The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Side 36

78
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #2
Sometimes when men passed by it in the
twilight, they seemed to see a young well
built Indian chief in native dress standing
under the oak tree pointing toward the
river but when they came closer the young
man vanished.
So one hundred years passed, and
white men had now come to the inlet. They
once lost a horse and thought surely he had
been stolen by a certain Indian. They cap-
tured him and accused him of stealing the
horse, but he denied it. In spite of his
denials, they sentenced him to death, and
the beautiful oak tree was to be his gallows.
They led the poor man there in the twi-
light, bound his hands behind him, placed
the rope around his neck and flung the
other end around the branch of the tree.
But when they lifted him up from the
ground, the branch broke, the bindings on
his hands fell off and he quickly removed
the rope from around his neck and ran like
a wild horse toward the riverbank and
jumped into the river. This all happened so
fast that the white men knew nothing until
they saw that the Indian was far out in the
river. He reached the far side safe and
sound and they never saw him again. The
next day it came to light that the Indian had
been innocent of the crime of which he had
been accused of because the horse had
never been stolen. The owner’s son had
taken it without permission and gone south
to Pembina to visit his fiancee who lived
there.
It was always as if the oak tree held a
protective arm over all that came close to it,
providing that they were innocent, and it
was the same if a person left something
there or hid it, as long as it was not stolen-
—it was never lost and was always found,
no matter how long it stayed there.”
Now O’Brian and Mr. Iceland looked
at each other.
“But do you know Mrs. Leturneau
that this unique oak tree has disappeared as
well as everything else from the river-
bank?” asked Mr. O’Brian.
“Yes, I noticed that awhile ago, when I
stepped out of the carriage” said Madeleine
Vanda. “But I remember clearly that it
stood here in full bloom, when 1 moved
away from the Red River Valley with my
parents in the spring of 1870.”
“But would you be able to show us
where the oak tree stood?” asked Mr.
Iceland.
“Yes, I am absolutely certain of that”
said Madeleine Vanda, “and I shall go out-
side at once and show you where it was.”
We all stood up and went into the hall-
way.
“Yes, there is the bedroom that Berg
the castaway last occupied” said Madeleine
Vanda, and pointed to the door of the bed-
room where O’Brian had stayed before.
“He was a true friend of the Lord,
though a bit strange. In fact, he was always
in pain while he stayed here. But he disap-
peared suddenly in a mysterious ways one
stormy day late in March and no one asked
about him after that. Men just assumed that
he had drowned himself in the large hole in
the ice on the river.”
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