Father wrote back that 
all the property he had was a quit claim deed 
to fifty acres of land, a log shanty, and a half 
share in a two hundred acre wood lot. The 
whole business wasn’t worth fifty dollars. On 
Sunday morning he says to me, ‘The better the 
day, the better the deed. Don’t you bother about 
meeting this morning. You get your moccasins 
on, and run over to Mary Crusher’s shanty. 
Tell her that old Mitchell has passed in his 
checks and his curse is lifted from her. You'd 
better take. her some tea and sugar and two or 
three figs of tobacco (Mary loved a draw of 
the pipe) and take stock of the place; maybe 
we'll have to make a frolic and get her a few 
loads of wood before the cold weather comes.’ 
“T wish you could have seen the inside of that 
shanty. The chinking had fallen from the logs 
and you could see daylight in a dozen places. 
There was an old rusty stove, broken in several 
places and bound together with hay wire. There 
was no bed; only a bunk, with a lot of old ragged 
blankets, and the only food in sight was a.tin 
kettle full of scraps, like you feed to a dog. In 
one corner of the shack was every bit of a ton 
of quartz, with a lot of old worn out picks, 
shovels and axes. It was the toughest place I 
ever saw a Christian living in. ‘I’ve got good 
news for you, Mary. Father had a letter last 
night telling. him Mitchell’s dead. The curse 
he put on you is lifted and you needn’t think 
about it any more.’ 
“Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter,’ says she. 
‘I dreamed that Mitchell was dead four nights 
ago. I dreamed that he was in hell, screaming 
for a drink of water. I carried him one, but 
as soon as he put the dipper to his lips the 
water turned to molten gold. I tried, and tried 
again, but it was always the same. Then he 
cursed me worse than he did the last time I 
saw him. I woke up and the cold sweat was 
running all over me. Now go home and tell 
your father that you’ve seen me. He and your 
mother have been good friends to me. You and 
your brother will never be without the love of 
a good woman, a child, and a dog as long as you 
live.’ 
“T’m scared to death of crazy people. 
can never tell what they'll do next. 
“Three or four years went by. I went out 
West for awhile, and then I came home to be 
married. I found old Mary still hunting for 
Mitchell’s gold and begging round the mines. 
My wife’s father and mother died when she 
was a child. Having no regular home of her 
own, she arranged to be married from my elder 
sister’s house. A: few days before the wedding 
I took my gun and walked out toward the lake, 
hoping I’d get a partridge or two. It was a 
bitter cold morning in the early winter. The 
small lakes and ponds were frozen solid. I 
stepped along pretty lively, watching for birds. 
Presently I saw old Mary Crusher coming down 
the trail. She was bent nearly double. She 
was shuffling along like a decrepit old bear, and 
she didn’t notice me until she smelt my tobacco. 
‘I heard you were home,’ says she when I told 
her who I was. ‘I'll be at your wedding, if 
the Lord lets me live, and I have a present with 
me for your wife. I have five little stones and 
gold enough to set them in. The Queen herself 
needn’t be ashamed to wear them.’ 
“T gave her a dollar and went on. That even- 
ing, when I went to see my wife, she told me 
You 
how she’d been half scared to death by a dirty 
old beggar who wanted to kiss her. I told her 
who Mary Crusher was and said she had no 
cause to fear her, but I made up my mind that 
as soon as we were married I would see that 
Mary was put into the poor house at Antigonish, 
even if I had to pay the bill out of my own 
pocket. 
“Tt came a-bitter frost that night and all the 
next day. Two days before I was married I 
took my skates and my rifle, intending to skate 
up the lake and try for a shot at a caribou on 
Stillwater bog. The lake was the finest of glib 
ice from one end to the other. I had two. other 
fellows with me. We put our, skates on and 
started for the head of the lake. About half 
way up I noticed a thing sticking out of the ice. 
I knew it wasn’t a rock, as the water is twenty 
feet deep there. We skated over to it and found 
old Mary frozen in the ice. She’d walked into 
an air hole, and hadn’t been strong enough to 
get out of it. They had an inquest over her, and 
the Episcopalian parson paid for a coffin and 
read the burial service over her. 
“About a month after I was married my wife 
brought me a parcel wrapped up in an old news- 
paper. She told me that ‘the crazy woman’ had 
left it with her, and she’d forgotten it. I opened 
it and found two big chunks of yellow iron pyrites, 
another little parcel, wrapped up in tissue paper, 
and a little slab off an inch lead that was fairly 
rotten with gold. It wasn’t drift quartz, either ; 
it had been broken off the top of a lead. In 
the little parcel I found an old ring worn to a 
It was set with five stones. I 
thread almost. 
but 
thought it came out of some prize package, 
my wife said no, it was too well made. It was 
too small to have gone on the tip of Mary 
Crusher’s little finger. I mortared the quartz and 
it gave me over a dollar in smelted gold to the 
ounce. 
“Next time I went to Halifax I took the ring 
and gold with me. I went into the biggest jewel- 
er’s there and asked one of the clerks what it 
would cost to get the stones reset if J furnished 
the gold. He took the ring into the inside office 
he said the manager 
and when he came out 
wished to speak with me. 
“Tf you take my advice, you won't have any- 
thing done to this ring,’ says the manager. ‘It 
is an exquisite piece of workmanship. I pre- 
it?s an heirloom in yout family.’ I told 
words as possible how I came by 
so 
sume 
him in as few \ 
it. I could see that he didn’t believe me, 
I said, ‘If the ring is valuable I don’t care to 
carry it round in my pocket. Let me have a 
suitable case for it, put it in your safe and keep 
it until I call for it. If you, want to find out 
any details about me, call up Government House; 
the Governor knows my people and has hunted 
with me for a couple of seasons.’ 
“He took me at my 
assured him. that I was neither a wrecker nor a 
burglar. He offered four hundred dollars 
cash for it when I-went to claim it. I refused 
his offer and my wife has it yet, she 
word. The Governor 
me 
though 
never wears it. 
We crawled out of 
The storm had subsided. 
The full 
the den to have a look at the night. 
moon had risen and the lake and barrens were 
flooded with light. My friend pointed to a black 
speck on thé snow, saying, “That‘s one of the air 
holes I dread so. It’s not a gunshot from there 
that we found Mary Crusher frozen in the ice.” 

