It was then that there came down from the north, one
bitter cold day, a ragged and half-starved boy, whose mother and father
had died of the plague in a little cabin fifty miles away, and who from
the day he staggered into the home of Henry Janesse, became Meleese's
playmate and chum. This boy was John Cummins.
When Janesse moved to Fort Churchill, where Meleese might learn more in
the way of reading and writing and books than her parents could teach
her, John Cummins went with her. He went with them to Nelson House, and
from there to Split Lake, where Janesse died. From that time, at the age
of eighteen, he became the head and support of the home. When he was
twenty and Meleese eighteen, the two were married by a missioner from
Nelson House. The following autumn the young wife's mother died, and that
winter Meleese began her remarkable work among her "people."
In their little cabin on the Gray Loon, one will hear John Cummins say
but little about himself; but there is a glow in his eyes and a flush in
his cheeks as he tells of that first day he came home from a three-days
journey over a long trap line to find his home cold and fireless, and a
note written by Meleese telling him that she had gone with a
twelve-year-old boy who had brought her word through twenty miles of
forest that his mother was dying. That first "case" was more terrible for
John Cummins than for his wife, for it turned out to be smallpox, and for
six weeks Meleese would allow him to come no nearer than the edge of the
clearing' in which the pest-ridden cabin stood.
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