Chapter V: Part 5

“Here are four generations,” says Mrs. Gunning—“grandmother, mother, daughter, and grandchild.” And on she went, tracing their lineage through blooded stock for more than half an hour. She was enthusiastic, too, and got between the doctor and the door, and emphasized all her points with the parasol. Her back kept ripping until I ought to have told her, but I knew the man was too mad to look at her, and she was so happy herself, I said, “I will let her alone.”

I had forgotten all about my half-breed driver, sitting on the parade-ground in the waiting carriage. But he was enjoying himself too, when we climbed to the fort again, with a soldier lounging on the front wheel.

Well, as soon as I entered the little parlor that Mrs. Gunning called her drawing-room—ornamented with the movable knickknacks that an army woman carries around with her, you know—I saw that Captain Markley had asserted himself. If he hadn't asserted himself on that occasion, I do believe Mrs. Gunning would have been done with him forever. I never saw a man so anxious to show that he was accepted. Of course he couldn't announce the engagement until it had been sanctioned by the girl's foster-parents. But he put Juliana through the engaged drill like a veteran, and she was wonderfully meek.

I suppose one British woman knows another better than an American can. But I felt sorry for Dr. McCurdy when he saw the state of things and took his leave, and Mrs. Gunning rubbed his defeat on the raw.

“Ah, my dear friend,” says she, shaking his hand, “we see that buds will match with buds. I could never find it in my heart to wed a bud to a full-blown rose.”

I don't doubt that the full-blown rose, as he went down the fort hill, cursed Mrs. Gunning's cow's tail and all her cows' pedigrees. But she looked as serene as if he had pledged the young couple's health (instead of going off and leaving his wine half tasted), and took me to see her chickens' cupboard.

There were shelves with rows of cans and bottles, each can or bottle labelled “Molly,” or “Lucy,” or “Speckie,” and so on.

“I have discovered,” Mrs. Gunning says to me, “that one hen's food may be another hen's poison, so I mix and prepare for each fowl what that fowl seems to need. For instance, Lucy can bear more meal than Speckie, and the Shanghai cock had to be strongly encouraged. Though it sometimes happens,” says she, casting her eye back towards the drawing-room, “that such a fellow gets pampered, and has to have his diet reduced and his spirit cooled down again.”

THE CURSED PATOIS

As his boat shot to the camp dock of beach stones, the camper thought he heard a child's voice behind the screen of brush. He leaped out and drew the boat to its landing upon a cross-piece held by two uprights in the water, and ascended the steep path worn in leaf mould.

There was not only a child, there was a woman also in the camp. And Frank Puttany, his German feet planted outward in a line, his smiling dark face unctuous with hospitality towards creatures whom he had evidently introduced, in foolish helplessness gave his partner the usual greeting:

“Vell, Prowny.”

“Hello, Puttany. Visitors?”

Brown pulled off his cap to the woman. She was pretty, with eyes like a deer's, with white teeth showing between her parted scarlet lips, and much curling hair pinned up and blowing over her ears. She had the rich tint of a quarter-breed, lightened in her case by a constant suffusion which gave her steady color. She was dressed in a mixture of patches, but all were fitted to her perfect shape with a Parisian elegance sensed even by backwoodsmen. Pressed against her knee stood the dirtiest and chubbiest four-year-old child on the borders of Brevoort Lake—perhaps the dirtiest on the north shore of Michigan. The Indian mixed with his French had been improved on by the sun until he was of a brick redness and hardness of flesh; a rosy-meated thing, like a good muskalonge. Brown suddenly remembered the pair. They were Joe La France's wife and child. Joe La France was dead. Puttany had recently told him that Joe La France left a widow and a baby without shelter, and without relations nearer than Canada.

After greeting Brown the guest resumed her seat on one of the camp-chairs, a box worn smooth by much use, having a slit cut in the top through which the hand could be thrust to lift it.

The camp, in a small clearing, consisted of two tents, both of the wedge-shaped kind. The sleeping-tent was nearly filled by the bed it contained; and this, lifted a few inches above the ground on pole supports, was of browse or brush and straw, covered with blankets. A square canopy of mosquito-netting protected it. The cooking-tent had a foundation of logs and a canvas top. The floor was of pure white sand. Boxes like lockers were stored under the eaves to hold food, and in one corner a cylindrical camp-stove with an oven thrust its pipe through a tinned hole in the roof. Plenty of iron skillets, kettles, and pans hung above the lockers on pegs in the logs; and the camp dinner service of white ware, black-handled knives and forks, and metal spoons, neatly washed, stood on a table. Jess, the Scotch collie, who was always left to guard the tents in their owners' absence, sat at her usual post within the door; and she and Brown exchanged repressed growls at the strangers. Jess, being freed from her chain, trotted at his heels when he went back to the beach to clean fish for supper. She sat and watched his deft and work-hardened hands as he dipped and washed and drew and scaled his spoil. He was a clean-skinned, blue-eyed Canadian Irishman, well made and sinewy, bright and open of countenance. His blond hair clung in almost flaxen tendrils to his warm forehead. No ill-nature was visible about him, yet he turned like a man in fierce self-defence on his partner, who followed Jess and stood also watching him.

“Puttany, you fool! what have you brought these cursed patois into camp for?”

“Joe La France vas my old pardner,” softly pleaded the German.

“Damn you, man, we can't start an orphan-asylum and widows' home! We'll get a bad name at the hotels. The real good people won't have us for guides.”

“She told me in Allanville she had no place to stay. She did not know what to do. At the old voman's, where Joe put her, they have need of her bed. The old voman is too poor to keep her any more.”

“I'd have done just what you did; that's what makes me so mad. How long is she going to stay?”

“I don't know,” sheepishly responded his partner.

“A Dutchman ought to have more sense than to load up with a lot of cursed patois. Nothing but French and Indian! We'll have to put the precious dears in the sleeping-tent, and bunk down ourselves with blankets in the other. Did you air the blankets good this morning, Frank?”

“They vos vell aired.”

“You're a soft mark, Frank! One of us will have to marry Joe La France's widow—that's what it will come to!” Brown slapped the water in violent disgust, but Puttany blushed a dark and modest red.

Men of their class rarely have vision or any kind of foresight. They live in the present and plan no farther than their horizon, being, like children, overpowered by visible things. But the Irish Canadian had lived many lives as lake sailor and lumberman, and he had a shrewd eye and quick humor. It was he who had devised the conveniences of the camp, and who delicately and skilfully prepared the meals so that the two fared like epicures; while Puttany did the scullery-work, and was superior only at deer-stalking.

The perfume of coffee presently sifted abroad, and the table was brought out and set under the evening sky. Lockers gave up their store of bread and pastry made by the capable hands of the camp housekeeper. The woman, their guest, sat watching him move from cook-tent to table, and Puttany lounged on the dog-kennel, whittling a stick.

“Frank,” said his partner, with sudden authority, “you take the kid down to the water and scrub him.”

“All over?” whispered Puttany, in confusion.

“No—just his hands and top. Supper is ready to put on.”

The docile mother heard her child yelling and blubbering under generous douches while nurse's duty was performed by one of her entertainers, and she smiled in proof that her faith was grounded on their righteousness. She was indeed a mere girl. Her short scarlet upper lip showed her teeth with piquant innocence. As much a creature of the woods as a doe, her lot had been that primitive struggle which knows nothing about the amenities and proprieties of civilization. This Brown could clearly see, and he addressed her with the same protecting patronage he would have used with the child.

“What's your kid's name?”

“Grégoire, but he call himself Gougou. Me, I am Françoise La France.”

“Yes, I know that. You have had a hard time since Joe died.”

“I been anxion”—she clasped her hands and looked pleadingly at him—“I been very anxion!”

“Well, you're all right now.”

“You let me do de mend'? I can sew. I use' learn to sew when I have t'ing to sew on.”

“Jerusalem! look at them shirts on the line! We have more clothes to sew on than any dude at the hotels. And it that isn't enough, I'll make Puttany strip and stay in the brush while you do his clothes.”

Françoise widened her smile.

“I've been thinking we'll have to build you a house right over there.” Her entertainer indicated the shore behind her.

“Oppos'?” exclaimed Françoise, turning with pleased interest. Even in her husband's lifetime little thought had ever been taken for her.

“Yes, directly opposite. We can fix it up snug like our winter camp at the other end of the lake.”

“Have you two camp?”

“Yes—a winter camp and a summer camp. But we have stayed comfortably here in the cook-tent until the thermometer went fourteen degrees below zero. We'll sleep in it till we get your house done, and you can take the tent. If there are no parties wanting guides, we might as well begin it in the morning.”

“But,” faltered Françoise, “afterw'iles when de ice is t'ick, and you go to de hudder camp—”

“Oh, we'll take care of you,” he promised. “You and Gougou will go with us. We couldn't leave you on this side.”

“In de dark nights,” shuddered Françoise.

“You needn't be afraid, any time. When we are off daring the day we always leave Jess and Jim to guard the camp. Jess is a Scotch collie and Jim is a blood-hound. He's there in the kennel. Neither man nor varmint would have any chance with them.”

“I been use' to live alone when my husban' is away, M'sieu' Brownee. I not 'fraid like you t'ink. But if Gougou be cold and hongry.”

“Now that's enough,” said Brown, with gentle severity. “Gougou will never be cold and hungry again while there's a stick of wood to be cut on the shores of this lake, or any game to bag, or a 'lunge to spear through the ice. We get about two days' lumbering a week down by St. Ignace. No use to work more than two days a week,” he explained, jocosely. “That gives us enough to live on; and everybody around here owes us from fifty to a hundred dollars back pay for work, anyhow. I've bought this ground, twenty acres of it, and another year I'm going to turn it into a garden.”

“Oh, a garden, M'sieu' Brownee! Me, I love some garden! I plant honion once, salade also.”

“But I want to get my fences built before I put in improvements. You know what the silver rule is, don't you?”

“No, m'sieu',” answered Françoise, vaguely. She knew little of any rule.

“The silver rule is different from the golden rule. It's 'Do your neighbors, or your neighbors will do you.' If I don't protect myself, all the loose cattle around Brevoort will graze over me. Every fellow for himself. We can't keep the golden rule. We'd never get rich if we did.”

“You are rich mans?” interrogated Françoise, focussing her curiosity on that invisible power of wealth.

“Millionaires,” brazenly claimed the young man, as he put an earthen-ware pitcher on the table. “Set there, you thousand-dollar dish! We don't have a yacht on the lake because we prefer small boats, and we go out as guides to have fun with the greenhorns. The cooking at the hotels is good enough for common hunters and fishermen who come here from the cities to spend their money, but it isn't good enough for me. You've come to the right place, you may make your mind easy on that.”

Françoise smiled because he told her to make her mind easy, not because she understood the irony of his poverty. To have secure shelter, and such a table as he spread, and the prowess to achieve continual abundant sustenance from the world, made wealth in her eyes. She was as happy as Gougou when this strange family, gathered from three or four nations, sat down to their first meal.

The sun went low like a scarlet egg, probing the mother-of-pearl lake with a long red line of shadow, until it wasted into grayness and so disappeared. Then home-returning sails became spiritualized, and moved in mist as in a dream—foggy lake and sky, as one body, seeming to push in upon the land.

Françoise slept the sleep of a healthy woman, with her child on her arm, until at dawn the closed flap of the tent yielded to a bounding shape. She opened her startled eyes to see Jim the blood-hound at the foot of the bed, jerking the mosquito-netting. He growled at the interlopers, not being able in his canine mind to reconcile their presence with his customary duty of waking his masters in that tent. A call and a whistle at the other side of the camp drew him away doubting. But in a day both he and Jess had adopted the new members of the family and walked at Gougou's heels.

Gougou existed in wonderland. He regarded the men as great and amiable powers, who could do what they pleased with the elements and with the creatures of the earth. They had a fawn, which had followed Brown home along the beach, feeding on leaves from his hand. They had built it a sylvan home of cedar boughs behind the camp, from which it wandered at will. And though at first shy of Gougou, the pretty thing was soon induced to stand upon its hind feet and dance for bits of cake. His Indian blood yearned towards the fawn; but Methuselah, the mighty turtle, was more exciting. Methuselah lived a prisoner in one side of the bait-tank, from which he was lifted by a rope around his tail. He was so enormous that it required both Brown and Puttany to carry him up the bank, and as he hung from the pole the sudden projection of his snapping head was a danger. When he fastened his teeth into a stick, the stick was hopelessly his as long as he chose to keep it. He was like an elephant cased in mottled shell, and the serrated ridge on his tail resembled a row of huge brown teeth. Methuselah was a many-wrinkled turtle. When he contracted, imbedding head in shoulders and legs in body, revealing all his claws and showing wicked little eyes near the point of his nose, his helpless rage stirred all the Indian; he was the most deliciously devilish thing that Gougou had ever seen.

Then there was the joy of wintergreen, which both men brought to the child, and he learned to forage for it himself. The fleshy dark green leaves and red berries clustered thickly in the woods. He and his mother went in the boat when the day was to be given to bass or pickerel fishing, and he learned great lessons of water-lore from the two men. If they trusted a troll line to his baby hands, he was in a state of beatitude. His object in life was to possess a bear cub, and many a porcupine creeping along the beach he mistook for that desirable property, until taught to distinguish quills from fur. Gougou heard, and he believed, that all porcupines were old lumbermen, who never died, but simply contracted to that shape. He furtively stoned them when he could, reflecting that they were tough, and delighting to see the quills fly.

Françoise would sit in the camp like a picture of still life, glowing and silent at her appointed labor. She sewed for all of them, looking womanly and unhurried, with a pink-veined moccasin-flower in her hair; while Brown, cooking and baking, rushed from tent to wood-pile, his sleeves turned back from his white, muscular arms. He lived more intensely than any other member of the sylvan household. His blue eyes shone, and his face was vivid as he talked to her. He was a common man, blunted in the finer nature by a life of hardship, yet his shrewd spirit seized on much that less facile people like Puttany learned slowly or not at all.

Puttany and the child were often together in one long play, broken only by the man's periods of labor. They basked in a boat near rushes, waiting for pickerel to strike, or waded a bog to a trout stream at the other end of the lake, hid in a forest full of windfalls and hoary moss and tropical growths of brake and fern. Gougou had new strong clothes and buckskin shoes. For the patois had not been a week in camp before Brown went to St. Ignace and brought back denim and white and black calico, which he presented to Françoise.

“She ought to have a kind of second mourning,” he explained to Puttany, who received his word on any matter as law. “Joe La France wasn't worth wearing first mourning for, but second mourning is decent for her, and it won't show in the camp like bright colors would.”

The world of city-maddened people who swarmed to this lake for their annual immersion in nature did not often intrude on the camp. Yet the fact of a woman's presence there could not be concealed, and Puttany was disciplined to say to strangers, “Dot vas my sister and her little poy.”

A tiny cabin was built for Françoise, with the luxuries of a puncheon floor and one glazed window. She inhabited it in primitive gladness, as a child adorns a play-house, and was careful to keep it in that trim, military state which Brown demanded. Françoise had a regard for M'sieu' Puttanee, who was neat and ladylike in all his doings, and smiled amiably at her over her boy's head; but her veneration of M'sieu' Brownee extended beyond the reach of humor. If he had been a priest he could have had no more authority. She used to watch him secretly from her window at dawn, as he put himself through a morning drill to limber his muscles. Some spectators might have laughed, but she heard as seriously as if they were the motions of her own soul his tactics with a stick:

“Straight out—across the shoulder—under the arm—down on the turf!”

There were days when the misty gray lake, dim and delicious, lay veiled within its irregular shores. Then the lowering sun stood on tree-tops, a pale red wraith like the ghost of an Indian. And there were days of sharp, clear shine, when Black Point seemed to approach across the water, and any moving object could be seen in the Burning—a growth of green springing where the woods had been swept by fire. The men were often away, guiding fishing parties from dawn until sunset, or hunting parties from sunset half the night. Françoise and Gougou dwelt in the camp, having the dogs as their protectors, though neither primitive nor civilized life menaced them there with any danger. Some evenings, when few affairs had crowded the day, Brown sat like a patriarch in the midst of his family, and took Gougou on his knee to hear bear stories. He supervised the youngster's manners like a mother, and Gougou learned to go down to the washing-place and use soap when the signs were strong for bear-dens and deer-stalking.

“I saw a bear come out on the beach once,” Brown would tell him, “when I was stalking for deer and had a doe and fawn in the lake. I smelt him, but couldn't get him to turn his eyes towards me. I killed both deer, and skinned them, and cut up one. And that bear went into the woods and howled for hours. I took all the venison I could carry, but left part of the carcasses. When we went after them in the morning, the bear had eaten all up clean.”

Bear-dens, Gougou was informed, might be found where there was a windfall. The bears stuffed cracks between the fallen trees with moss, and so made themselves a tight house in which to hibernate. If you were obliged to have bear meat that season when the game was thin, you could cut a hole into a den, stand by it with an axe, and lop off the inquiring head stuck out to investigate disturbances. Bears had very small stomachs, but whatever they ate went to fat. They walked much on their hind feet, and browsed on nuts or mast when their hunting was not successful, being able to thrive on little. Usually a father, a mother, and a cub formed one household in one den.

Brown's mind ran on the subject of households; and he sometimes talked to Françoise about his mother.

“My mother Gaelics like the Scotch,” he said. Françoise could not imagine what it was to Gaelic. People had not Gaelic-ed on the Chaudière, where she was brought up until the children were obliged to scatter from the narrow farm. But the priest had never warned her against it, and since M'sieu' Brownee's mother was addicted to the practice, it must be something excellent, perhaps even religious. She secretly invoked St. Francis, her patron saint, to obtain for her that mysterious power of Gaelic-ing of which M'sieu' Brownee spoke so tenderly.

So the summer passed, and frost was already ripening to glory the ranks on ranks of dense forest pressing to the lake borders. Brown and Puttany rowed home through an early September evening, lifted their boat to its cross-piece dock, and pulled the plug out of the bottom to let it drain. There was no sound, even of the dogs, as they flung their spoil ashore. It was the very instant of moon-rise. At first a copper rim was answered by the faintest line in the water. Then the full reddish disk stood upon a strong copper pillar, smooth and flawless in a rippleless lake, and that became denuded of its capital as the ball rose over it into the sky.

“Seems still,” remarked Brown, and he ran up the path, shaking leaf loam like dry tobacco dust from the roots of ferns he had brought to Françoise. He knew at once that she and Gougou had left the camp. He sat down on the dog-kennel with his hands on his knees, staring at the dim earth. Puttany went from tent to cabin, calling his daily playmate, unable to convince himself that some unusual thing had happened, and he hoped that Brown would contradict him when he felt compelled to announce his slow discovery.

“Dey vas gone!”

“Damn you, Puttany!” exploded his partner, “what did you bring her here for? I didn't want to get into this! I wanted to steer clear of women! You knew I was soft! You knew her black eyes, and the child that made her seem like the Virgin, would get in their work on me!”

“No, I didn't,” said Puttany, in phlegmatic consternation.

“What's the matter, Frank? Haven't we behaved white to this woman? Have you done anything, you stupid old Dutchman,” cried Brown, collaring his partner with abrupt violence, “that would drive her out of the camp without a word?”

“I svear, Prowny,” the other gasped, as soon as he had breath for swearing, “I haf been so polite to her as my own mudder.”

The younger man sat down again, dropping lax hands across his knees. A growl inside the box reminded him that Jim the blood-hound should be brought to account for this disappearance.

“Come out here!” he commanded, and the lithe beast crept wagging and apologizing to his side. “What kind of a way is this for you to keep a camp—Jess sitting in the kitchen, and you in the box, and somebody carrying off Françoise and the boy, and every rag that would show they had ever been here—and not a sound out of your cowardly head till we come home and catch you skulking? I've a notion to take a board and beat you to death!”

Jim lay down with an abject and dismal whine.

“Where is she?”

Jim lifted his nose and sniffed hopefully, and his master rose up and dragged him by the collar to the empty cabin. It was the first time Brown had entered that little cell since its dedication to the woman for whom it was built. He rubbed Jim's muzzle against the bed, and pointed to nails in the logs where the clothes of the patois had hung.

“Now you lope out and find them—do you hear?”

Jim, crouching on his belly in acknowledgment that his apprehension had been at fault during some late encounter, slunk across the camp and took the path to the hotels.

Brown turned on Puttany following at his heels: “Frank, are you sure Joe La France is dead?”

“Oh yes, he is det.”

“Did you see him die? Were you there when he was buried? Was he put underground with plenty of dirt on top of him, or did he merely drop in the water?”

“I vas not there.”

“Maybe the lazy hound has resurrected. I've seen these lumbermen dropped into the water and drowned too often. You can never be sure they won't be up drinking and fighting to-morrow unless you run a knife through them.”

“He is a det man,” affirmed Puttany.

“Then somebody else has carried her off, and I'm going to know all about it before I come back to camp. If I never come back, you may have the stuff and land. I'm in this heels over head, and I don't care how soon things end with me.”

“But, Prowny, old poy, I vill help you—”

“You stay here. This is my hunt.”

Jim passed the rustic guest-houses without turning aside from the trail. Brown took no thought of inquiring at their doors, for throughout the summer Françoise had not once been seen at the hotels. He did, however, hastily borrow a horse from the stable where he was privileged, and pursuing the blood-hound along the lake shore, he cantered over a causeway of logs and earth which had been raised above a swamp.

The trail was very fresh, for Jim, without swerving, followed the road where it turned at right angles from the shore and wound inland among stumps. They had nearly reached Allanville, a group of log huts beside a north-shore railroad, when Jim uttered the bay of victory.

Brown dropped from the saddle and called him sternly back. To be hunting Françoise with a blood-hound out of leash—how horrible was this! He tied his horse to a tree and took Jim by the collar, restraining the creature's fierce joy of discovery. Françoise must be near, unless a hound whose scent was unerring had become a fool.

What if she had left camp of her own will? She was so quiet, one could not be sure of her thoughts. Brown was sure of his thoughts. He grinned in the lonely landscape, seeing himself as he had appeared on recent Sundays, in his best turtle-tail neck-tie mounted on velvet.

“I've got it bad,” he confessed.

Stooping to Jim's collar while the dog whined and strained, he passed a cabin. And there Jim relaxed in the search and turned around. The moon stood high enough to make a wan fairy daylight. Gougou, like a gnome, started from the ground to meet them, and the dog at once lay down and fawned at his feet.

More slowly approaching from the cabin, Brown saw Françoise, still carrying in her hand the bundle of her belongings brought from camp. In the shadow of the house a man watched the encounter, and a sift of rank tobacco smoke hinted the pipes of fathers and sons resting from the day's labor on the cabin door-sill or the sward. Voices of children could be heard, and other dogs gave mouth, so that Brown laid severe commands on Jim before he could tremblingly speak to Françoise.

“Oh, M'sieu' Brownee, I t'ink maybe you come!”

“But, Françoise, what made you leave?”

“It is my husban's brudder. I not know what to do! He bring us to dese folks to stay all night till de cars go.”

“Why didn't he show himself to us, and take you like a man?”

“Oh, M'sieu' Brownee—he say de priest hexcommunicate me—to live—so—in de camp! It is not my fault—and I t'ink about you and M'sieu' Puttanee—and Gougou he bite his honcle, and kick and scream!”

“Damn the uncle!” swore Brown, deeply.

“Oh, I been so anxion!” sobbed Françoise.

“We must be married right off,” said Brown. “I'll fix your brother-in-law. Françoise, will you have me for your husband?”

“Me, M'sieu' Brownee?”

“Yes, you—you cursed sweet patois!”

“M'sieu' Brownee, you may call me de cursed patois. I not know anyt'ings. But when André La France take me away, oh, I t'ink I die! Let me honly be Françoise to do your mend'! I be 'appier to honly look at you dan some womans who 'ave 'usban'!”

“Françoise, kiss me—kiss me!” His voice broke with a sob. “If you loved me you would have me!”

“M'sieu' Brownee, I ado' you!”

Suddenly giving way to passionate weeping, and to all the tenderness which nature teaches even barbarians to repress, she abandoned herself to his arms.

THE MOTHERS OF HONORÉ

The sun was shining again after squalls, and the strait showed violet, green, red, and bronze lines, melting and intermingling each changing second. Metallic lustres shone as if some volcanic fountain on the lake-bed were spraying the surface. Jules McCarty stood at his gate, noting this change in the weather with one eye. He was a small, old man, having the appearance of a mummied boy. His cheek-bones shone apple-red, and his partial blindness had merely the effect of a prolonged wink. Jules was keeping melancholy holiday in his best clothes, the well-preserved coat parting its jaunty tails a little below the middle of his back.

Another old islander paused at the gate in passing. The two men shook their heads at each other.

“I went to your wife's funeral this morning, Jules,” said the passer, impressing on the widower's hearing an important fact which might have escaped his one eye.

“You was at de funer'l? Did you see Therese?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“Ah, what a fat woman dat was! I make some of de peop' feel her arm. I feed her well.”

The other old man smiled, but he was bound to say,

“I'm sorry for you, Jules.”

“Did you see me at de church?”

“Yes, I went to the church.”

“You t'ink I feel bad—eh?”

“I thought you felt pretty bad.”

“You go to de graveyard, too?”

“No,” admitted his sympathizer, reluctantly, “I didn't go to the graveyard.”

“But dat was de fines'. You ought see me at de graveyard. You t'ink I feel bad at de church—I raise hell at de graveyard.”

The friend shuffled his feet and coughed behind his hand.

“Yes, I feel bad, me,” ruminated the bereaved man. “You get used to some woman in de house and not know where to get anodder.”

“Haven't you had your share, Jules?” inquired his friend, relaxing gladly to banter.

“I have one fine wife, maman to Honoré,” enumerated Jules, “and de squaw, and Lavelotte's widow, and Therese. It is not much.”

“I've often wondered why you didn't take Melinda Cree. You've no objection to Indians. She's next door to you, and she knows how to nurse in sickness, besides being a good washer and ironer. The summer folks say she makes the best fish pies on the island.”

“It is de trut'!” exclaimed Jules, a new light shining in his dim blue eye as he turned it towards the house of Melinda Cree. The weather-worn, low domicile was bowered in trees. There was a convenient stile two steps high in the separating fence, and it had long been made a thoroughfare by the families. On the top step sat Clethera, Melinda Cree's granddaughter. Clethera had been Honoré's playmate since infancy. She was a lithe, dark girl, with more of her French father in her than of her half-breed mother. Some needle-work busied her hands, but her ear caught every accent of the conference at the gate. She flattened her lips, and determined to tell Honoré as soon as he came in with the boat. Honoré was the favorite skipper of the summer visitors. He went out immediately after the funeral to earn money to apply on his last mother's burial expenses.

When the old men parted, Clethera examined her grandmother with stealthy eyes in a kind of aboriginal reconnoitring. Melinda Cree's black hair and dark masses of wrinkles showed through a sashless shed window where she stood at her ironing-board. Her stoical eyelids were lowered, and she moved with the rhythmical motion of the smoothing-iron. Whether she had overheard the talk, or was meditating on her own matrimonial troubles, was impossible to gather from facial muscles rigid as carved wood. Melinda Cree was one of the few pure-blooded Indians on the island. If she was fond of anything in the world, her preference had not declared itself, though previous to receiving her orphaned granddaughter into her house she had consented to become the bride of a drunken youth in his teens. This incipient husband—before he got drowned in a squall off Detour, thereby saving his aged wife some outlay—visited her only when he needed funds, and she silently paid the levy if her toil had provided the means. He also inclined to offer delicate attentions to Clethera, who spat at him like a cat, and at sight of him ever afterwards took to the attic, locking the door.

But while Melinda Cree submitted to the shackles of civilization, she did not entirely give up the ways of her own people. She kept a conical tent of poles and birch bark in her back yard, in which she slept during summer. And she was noted as wise and skilled in herbs, guarding their secrets so jealously that the knowledge was likely to die with her. Once she appeared at the bedside of a dying islander, and asked, as the doctor had withdrawn, to try her own remedies. Permission being given, she went to the kitchen, took some dried vegetable substance from her pocket, and made a tea of it. A little was poured down the sick man's throat. He revived. He drank more, and grew better. Melinda Cree's decoction cured him, and the chagrined doctor visited her to learn what wonderful remedy she had used.

“It was nothing but some little bushes,” responded the Indian woman.

“If you tell me what they are, I will pay you fifty dollars,” he pleaded.

Melinda Cree shook her head. She continued to repeat, as he raised the bid higher, “It was nothing but some little bushes, doctor; it was nothing but some little bushes.”

Clethera felt the same kind of protecting tenderness for this self-restrained squaw that Honoré had for his undersized parent, whom he always called by the baptismal name. Melinda had been the wife of a great medicine-man, who wore a trailing blanket, and white gulls' wings bound around and spread behind his head. During his lifetime he was often seen stretched on his back invoking the sun. A stranger observing him declared he was using the signs of Freemasonry, and must know its secrets.

With the readiness of custom, Honoré and Clethera met each other at the steps in the fence about dusk. She sat down on her side, and he sat down on his, the broad top of the stile separating them. Honoré was a stalwart Saxon-looking youth in his early twenties. Wind and weather had painted his large-featured countenance a rosy tan. By the employing class Honoré was considered one of the finest and most promising young quarter-breeds on the island.

The fresh moist odor of the lake, with its incessant wash upon pebbles, came to them accompanied by piercing sweetness of wild roses. For the wind had turned to the west, raking fragrant thickets. Dusk was moving from eastern fastnesses to rock battlements still tinged with sunset. The fort, dismantled of its garrison, reared a whitewashed crown against the island's back of evergreens.

Both Honoré and Clethera knew there was a Spanish war. As summer day followed summer day, the village seethed with it, as other spots then seethed. A military post, even when dismantled, always brings home to the community where it is situated the dignity and pomp of arms. Young men enlisted, and Honoré restlessly followed, with a friend from the North Shore, to look at the camp. His pulses beat with the drums. But he was carrying the burden of the family; to leave Jules and Jules's dependent wife would be deserting infants.

Clethera gave little more thought to fleets sailing tropical seas than to La Salle's vanished _Griffin_ on Northern waters. It was nothing to her, for she had never heard of it, that pioneers of her father's blood once trod that island, and lifted up the cross at St. Ignace, and planted outposts along the South Shore. Bareheaded, or with a crimson kerchief bound about her hair, she loved to help her grandmother spread the white clothes to bleach, or to be seen and respected as a prosperous laundress carrying her basket through the teeming streets. The island was her world. Its crowds in summer brought variety enough; and its virgin winter snows, the dog-sledges, the ice-boats, were month by month a procession of joys.

Clethera wondered that Honoré persistently went where newspapers were read and discussed. He stuffed them in his pockets, and pored over them while waiting in his boat beside the wharf. People would fight out that war with Spain. What thrilled her was the boom of winter surf, piling iridescent frozen spume as high as a man's head, and rimming the island in a corona of shattered rainbows. And she had an eye for summer lightning infusing itself through sheets of water as if descending in the downpour, glorifying for one instant every distinct drop.

The pair sitting with the broad top step betwixt them exchanged the smiling good-will of youth.

“I take some more party out to-night for de light-moon sail,” said Honoré, pleased to report his prosperity. “It is consider' gran' to sail in de light-moon.”

“Did you find de hot fish pie?” inquired Clethera, solicitous about man thrown on his own resources as cook.

Honoré acknowledged with hearty gratitude the supper which Melinda Cree had baked and her granddaughter had carried into the bereaved house while its inmates were out.

“They not get fish pie like that in de war. Jules, he say it is better than poor Therese could make,” Honoré added, handsomely, with large unsuspicion.

Clethera shook a finger in his face.

“Honoré McCarty, you got watch dat Jules! I got to watch Melinda. Simon Leslie, he have come by and put it in Jules' head since de funer'l! I hear it, me.”

The young man's face changed through the dusk. He braced his back against the fence and breathed the deep sigh of tried patience.

“Honoré, how many mothers is it you have already?”

“I have not count',” said the young man, testily.

“Count dem mothers,” ordered Clethera.

“Maman,” he began the enumeration, reverently. His companion allowed him a minute's silence after the mention of that fine woman.

“One,” she tallied.

“Nex',” proceeded Honoré, “poor Jules is involve' with de Chippewa woman.”

“Two,” clinched Clethera.

The Chippewa squaw was a sore theme. She had entered Jules's wigwam in good faith; but during one of his merry carouses, while both Honoré and the priest were absent, he traded her off to a North Shore man for a horse. Long after she tramped away across the frozen strait with her new possessor, and all trace of her was lost, Jules had the grace to be shamefaced about the scandal; but he got a good bargain in the horse.

“Then there is Lavelotte's widow,” continued Honoré.

“Three,” marked Clethera.

Yes, there was Lavelotte's widow, the worst of all. She whipped little Jules unmercifully, and if Honoré had not taken his part and stood before him, she might have ended by being Jules's widow. She stripped him of his whole fortune, four hundred dollars, when he finally obtained a separation from her. But instead of curing him, this experience only whetted his zest for another wife.

“And there is Therese.” Honoré did not say, “Last, Therese.” While Jules lived and his wives died, or were traded off or divorced, there would be no last.

“It is four,” declared Clethera; and the count was true. Honoré had taken Jules in hand like a father, after the adventure with Lavelotte's widow. He made his parent work hard at the boat, and in winter walked him to and from mass literally with hand on collar. He encouraged the little man, moreover, with a half interest in their house on the beach, which long-accumulated earnings of the boat paid for. But all this care was thrown away; though after Jules brought Therese home, and saw that Honoré was not appeased by a woman's cooking, he had qualms about the homestead, and secretly carried the deed back to the original owner.

“I want you keep my part of de deed,” he explained. “I not let some more women rob Honoré. My wife, if she get de deed in her han', she might sell de whole t'ing!”

“Why, no, Jules, she couldn't sell your real estate!” the former owner declared. “She would only have a life interest in your share.”

“You say she couldn't sell it?”

“No. She would have nothing but a life interest.”

“She have only life interest? By gar! I t'ink I pay somebody twenty dollar to kill her!”

But lacking both twenty dollars and determination, he lived peaceably with Therese until she died a natural death, on that occasion proudly doing his whole duty as a man and a mourner.

Remembering these affairs, which had not been kept secret from anybody on the island, Clethera spoke out under conviction.

“Honoré, it a scandal' t'ing, to get marry.”

“Me, I t'ink so too,” assented Honoré.

“Jules McCarty have disgrace' his son!”

“Melinda Cree,” retorted Honoré, obliged to defend his own, “she take a little 'usban' honly nineteen.”

“She 'ave no chance like Jules; she is oblige' to wait and take what invite her.”

The voices of children from other quarter-breed cottages, playing along the beach, added cheer to the sweet darkness. Clethera and Honoré sat silently enjoying each other's company, unconscious that their aboriginal forefathers had courted in that manner, sitting under arbors of branches.

“Why do peop' want to get marry?” propounded Clethera.

“I don't know,” said Honoré.

“Me, if some man hask me, I box his ear! I have know you all my life—but don' you never hask me to get marry!”

“I not such a fool,” heartily responded Honoré. “You and me, we have seen de folly. I not form de habit, like Jules.”

“But what we do, Honoré, to keep dat Jules and dat Melinda apart?”

Though they discussed many plans, the sequel showed that nothing effectual could be done. All their traditions and instincts were against making themselves disagreeable or showing discourtesy to their elders. The young man's French and Irish and Chippewa blood, and the young girl's French and Cree blood exhausted all their inherited diplomacy. But as steadily as the waters set like a strong tide through the strait, in spite of wind which combed them to ridging foam, the rapid courtship of age went on.

In carrying laundered clothing through the village street, Melinda Cree was carefully chaperoned by her granddaughter, and Honoré kept Jules under orders in the boat. But of early mornings and late twilights there was no restraining the twittering widower.

“Melinda 'tend to her work and is behave if Jules let her alone,” Clethera reported to Honoré. “But he slip around de garden and talk over de back fence, and he is by de ironing-board de minute my back is turn'! If he belong to me, I could 'mos' whip him!”

“Jules McCarty,” declared Honoré, with some bitterness, “when he fix his min' to marry some more, he is not turn' if he is hexcommunicate'!”

Jules, indeed, became so bold that he crowded across the stile through the very conferences of the pair united to prevent him; and his loud voice could be heard beside Melinda's ironing-board, proclaiming in the manner of a callow young suitor.

“Some peop' like separate us, Melinda, but we not let them.”

The conflict of Honoré and Clethera with Jules and Melinda ended one day in August. There had been no domestic clamor in this silent grapple of forces. The young man used no argument except maxims and morals and a tightening of authority; the young girl permitted neither neighboring maids nor the duties of religion to lure her off guard. It may be said of any French half-breed that he has all the instincts of gentility except an inclination to lying, and that arises from excessive politeness.

Honoré came to the fence at noon and called Clethera. In his excitement he crossed the stile and stood on her premises.

“It no use, Clethera. Jules have tell me this morning he have arrange' de marriage.”

Clethera glanced behind her at the house she called home, and threw herself in Honoré's arms, as she had often done in childish despairs. Neither misunderstood the action, and it relieved them to shed a few tears on each other's necks. This truly Latin outburst being over, they stood apart and wiped their eyes on their sleeves.

“It no use,” exclaimed Clethera, “to set a good examp' to your grandmother!”

“I not wait any longer now,” announced Honoré, giving rein to fierce eagerness. “I go to de war to-day.”

“But de camp is move',” objected Clethera.

“I have pass' de examin', and I know de man to go to when I am ready; he promis' to get me into de war. Jules have de sails up now, ready to take me across to de train.”

“But who will have de boat when you are gone, Honoré?”

“Jules. And he bring Melinda to de house.”

“She not come. She not leave her own house. She take her 'usban' in.”

“Then Jules must rent de house. You not detest poor Jules?”

“I not detest him like de hudder one.”

“Au 'voir, Clethera.”

“Au 'voir, Honoré.”

They shook hands, the young man wringing himself away with the animation of one who goes, the girl standing in the dull anxiety of one who stays. War, so remote that she had heard of it indifferently, rushed suddenly from the tropics over the island.

“Are your clothes all mend' and ready, Honoré?”

But what thought can a young man give to his clothes when about to wrap himself in glory? He is politely tapping at the shed window of the Indian woman, and touching his cap in farewell and gallant capitulation, and with long-limbed sweeping haste, unusual in a quarter-breed, he is gone to the docks, with a bundle under one arm, waving his hand as he passes. All the women and children along the street would turn out to see him go to the war if his intention were known, and even summer idlers about the bazars would look at him with new interest.

Clethera could not imagine the moist and horrid heat of those southern latitudes into which Honoré departed to throw himself. Shifting mists on the lake rim were no vaguer than her conception of her country's mighty undertaking. But she could feel; and the life she had lived to that day was wrenched up by the roots, leaving her as with a bleeding socket.

All afternoon she drenched herself with soapsuds in the ferocity of her washing. By the time Jules returned with the boat, the lake was black as ink under a storm cloud, with glints of steel; a dull bar stretched diagonally across the water. Beyond that a whitening of rain showed against the horizon. Points of cedars on the opposite island pricked a sullen sky.

Clethera's tubs were under the trees. She paid no attention to what befell her, or to her grandmother, who called her out of the rain. It came like a powder of dust, and then a moving, blanched wall, pushing islands of flattened mist before it. Under a steady pour the waters turned dull green, and lightened shade by shade as if diluting an infusion of grass. Waves began to come in regular windrows. Though Clethera told herself savagely she not care for anything in de world, her Indian eye took joy of these sights. The shower-bath from the trees she endured without a shiver.

Jules sat beside Melinda to be comforted. He wept for Honoré, and praised his boy, gasconading with time-worn boasts.

“I got de hang of him, and now I got to part! But de war will end, now Honoré have gone into it. His gran'fodder was such a fighter when de British come to take de island, he turn' de cannon and blow de British off. The gran'fodder of Honoré was a fine man. He always keep de bes' liquors and hy wines on his sideboa'd.”

When Honoré had been gone twenty-four hours, and Jules was still idling like a boy undriven by his task-master, leaving the boat to rock under bare poles at anchor on the rise and fall of the water, Clethera went into their empty house. It contained three rooms, and she laid violent hands on male housekeeping. The service was almost religious, like preparing linen for an altar. It comforted her unacknowledged anguish, which increased rather than diminished, the unrest of which she resented with all her stoic Indian nature.

Nets, sledge-harness, and Honoré's every-day clothes hung on his whitewashed wall. The most touching relic of any man is the hat he has worn. Honoré's cap crowned the post of his bed like a wraith. The room might have been a young hermit's cell in a cave, or a tunnel in the evergreens, it was so simple and bare of human appointments. Clethera stood with the broom in one hand, and tipped forward a piece of broken looking-glass on his shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent maidenhood now belonged.

As Clethera propped the glass again in place, she heard Jules come in. She resumed her sweeping with resolute strokes on the bare boards, which would explain to his ear the necessity of her presence. He appeared at the door, and it was Honoré!

It was Honoré, shamefaced but laughing, back from the war within twenty-four hours! Clethera heard the broom-handle strike the floor as one hears the far-off fall of a spar on a ship in harbor. She put her palms together, without flying into his arms or even offering to shake hands.

“You come back?” she cried out, her voice sharpened by joy.

“The war is end',” said Honoré. “Peace is declare' yesterday!” He threw his bundle down and looked fondly around the rough walls. “All de peop' laugh at me because I go to war when de war is end'!”

“They laugh because de war is end'! I laugh too?” said Clethera, relaxing to sobs. Tears and cries which had been shut up a day and a night were let loose with French abandon. Honoré opened his arms to comfort her in the old manner, and although she rushed into them, strange embarrassment went with her. The two could not look at each other.

“It is de 'omesick,” she explained. “When you go to war it make me 'omesick.”

“Me, too,” owned Honoré. “I never know what it is before. I not mind de fighting, but I am glad de war is end', account of de 'omesick!”