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Title: The Plains of Abraham
Author: Curwood, James Oliver (1878-1927)
Illustrator: Anonymous
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Doubleday, Doran & Gundy, 1928
Date first posted: 15 October 2009
Date last updated: 15 October 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #402

This ebook was produced by: Al Haines





[Illustration: Front endpaper]





THE PLAINS

OF

ABRAHAM


By

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD




TORONTO, CANADA

DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & GUNDY, LIMITED

1928




COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1928

BY

DOUBLEBAY, DORAN & GUNDY, LIMITED, TORONTO


_Printed and Bound in Canada_

Press of The Hunter-Rose Co., Limited




_FOREWORD_

An opinion I have stated before is that a writer of romance is not an
historian, nor can he ever be judged as such, though his pages may
carry more of history and truer history of a certain people and time
than has been written.  For, as there are times in an historical novel
when fact insists upon drawing a sombre cloud between romance and its
fulfilment, so there are times when the necessities of romance make
permissible that poetic licence which writers of fiction have been
granted from the remoteness of the ancients, and which will persist
further ahead than we can possibly see into the future.  In _The Plains
of Abraham_ I have made an humble effort to "carry on" with the same
fidelity to truth that I prescribed for myself in my first historical
romance, _The Black Hunter_, and it is probably a deeper satisfaction
to me than it is to my readers to know that Marie Antoinette Tonteur
and her fierce old father lived and loved as I have described; that
Catherine Bulain and her valiant son were flesh and blood of their day;
that Tiaoga and Shindas, Silver Heels and Wood Pigeon, and Mary
Daghlen, the Thrush, are not creatures of fancy, and that _The Plains
of Abraham_, like _The Black Hunter_, is largely a romance of life as
it was lived and not as it might have been lived.  It is with a keen
sense of my own limitations that I realize I have been only partly
successful in bringing back to life those men and women whom I chose
from the accumulation of material at hand.  The gathering of this
material has been the most thrilling adventure of my life; the
travelling foot by foot over the hallowed ground, the reading of
letters written by hands dead a hundred and fifty years or more, the
dreaming over yellow manuscripts written by priests and martyrs, the
winning of the friendship of holy nuns of the Ursulines and devout
fathers of Quebec who still guard the treasures of the New World
pioneers of their faith--and, lastly, the unveiling of loves and hates
and tragedies and happiness of the almost forgotten period embracing
the very birth of both the American and Canadian peoples, and weighted
with happenings that shook the foremost nations of the earth and
largely made them what they are to-day.

While _The Plains of Abraham_ and _The Black Hunter_ are in no way
dependent upon each other, it has been my intention that they shall,
together, give a more complete picture of the men and women and
stirring events of their times than it would be possible for either to
do individually.  The present novel begins approximately where its
predecessor left off, the first terminating with the episodes closely
following the battle of Lake St. George and the second finding its
finale on the Plains of Abraham.  Anne St. Denis and Nancy Lotbinire
of _The Black Hunter_ play their small parts in the lives of Antoinette
Tonteur and Jeems Bulain of _The Plains of Abraham_, so close is the
intermingling of the periods.

That we, as a people, know little of the more intimately human side of
our history, and that its most picturesque and dramatic incidents are
buried under a mass of printed versions which recognize only the great
and the near great, is illustrated in no way better than by the
forgotten report of an officer who was under Colonel Henry Boquet when
he invaded the Hidden Town of the Indians described in this story and
"released" the white prisoners there, later assembling them in a camp
to which white men and women came from the near-by provinces to find
their lost ones. This remarkable document was printed in the provincial
correspondence of the Register of Pennsylvania in 1765, and since that
time, in so far as I have been able to discover, has rested in
oblivion, though it throws more light on Indian character than any
other thing that has been written.

A part of this report is as follows:


The Indians at first delivered up twenty prisoners, but promised to
restore the remainder. The Colonel, having no faith in their promises,
immediately marched into the very heart of their country, where he
received a large number, even children born of white mothers, but these
little children were so completely savage that they were brought to the
camp tied hand and foot; for in no other way could they have been taken
from the wigwams. Two hundred were now given up, but it was supposed
that at least one hundred yet remained in the interior, scattered among
different tribes.

Language cannot describe the joy, terror, disappointment, expectation,
horror, and gloom; every face exhibited different emotions.  The scene
baffled description; husbands found wives, parents children, and
sisters brothers.  The brother embraced the tender companion of his
early years, now the mother of Indian children.  Various were the
groups thus collected--some, not understanding the language of their
new-found relatives, were unable to make their wishes known--others
recovered children long supposed dead--some stood in despair, living
monuments of wretched uncertainty.  Embracing their captives for the
last time, the Indians shed torrents of tears and gave up all their
little property as an evidence of their affection.  They even applied
and obtained the consent of Boquet to accompany them to Pittsburgh; and
during that journey they hunted and gave venison to the captives on the
march.  Among the captives was a young Virginian who had captured the
heart of a young Mingo.  Never was there seen an instance of more real
affection, regard, and constancy.  The young Mingo was told to beware
of the relatives of her he loved.  He replied, "I would live in her
sight or die in her presence--what pleasure shall the Mingo have--who
is to cook the venison--who to thank him for the soft fur?  No one!
The venison will run--the fur will not be taken--the Mingo can hunt no
more."  The Colonel dismissed him with a handsome present.  Every
captive left the Indians with regret.  The Indian children shed tears,
and considered the whites as barbarians.  Several women eloped in the
night and ran off to join their Indian friends.  One young woman was
carried off tied by her friends, to prevent her from joining the
Indians.  There had not been a solitary instance among them of any
woman having her delicacy injured by being compelled to marry.  They
had been left liberty of choice, and those who chose to remain single
were not sufferers on that account.  There was one young woman whose
relation was such as to excite an unusual degree of interest.  It had
been her fate to be captured at an early age.  She had been captured
and taken away to a distant tribe, far from the dwelling of the whites.
Years had removed every prospect of restoration to her former home.
She had been adopted in the family of an Indian chief.  Her delicacy of
form and feature made an impression on a young Indian.  He would attend
and aid her in the performance of her duties; sympathize with her
distress, and alleviate her cares--thus by a thousand kind attentions
he won her heart.  They were married--they had children--they were
happy--she felt happy because she possessed the affection of her
husband and children.  When she heard she was to be delivered up to her
former friends her grief knew no bounds.  Thus would she reason: "As a
wife of an Indian, as a mother of Indian children, can I enter the
dwelling of my parents; will my parents be kind; will they receive my
children with affection; will my former companions associate with the
wife of an Indian Chief; will they not shun my steps?  And my Indian
husband who has been so kind, so very kind, can I desert him?"  No, she
would not surrender him--and that night she eloped from the camp,
accompanied by her husband and children.  When Colonel Boquet was
informed of the circumstance, he requested that no pursuit should be
made, as she was happier with her Chief than she would be if restored
to her home.


Upon his return from this expedition, Colonel Boquet was immediately
elected to the rank and pay of Major General, Commander in Chief of His
Majesty's forces in the Southern Department of America.

My great-grandmother was a Mohawk, and it is with pardonable pride and
satisfaction that I find myself able to present to the public an
occasional evidence of the nobler side of Indian character, suppressed
through a period of centuries by the white man's egoism and prejudice.
The Indian was the greatest of all friends, the greatest of all
patriots, the greatest of all lovers of his country.  Despoiled,
subjugated, annihilated, _he died a savage_.

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD.

Owosso, Michigan, November 20th, 1926.




THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM


CHAPTER I

On a sunny afternoon in May, 1749, a dog, a boy, a man, and a woman had
crossed the oak opens of Tonteur's Hill and were trailing toward the
deeper wilderness of the French frontier westward of the Richelieu and
Lake Champlain--the dog first, the boy following, the man next, and the
woman last.

It was a reversal of proper form, Tonteur had growled as he watched
them go.  A fool's way of facing a savage-infested country that had no
end.  The man should have marched at the head of his precious column
with his long gun ready and his questing eyes alert; the woman next, to
watch and guard with him; then the boy and the dog, if such nuisances
were to be tolerated in travel of this kind, with evening coming on.

Tonteur was the one-legged warrior seigneur from whose grist mill down
in the valley the four were going home.

His eyes had followed the woman with a subdued and appraising hunger in
them.  Henri Bulain was a strange man, he had thought.  He might be a
little crazy, might even be a fool.  But he was also a very lucky
husband to possess a woman with the sweet face and form and the
divinely chaste heart of Catherine, his wife.

Jeems was a fortunate boy to have her for a mother.  Even the dog was a
scoundrel for luck.  An Indian dog at that.  A sneaking,
good-for-nothing dog.  A wreck of a dog without a soul, to be fed by
her, petted by her, smiled at by her--as he had seen her smile.

Tonteur had prodded the heel of his wooden leg into the soft earth as
they disappeared across his meadow bottom lands.  The King of France
had honoured him, and he was first of the long string of heroic
fighting barons settled along the Richelieu to hold the English and
their red barbarians back.  He was Doorkeeper to the waterway that led
straight to the heart of New France.  If the English came with their
scalping fiends, the Mohawks and the Senecas, they would have to pass
over him first of all.  No general could be given greater distinction
than that.  Honour.  Wealth.  A wide domain over which he was king.

And yet----

He envied Henri Bulain.


It was midafternoon.  Maytime shadows were growing longer toward the
east.  The sun was still a mellow glory over the land, a golden
radiance without sting or glare, a lambent sea which spread itself in
warm pools and streaming veils over an earth which seemed to be purring
gently with peace and joy.  It had been like that since morning.  It
had been like that for days.  Sweet rains had come, pulling up green
shoots from the soil; there had been winds, dark clouds, and deep
thunder, but only at night since two weeks ago this Thursday afternoon.
With each dawn had come the glow of the sun, the singing of birds, the
building of nests, the opening of flowers, the deepening a little more
of the plastic greens in the forest.

It was so quiet this afternoon that one could hear clearly the humming
of bees, and with this friendly and comforting sound the tinkling
symphony of running water finding its way in a hundred little creeks
and rills down to the meadowed lands of the Richelieu.  There was no
wind that moved a leaf or twig, yet all about there seemed to be a
living breath of something--a spirit of growing things, a song of
flowers, a perfumed laughter rioting on the hilltop and in the valley,
almost too mysterious for human eyes to see or human ears to hear.

It was the hour when birds were singing softly.  Morning had heard
their defiance, a glorious and fearless challenge of feathered
minstrelsy to all the spirits of darkness; but with late afternoon,
sunset, evening, these same slim-throated songsters found a note of
gratitude and of prayer in their chastened voices.  A thrush sang that
way now.  A catbird's melody joined it.  Silver-throated brush warblers
piped their subdued hymns in the thickets.  Flowers crushed underfoot.
In the open spaces they carpeted the earth with white and pink and
blue.  Flowers and birds and peace--a world filled with a declining
sun--a smiling heaven of blue over the tree-tops--and with them a dog,
a boy, a man, and a woman advancing westward.

Three of these, even the dog, Tonteur envied.

This dog had a name which fitted him, Tonteur had thought.  For he was
a wreck of a dog--even more a wreck than the splendid seigneur himself,
with his stub of a shot-off leg and a breast that bore sword marks
which would have killed an ordinary man.  The dog, first of all, was
big and bony and gaunt, a physical ensemble of rough-edged joints and
craggy muscles that came by nature and not because of hunger.  He was a
homely dog, so hopelessly homely that one could not help loving him at
sight.  His hair was bristly and unkempt.  His paws were huge.  His
jaws were long and lank, and his ears were relics of many a hard-fought
battle with other beasts of his kind.  His tail was half gone, which
left him only a stub to wag.  He walked with a limp, a heavy,
never-falling limp that seemed to shake his long body from end to end,
for his left fore paw--like Tonteur's foot--was missing.  A crooked,
cheery, inartistic, lovable dog to whom the woman--in a moment's
visioning of the fitness of things--had given the name of Odds-and-Ends.

So Tonteur was half right in thinking of him as a wreck of a dog, but
in one other thing he was wrong.  The dog did have a soul--a soul that
belonged to the boy, his master.  That soul had a great scar seared
upon it by hunger and abuse in an Indian camp where Henri Bulain had
found him four years before, and from which, out of pity for a dying
creature, he had taken him home to Jeems.  It was a scar cut deep by
clubs and kicks, a wound that had never healed and that made the dog
what he was--a tireless and suspicious hunter of scents and sounds in
the woods.

He was always ahead by a step or two, even when the song of birds and a
softly stirring melody of peace filled the day.  He was ahead this
afternoon.  Of the four who were filing westward, he seemed to be the
only one who watched and listened for danger to come out of the beauty
and stillness of the world about them.  Now and then he glanced up at
his master.  Trouble lay in the boy's face and eyes, and the dog sensed
it after a little and whined in a questioning way in his throat.

Daniel James Bulain was the boy's name, but from babyhood his mother
had called him Jeems.  He was twelve and weighed twenty pounds more
than his dog.  Odds-and-Ends, called Odd for short, weighted sixty, if
the scales in Tonteur's gristmill were right.  One would have known the
dog and the boy belonged together even had they been in a crowd, for if
Odd was a battered old warrior, the boy, on the other hand, gave every
evidence of an ambition to achieve a similar physical condition.

"Why, he's dressed up like a bold, bad pirate come to abduct my little
girl and hold her for ransom," Tonteur had roared, down in the valley,
and Jeems's father had joined the baron in his laughter; then, to make
the thing worse, Tonteur had turned him round and round, slowly and
appraisingly, with lovely little Marie Antoinette looking on, her
dainty nose upturned in patrician disdain--and with Paul Tache, her
detestable cousin from the great city of Quebec, openly leering and
grimacing at him from behind her back.  And this after he had prepared
himself with painstaking care for Marie Antoinette's eyes should she
happen to see him!  That was the tragedy of it.  He had put on his new
doeskin suit on this day when they were going to Tonteur's mill for a
bag of meal.  He carried a gun which was two inches longer than
himself.  A big powderhorn swung at his waist, in his belt was a knife,
and over his shoulder hung the most treasured of his possessions, a
slim ash bow and a quiver filled with arrows.  He had worn his coonskin
cap of fur in spite of the warmth of the day, because it looked better
than the lighter one, which was stripped, and in this cap was a long
turkey feather.  Odd, the dog, was proud of his martial-looking master,
but he could not understand the change that had come over the boy or
why he was going home with such a strangely set and solemn face.

Henri Bulain was aching to describe the little scene to his wife as
soon as Jeems was out of hearing.  But Henri was always seeing either
the bright or the funny side of things.  That was one reason why
Catherine had married him, and it was why she loved him now even more
than fifteen years ago, before Jeems was born.  It was the big and
all-embracing reason why the wilderness with its trees and flowers and
dangers loved Henri Bulain.  It was because he loved life--loved it in
such a vastly inclusive and mysteriously trustful way that Louis Edmond
Tonteur, the lion-hearted baron of the seigneurie, had called him a
fool for his simplicity and predicted the day when his scalp and those
of his wife and boy would adorn the small round hoops of the savages.

From her position behind the dog, the boy, and the man, Catherine
Bulain looked upon her world with a joyous and unafraid pride.  No boy,
in her opinion, could equal Jeems, and no man her husband.  That
challenge always lay in her dark eyes, rich with sleeping lights
because love was there.  One could see and feel her happiness, and as
Tonteur secretly built up the fire of his yearning when he was alone,
so she loved to exult in her own possessions when her men folk were
ahead and could not see all that came and went in her face.  This
desire to hold within herself some small and sacred part of her
rejoicing was because she was English and not French.  That was why
Daniel James had an English name, inherited from her father, who had
been a New England schoolmaster and afterward an agent of the Penns
down in Pennsylvania.  It was on the frontier of that far province that
Henri had found and married her two years before her father's death.[1]

"And for fifteen years you have been growing younger and more
beautiful," he was fond of telling her.  "What a tragedy it will be
when I am old and bent and you are still a girl!"

It was true that Catherine did not look her thirty-five years.  Her
face, as well as her eyes, was young with the softness and radiant
changeableness of girlhood, and especially on this Thursday afternoon
when she walked behind her boy and her husband from the Richelieu
bottom lands.  The climb over Tonteur's Hill had brought a flush to her
cheeks, and with the glow of the sun in her glossy hair she was a
witching picture for Henri to look back on now and then as he shifted
the heavy bag of meal from one shoulder to the other.

Tonteur was aware, possibly even more than Henri Bulain, that
Catherine's adoration of her men folk and of everything that went with
them, even to the primitive discomforts of the wilderness life which
had claimed her, was built up against a background of something more
than merely being the mate of a man and the mother of a son.  Culture
and learning and broadness of vision and thought, nurtured in her first
by a gentle mother, and, after her death, developed and strengthened by
a schoolmaster father, had given to her a medium of priceless value by
which to measure happiness.  Sometimes she yearned a little for the
things outside this happiness--dreamed of brocades with gold
embroidery, of buttercup silks and blue satins, of white moires and
dainty Valenciennes, and for that reason in Henri's cabin were roguish
caps with pink and lavender ribbons, and cobwebby lace for Catherine's
hair, and many simple but pretty things made by her own clever hands.
She could make frills and fichus as fine as any that Madame Tonteur
ever wore, with all their cost, and to-day her simple gown of sprigged
muslin, caught up with blue love-knots, and her cloak and hood of
bakneesh red had given her a loveliness in Tonteur's eyes that made his
heart thump like a boy's in his battle-scarred breast.  Because of her
feminine adroitness in fashioning beauty and perfection out of simple
and inexpensive things, and also because she was of the spawn of the
despicable English, Madame Henriette Tonteur had come to regard her
with much the same aversion and dislike with which she would have
looked upon a cup of poison.

Tonteur knew this and cursed in his honest heart at the woman who was
his wife, with her coldly patrician face, her powdered hair, her jewels
and gowns and her platonic ignorance of love--and then thanked his God
that little Marie Antoinette was growing less like her with each day
that passed over her pretty head.  For Marie Antoinette was
tempestuous, like himself, a patrician without doubt, but with a warm
and ready passion to offset that curse, and for this, too, he blessed
the fortune which in one way had been so unkind to him.

Behind her husband and boy Catherine had been thinking of Tonteur and
of his wife, the aristocratic Henriette.  For a long time she had known
of Madame Tonteur's hatred, but it was not until this afternoon that
the other discovery had come to her, for, in spite of his most heroic
efforts, Tonteur had betrayed himself when suddenly she had caught him
looking at her.  Catherine had seen the shadow of his secret--like a
ghost swiftly disappearing.  Up over the Hill she had added many twos
and twos together, until, in the sure way of a woman, she knew what
Tonteur was thinking and did not fear or distrust him for it.

At the same time her thoughts inspired her with a warm appreciation of
her own great fortune, for against another man's unhappiness and
another woman's failure as a wife she could see more clearly the things
for which she, in the fullness of her felicity, should offer up the
devoutest of prayers.  The man ahead of her was humming a French tune
as he carried his hundred pounds of whole-corn meal, and one could see
that he was French in every drop of blood that ran through his veins.
Catherine loved the spirit of this blood even more than she did the
English which was in herself.  Just as she had become French, so Henri
in his heart had become as wholly English, and never tired of swearing
that he would not trade one tiny breath of the precious life in
Catherine's body for all of his beloved New France.  From the
beginning, his influence had been stronger than his wife's, for while
Catherine kept everything that was English alive in her memories, and
taught her boy in English as well as in French, and sang her English
songs and treasured her English books, she loved New France as she had
never loved the more forbidding aspects of her New England home, and
she loved the warm-hearted and sunny people in it with a sympathy and
devotion which might have come from birth and not adoption.

Yet Madame Tonteur hated her.  Disbelieving whatever good might have
been said of Catherine, she hated her first as a deadly enemy of her
race, and hated her then because she dared hold her head as proudly as
a baron's lady, and hated her last of all because, nothing more than
the wife of a worthless backwoodsman like Henri Bulain, she was
impudent enough to be the prettiest woman anywhere near the Tonteur
seigneurie.

And, so far as it was in her power, she had planted and nurtured this
hatred to growth in the heart and mind of her proud daughter, Marie
Antoinette, until Tonteur, blind to the feline subtlety of a woman in
such matters, wondered why it was that his girl, whom he worshipped
above all other things on earth, should so openly display
unfriendliness and dislike whenever Jeems came to Tonteur Manor.



[1] Daniel James Adams, Catherine's father, was killed in a feud
between a village of Tuscaroras and a rival village of Delawares, in
Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1736.




CHAPTER II

Of this same thing Jeems had been thinking as he walked ahead of his
father and mother.  His mind, at present, was busy with the stress of
fighting.  Mentally, and physically in a way, he was experiencing the
thrill of sanguinary battle.  Half a dozen times since beginning the
long climb over Tonteur's Hill he had choked and beaten Paul Tache, and
in every moment of these mental triumphs Marie Antoinette looked on
with wonder and horror as he pitilessly assailed and vanquished her
handsome young cousin from the big city of Quebec.[1]

Even in the heat of these vivid imaginings, Jeems was sick at heart,
and it was the shadow of this sickness which Odd caught when he looked
up into his master's eyes.  From the day Jeems had first seen Marie
Antoinette, when she was seven and he was nine, he had dreamed of her,
and had anticipated through weeks and months the journeys which his
father permitted him to make with him to Tonteur Manor.  On these rare
occasions he had gazed with childish adoration at the little princess
of the seigneurie and had made her presents of flowers and feathers and
nuts and maple sugar and queer treasures which he brought from the
forests.  These tokens of his homage had never served to build a bridge
across the abyss which lay between them.

He had stood this hurt and still kept Marie Antoinette in his thoughts,
for there was no other child to help fill her place.  But since last
autumn, when Madame Tonteur's sister and her son Paul had come to the
seigneurie, his dreams had grown more clouded until, on this Thursday
afternoon, they were replaced by grim and merciless visions of a future
vengeance on the young man who had laughed at him and humiliated him,
and who, without any grace whatever that he could see, basked warmly in
the smiles and graciousness of Marie Antoinette's favour.

For all his shattered hopes of friendship with Toinette, he now found
an excuse to blame this rich and high-toned youth with his green and
crimson velvet suits, his lace ruffles and gold brocades, his
silver-handled sword and supercilious, conceited airs.  His antagonism
was not a thing brewed only in his mind, for Paul Tache, who was the
son of a Quebec army officer deep in the intrigues of the Intendant,
was the last straw to break down whatever hopes he had possessed of
ultimately making an impression on the seigneur's daughter.  With the
coming of Paul, who was two years older and a head taller than himself,
and who paraded all the fine and courtly manners taught to young
gentlemen in Quebec, she had regarded him more haughtily than ever, and
that very day had made no effort to hide her amusement when Paul said,
with a sneer on his dark face, "_Doesn't it make you tired to walk all
the way in from the woods, little boy?  And does your mother allow you
to load that old gun of yours with powder and ball?_"

It was the memory of this moment which rankled in his breast--a moment
in which he had stood speechless, his face hot and red, his tongue
hopelessly tied, his heart only half beating as the Quebec boy walked
away with Toinette, strutting like a turkey cock and looking back
contemptuously as he went.  It was the knowledge of his own failure to
reply or to do anything but stand red-faced and dumb, like a fool,
accepting the insult without protest, that deepened his gloom and
increased his bitterness.

He was glad when his mother and father paused to rest on the edge of a
great rock near the trail, for this interval gave him opportunity to go
on alone, and when he was alone he could tear and thrash Toinette's
cousin in a much more admirable way than when the others were tramping
close at his heels.  By the time Odd had preceded him to the edge of a
high plateau, which was richly covered with grass and thickly grown
with big chestnut trees, his mental orgy of vengeance and blood-shed
was beginning to subside.

Suddenly Odd stopped so that his gaunt body made a barrier against
Jeems's knees.  He stood with his pawless leg off the ground, and when
he slowly rested it to earth again it was in a manner which sent a
thrill of anticipation through his master.  They stood at the edge of a
flower-strewn open among the chestnut trees, a dancing place for the
wood fairies, his mother had called it that morning, and all about this
lovely open was a thick growth of hazel, like a fence put there by the
fairies themselves to shut out prying eyes from their frolics.  It was
a hundred yards across this sun-filled playground of the wild, and on
the far side of it, concealed in the bushes, Jeems knew there was game
of some kind.

He dropped to the earth and drew himself behind the decaying mass of a
monster log that had fallen a hundred years before.  Odd crouched at
his side with his muzzle level with the top of the log.  Thus a minute
passed, and after that another, and more on top of them, yet Odd gave
no sign of discouragement, nor did Jeems.  They were so still and
motionless that a red squirrel studied them curiously for a sign of
life and a chickadee almost stopped to rest on the end of Jeems's gun.
A fragile sweetness of violets and anemones rose from the ground, but
Jeems did not look down at the white and pink and blue masses of them
crushed under his knees.  He watched the far side of the clearing on a
line as straight as a die with the pointing of Odd's nose.

Another minute of this rustling stillness, and a magnificent turkey
cock strutted majestically out into the sun.  He weighed twenty pounds
if an ounce, thought Jeems.  His head was like blood, his beautiful
body a gold and purple bronze, and his gorgeous breast plume touched
the ground.  He was a proud and immaculate bird, defying all the world
in the empty open, and he shuffled his wings and began to swagger about
in a circle while the chuckling and clucking sound of his satisfaction
clearly reached the watchers' ears.  In this moment Jeems thought again
of Paul Tache, for the Quebec boy was like this turkey cock, always
flaunting his clothes and disporting himself with the importance of a
man.

He caught his breath short as a slim brown female bird came out from
the bushes to join her red-headed monarch.  A flutter of velvety wings
followed her and in as many seconds six more females joined the
gathering in the open.  The turkey cock paraded more proudly than
before and puffed himself up until he was twice his honest size, and it
seemed to Jeems that the lady turkeys were all crowding about him like
so many Marie Antoinettes attracted by his fine clothes and his manner
of making himself big in their eyes.  At the sight before him, Jeems
hated Paul Tache more than ever and was possessed with the inspiring
thought of wreaking his first vengeance upon his rival's head by
killing the turkey cock.

Slowly he withdrew the long-barrelled gun from the top of the log and
tautened the string of his bow.  He waited until the big bird stood
less than eighty yards away.  An inch at a time he rose higher on his
knees, and Odd's body grew stiffer with his movement.  A choking sound
came from the dog's throat as the long bow was bent.  The twang of the
string was like the ring of a steel tuning fork, and across the open
sped a grayish flash.  There followed a mellow sound, a great
commotion, a leaping of gorgeous colour high into the air, then a wild
beating of wings and a speeding away of seven brown forms to the safety
of cover.  Paul Tache, the turkey cock, was down and dying, and in the
space of a dozen seconds his seven Marie Antoinettes were gone.

A moment later, Jeems and Odd stood looking down on the turkey cock,
and gladness leapt once more into the boy's face and eyes--for here was
not only a splendid dinner for to-morrow, but also, in his imagination,
the first blow struck against his enemy.


There was a point on the ancient Indian trail over and beyond Tonteur's
Hill where a narrow path made by generations of Caughnawaga, Algonquin,
and Ottawa feet ran close to the edge of a precipitous height with
miles and miles of glorious country under it.  This valley lay to the
westward and was rich with deep forests and glimmering lakes, a quietly
slumbering land filled with mystery and beauty and with seldom the
smoke of an Indian camp fire rising out of it.  It was a fortunate
valley in many ways, for it was far enough from the Richelieu to escape
the desecration of white men's axes, too near to the long-houses of the
Mohawks for the safety of the red hunters of their enemies from above
the St. Lawrence, and too closely a part of the French and their allies
to be more than adventurously invaded by the hunting parties of the Six
Nations.  So it had lain for many years in peace and silence.  Yet
countless eyes must have looked upon it in the centuries that had gone
by, for on its valleyward side the shelving rock was worn smooth by
those who had rested there to gaze down into its forbidden lure, where
life would have been so pleasant to live.

Viewed from where Catherine and Henri paused to rest, the valley under
them was a huge oriental rug of greens and golds and blacks and
silvers--greens where the meadows ran in and out and the hardwoods were
bursting into tender leaf, golds where the slanting sun struck floods
of yellow light upon poplars and birch, blacks where the thick
evergreens grew in deep masses of darkening gloom, and silvers where
the still waters of three small lakes gleamed with the warm splendour
of jewels.  As they sat on the rock there came to them a faintly
exquisite and lulling melody, a droning and unchanging cadence which
enchanted and rested the senses, mingling as it rose with sweet air
laden with the delicate fragrance of flowers and the gossamery breath
of growing things.  Only at dawn and at an hour when the sun was poised
for its drop behind the curtain of the western forests did this sound
rise from the valley--the song of thousands of squirrels.  And as it
was this afternoon so it must have been from the beginning, for, as far
back as the oldest Indian story went, the huge gray stone had been
called Squirrel Rock.

As Henri's eyes rested upon the pleasant scene, he told the story of
Jeems, and he was still chuckling over the humour of what had happened
when he discovered the clouded and serious look in Catherine's face.

"It is what I have been guessing of late," she said, and there was no
laughter in her voice.  "Madame Tonteur hates me and she has been
training Toinette to hate Jeems!"

"What are you saying?" cried her husband.  "Madame Tonteur hate you!
It is impossible.  Of all people in the world not to like----"

"I am the one," said his wife.  "And you, poor Henri, with your foolish
notion that everyone must love us, have never been able to guess the
truth.  She hates me so much that she would like to poison me, and not
being able to do that, she has turned little Antoinette's mind against
Jeems."

"You went in to see her to-day!"

"Yes, because I am a woman."

"She cannot hate you!"

"No more than she can hate bugs and snakes and poison."

"But--Tonteur.  It is impossible, I tell you!  He does not feel that
way."

"No, I am sure he does not," said Catherine.

"If Tonteur likes us and treats us so well, why should his wife dislike
you?" he demanded.

"First, because I am English.  You must always remember that.  Though I
have come to love your country as dearly as my own, I am still English,
and Jeems is half English.  We are of a people who are your country's
enemies.  That is one reason why she hates me."

"And there is another?"

"Yes.  She hates me because her husband sees fit to look upon me in a
kindly way," answered Catherine.  She was ready to say more, but the
glad laugh which she loved came from Henri's lips, and in a moment she
was tightly held in his arms.

Then he thrust her from him with playful roughness and pointed down the
valley.

"As long as we have that, what do we care about Madame Tonteur or all
the rest of the world?" he cried.  "Let it fight, I say, and let women
like Tonteur's wife quarrel and hate if they must.  So long as you are
not unhappy in a land such as this we look upon yonder, I would not
trade my place for all the kingdoms on earth!"

"Nor I, as long as I have you and Jeems," said Catherine, and as Henri
turned to his corn again she added, "but I am not thinking of you or of
myself.  I am thinking of Jeems."

They started slowly up the trail.

"Madame Tonteur's dissatisfaction with me has been amusing, and I have
had my innocent frolics out of it, like to-day, for instance," she
continued in the silence of her husband's pondering thoughtfulness.
"With you and Jeems I need no other company to keep me happy, and so
Madame Tonteur's dislike has caused me no special pain.  I have even
liked to tease and plague her, for which I should properly feel shame.
To-day I let my braids down, feigning a bit of headache as I did it,
but truthfully to let her see how long and thick they are and how
skimpy her own hair is, for she is only a little older than I.  You
should have heard her sniff when her sister from Quebec said my hair
was beautiful and that it would be a crime to pomade or powder it.  I
may be wicked, Henri, but I cannot hold myself from pestering her in
these ways, for all the trouble she has taken to make me so distasteful
to her own unreasonable self.  I tried so hard to be her friend, but
when at last there ceased to be a hope, why, I began to see the humour
of it, just as you have always taught me to catch the whimsies in
unpleasant things.  But with Jeems and Toinette--it is different.  He
has dreamed of her for a long time and has made her a spirit companion
in his adventures and play."

Henri looked at Catherine.  "I know--I can see--I was stupid to laugh
at him down there.  But Tonteur laughed, too.  I did not think a boy so
young would take it to heart."

"A child is like a woman," said his wife.  "Both are more easily hurt
than man ever dreams."

"I will hurry to Jeems and tell him how sorry I am," said Henri.

"You will do nothing of the kind," replied Catherine.

"But if I have done wrong----"

"You will keep it to yourself--this once," decided his wife.  So he
waited discreetly, and after a moment she said, "Henri, I know that
Louis Tonteur is a good and noble man and that in his heart is a great
loneliness and want of something, although he worships Toinette.  No
man could love his wife, even with her blue blood and high ways.  He is
so pitifully lonely that I am going to ask him to come to our place
often and bring Toinette with him."

"You think he will come?" asked Henri eagerly.

"I am sure he will," replied his wife, and now that she was thinking
only of Jeems, she was glad she had not told her husband what had been
at her tongue's end--the secret of her discovery that afternoon.  "He
will come," she added, "and I am sure, if I ask him, he will bring
Toinette."

Henri laughed his pleasure.

"Tonteur is one man I love," he said.

"He is a man made to love," agreed Catherine.

"But--Toinette----" and Henri shifted the bag of milled corn to his
other shoulder.  "If Madame Tonteur says no, what then?"

"Monsieur Tonteur will still bring her," replied Catherine.  "That is,
if I tell him it will please me very much," she added, smiling up at
him.

"That he will!" cried Henri confidently.  "He will bring Toinette if
you look at him like that, angel But if he does such a thing, and
Madame Tonteur protests, and he dares to do it again----"

"Possibly she will accompany him after that," said Catherine.  "It may
add to Madame Tonteur's liking for me, Henri."  She laid her hand on
his arm, for they had come to the edge of the woodland open, and ahead
of them Jeems and Odd were standing over their slain turkey cock.

The wild hot pride of youth and achievement possessed the lad as his
father and mother came toward him, and like a bristling gargoyle on
four legs Odd stood joyously wagging his stump of a tail.  Here was
triumph, and the boy's eyes lighted up when he saw his mother's
interest in what he had done, and the unfeigned amazement in his
father's face as he dropped his milled corn to the ground and looked
down upon the magnificent turkey cock with the feathered arrow
transfixing it.

Catherine regarded her boy unobserved by the two whose hunting instinct
drew their eyes to the fallen game.  Her own eyes were shining, and
after a moment Henri saw what she was seeing and thinking and placed
one of his big hands tenderly on his son's slim shoulder.  Yes, Jeems
was like his mother except for his blond hair and gray eyes, and in
these two things he resembled his mother's brother, that worthless,
wandering, always fighting and forever lovable vagabond, Hepsibah
Adams.  Henri's heart was happier at his wife's proud contemplation of
her son, and he burst forth in praise of the lad's exploit.

"What a shot!" he cried, bending low to examine the bird and the arrow.
"Straight through from wing to wing as clean as a bullet--and right up
to the shaft of the feathers!  I'd swear you did not have that strength
in your arm, lad!  Yet the arrow was sped from back there at the edge
of the open, you say?  I scarce believe it!  It is a shot for Captain
Pipe and White Eyes and Big Cat, and not for you!"

These three were the Caughnawaga Indian friends who had taught Jeems to
shoot, and it was Captain Pipe who had made his bow of choice seasoned
ash.

They went on as the sun was setting behind the wilderness, and the
golden pools of light grew dimmer about them and shadows grew heavier
and more velvety dark among the trees.  Because of this approach of
evening with all of its stillness and beauty, an instinct born of the
solitudes made the four travel so softly that one could scarcely hear
the footsteps of the others.  The sun was not yet down and would light
the western sky with springtime glow for another hour, but the forest
through which the old Indian trail wound its way had grown thick and
gloomily vast, so that it made a dusk like night within itself.  To the
boy and the dog this timbered country which lay between the seigneurie
and their home was a silent and mysterious realm of adventure, a place
filled with whispers of mighty things to happen, and with
ghosts--ghosts everywhere--of promising and lureful things of which
neither was afraid.  To the man and the woman it was different, for to
them, with their experience and understanding, the beauty and greatness
of God in nature had never grown common or old.  In this great forest,
with its age-old trees and battlemented tops, Catherine's heart beat
faster and her soul rose to the awe and majesty of spirit which she
could not see, but which, like a warm presence closing in softly about
her, she could clearly feel.  Through the woods, though the trail was
narrow, she walked with her hand in Henri's, and for half an hour they
spoke no word except in whispers.  A little more, and there was sky to
see again with its glow in the west, and then small opens and scattered
maples and chestnuts and beech, with green meadows running like ribbons
between them, and at last, coming to a broader meadow that looked down
a gentle slope into the forbidden valley which they had viewed from
Squirrel Rock, the four saw their home.

It lay in a sheltered dip which was like a diminutive child of the
larger valley, a low and cheerful cabin of peeled logs, with more
windows in it than a cautious man would have had, and with a huge
chimney of clay and stone at the end.  It was not a "rolled-up" house,
with logs standing endwise in a trench, and possibly built around the
stump of a great tree which could be used for a table within, but a
home of beauty and comfort and luxury, as those things were measured on
the frontier, and the best that Henri Bulain could build.  Catherine's
love for this home was next to her love for Henri and her boy.  From
its windows, which were unshuttered against foe of any kind, she could
look east, west, north, and south from the knoll in the dip on which it
stood--south and east over the forbidden valley, where every morning
she could see the sun rising over the Tonteur seigneurie and Squirrel
Rock; northward up the slope into the dark depths of the forest; and
westward to the sinking sun where lay the vast reaches of unexplored
country of which Henri Bulain was always dreaming, and toward which
Jeems was beginning to turn wondering and sometimes yearning eyes as he
grew older.

But Catherine possessed the feminine glory which would forever hold her
men folk back.  Close about the cabin was her own domain--her flowers,
her gardens of shrubs, her bird houses built of chestnut bark, her box
hedges among the thinned-out trees, with pretty paths edged with
whitewashed stones winding in and out among them.  Her daffodils and
wild-flower plots were in bloom, and from this day until the white
frosts there would be no end of flowering things.  Most of all she
loved her kit-run-abouts which Jeems called Johnny-jump-ups, and her
sweet Williams and bouncing Bets, the last of which was the plumed
ancestor of all the carnations.  From daffodil-time until the autumnal
marigold there would be hollyhocks, celandine, roses, lewpins and
candy-tuff, larkin-spur and sweet-scented pease, sunflowers and
catchfly, pinks and Queen Margarets, and a score more of grasses and
flowers in her gardens, until a stranger coming upon her wilderness
home would scarcely have believed that it lay at the edge of a raw
frontier.

Running up to the borders of these gardens were Henri's work fields,
beginning first, because of Catherine's artistic eye, with the gentler
growths of husbandry--carefully groomed and plotted soil for herbs and
vegetables, lettuce, sorrel, parsley, mallows, chervil, burnet, thyme,
sage, carrots, parsnips, beets, radishes, purslain, beans, cabbages,
squashes, asparagus, musk melons, cucumbers, and pompions; and beyond
these marked-out patches lay the broader fields for heavier grains and
foods, ten acres of well-tilled land in all, ending up against the
hard-maple wood out of which, in the preceding month of April, Henri
had taken his year's supply of fifty gallons of maple syrup and four
times as many pounds of sugar.

These precious possessions the four saw as they came down the green
slope, and not one half of them would Catherine have exchanged for all
of Madame Tonteur's riches.  Only a pallid glow of the sun was left,
and the world was preparing itself for the close of day.  Overhead an
endless column of pigeons was on its way to a great roost in the
forbidden valley, flying crows settled into the gloom of the Big
Forest, and black and gray squirrels in the hardwoods ceased their
chatter and slipped like shadows from tree to tree.  Catherine's
chickens were gathered about their shelter, and up from the fenced-in
meadow, through which a creek ran to lose itself in the woods, their ox
and cow had come to the log-barn gate.

Catherine was smiling at her husband, and in Henri's eyes was an
answering light of happiness, when out of the peace and beauty which
lay about their home rose a piercing and blood-curdling cry--a cry
which seemed to stop every sound that was in the air, which reached the
pigeons and swerved them affrightedly, which startled the phlegmatic ox
at the gate, a cry of monstrous depth and vastness, and with that cry a
wild figure came toward them from its hiding place in the greening
shrubbery of Catherine's garden.

With a lurch of his shoulder, Henri sent the bag of corn to the ground,
while ahead of him Jeems swung his long gun into the crook of his arm
and Odd stiffened and let out a sullen growl.  The scraggy and
mysterious figure advanced up the slope, and Jeems had looked to his
flint and priming and stood with a ready thumb on the hammer of his
weapon when from behind her husband and her boy Catherine gave first a
startled gasp, then a little scream, and sped past her protectors to
meet the advancing stranger with open arms.

"_It's Hepsibah!_" she cried.  "_It's Hepsibah!_"



[1] In 1749, the population of Quebec City, metropolis of New France,
whose wealth and culture and courtly life made it at that time the
Versailles of the New World, was less than seven thousand.




CHAPTER III

The stirring words had scarcely fallen from his mother's lips when
Jeems laid his gun on the ground and ran after her, but with all his
haste she was in her brother's arms before he could overtake her, while
his father, carrying the turkey cock but without the corn, came
hurriedly out of his amazement and down to meet them.  When he arrived,
Hepsibah Adams was holding Catherine with one arm and with the other
had hoisted Jeems halfway to his shoulder.  In a moment he freed
himself enough to hold out a hand as rough and knotted as the old oak
tree which sheltered the cabin from the afternoon sun.

If ever a man bore an affinity to an oak, with its cheer and strength
and rugged growth, that man was Hepsibah Adams, the Indian trader.
There was also something about him which made one think of
Odds-and-Ends.  With all this he was as cheerful a creature to look
upon as friend or enemy could want to meet.  He was not as tall as
Henri by half a head, nor did he have his leanness.  His shoulders were
wide and his body thick, and his face was as round as an apple and
almost as red, with marks and mars of stress and battle set upon it,
but in such a way that its vivacity and the good humour of its
twinkling eyes were enhanced rather than spoiled by the vicissitudes of
fortune.  He wore no hat, and on the top of his head was a saucer-like
space as bald as an egg, but under this beauty spot, as Hepsibah called
it, his reddish blond hair grew thick and rampant, with its ends
curling up, so that with a small effort of imagination he might have
been taken for a shaven friar who had been at hard grips with the
disciples of Satan.

When the excitement of first greetings was over, Catherine stood back
from her jolly rogue of a brother and viewed him with a pair of eyes
bright with affection, but which glowed at the same time with an
appraising and speculative questioning which her lips at once put into
words.

"Hepsibah, I am so happy to see you that it makes my heart choke, and
yet I observe that you have not kept your promise to stop fighting, for
one of your ears is nicked and your nose is crooked and there is a mark
over your eye which was not there when I saw you two years ago!"

Hepsibah's weather-stained face broke into a smile.  "I can't say as
much for your nose, Catherine, for it grows prettier each year," he
said.  "But if a Dutchman's ham should happen to come against it, as
one hit mine in a little joust in Albany Town, why, I'll say there
would be a bend in it, or no nose at all.  And as for the ear with a
nick in it, what can you expect from a Frenchman--excepting your
sweet-tempered husband here--when he gets a chance to use his teeth
instead of the hands which God gave him to fight with?  The slit in the
face is only a crease left by an Oneida's knife when he misled himself
with the thought that I had got the best of a bargain, which I never do
get, or I'm a sinner!  But is that all?  Do you keep no better account
of me than that?"

"The bald spot is larger, Hepsibah, and so even and round it amazes me."

"That is because I gave a Seneca hairdresser a good hatchet and holder
to pluck out the hairs in the Indian way and make it so, Sister.  I
hated that bald patch, which was as uneven as a candle-dripping on the
top of my head, but now that it is round I like it."

"And I saw a tooth gone when you laughed."

"Only a second dose from the Dutchman's knuckles.  God love me, but you
should have seen that Albany Dutchman fight!"

"And your clothes," said Catherine, coming to the main point in her
mind at last.  "You look as though a bear had played with you.
Hepsibah, has anything happened--near here?"

"A mere trifle, Sister.  A few miles back I ran into a bunch of
Frenchies who said this was a long way from New England and had it in
their minds to turn me t'other way.  But that was nothing, nothing at
all.  I am a bit ashamed of you, Catherine, for you have missed the
important thing!"

"What is that?"

"My stomach," declared Hepsibah, holding his ample paunch with both
knotted hands.  "It is sunk and shrunken, as you may clearly observe.
It has fallen in on itself until it hurts my backbone, and has withered
and wasted itself to the dimensions of a lady's.  It is dwarfed,
shortened, circumscribed, and reduced--fairly warped and strangled from
lack of food!  And if I do not eat very soon----"

The rest was smothered in Catherine's arms and laughter.

"Dear old Heppy!--Hungry--always hungry, and you never will be any
other way.  So we shall have supper almost as soon as smoke can be made
to come out of the chimney.  I am so happy you have come!"

"And I," added Henri, getting in a word at last.

Jeems was tugging at the hand of his roving vagabond of an uncle, who
was his greatest hero in all the world, and dragged him back to get his
gun.

As they went, the happiness in Catherine's face was clouded for an
instant.

"Best keep good eyes on our Jeems for a time, Henri," she warned.
"Hepsibah, you know very well, is a singularly improvident and
thoughtless man, overfilled with foolish tricks and contrivances most
alluring to boyish minds, and of which, because of Jeems, I am a bit
afraid."

But Henri only chuckled, for the thought was in his mind that it was a
fattening of one's good fortune to be taught tricks by a man like
Hepsibah Adams.

Then Catherine saw that a film of smoke was rising from the top of the
big stone chimney.

"Hepsibah has already started a fire," she said.

When they came through the wide double door of the kitchen, Henri drew
a deep breath of satisfaction and Catherine gave a pleased cry of
surprise.  It was a great kitchen, thirty feet from end to end and
twenty in width, with the last light of day coming through its western
windows.  To this fading illumination was added the rosier glow of a
flaming back log and a huge mass of hard-maple coals which faced them
as they entered.  Henri had spent a month in the building of their
fireplace, and the proudest seigneurie along the Richelieu could not
boast a finer one.  He had housed Catherine and Jeems with an aunt in
Three Rivers while constructing their home, and when Catherine first
saw the fireplace she walked straight into it without bending her head,
and so wide was it, as well as high, that Henri had built seats within
the chimney-place on either side, and over these were hooks on which to
hang firearms, and even small drawers set into the stone for his pipes
and tobacco; and farther back, never in the way of smoke or soot, were
many other hooks for Catherine's treasures of pots and kettles and
pans, so that the chimney-place was a kitchen in itself and a cozy
snug-corner for wild wintry nights as well.  The problem of getting
fuel, which at first had somewhat frightened Catherine, had never
worried Henri at all, for in the winter he dragged up with his ox
hardwood logs six feet in length and two feet thick, which he ran on
rollers through the door to the firepot, and with one timber such as
this for a back log and two or three smaller ones with which to cuddle
it, he had a fire that would last a day and night, and not only was he
rewarded with greater comfort than if he had burned smaller logs, but
he was also saved a vast amount of cutting.

It was the aliveness of this fireplace which had drawn an expression of
surprise and pleasure from Catherine--that and the aroma of cooking
things which greeted them.  Since Catherine's earliest memories, her
brother had boasted of his excellence as a cook, and most assuredly he
had been busy since his unexpected arrival.  Half a dozen chains were
dropped from their bolts in the thick oak lug-bar seven feet above the
fire, and from the pothooks at the end of these chains were suspended
as many pots and kettles, steaming and boiling and giving forth a
cheerful sound of dancing pewter lids against which the bubbling water
was playing an animated and pleasing melody.  But to Henri, who always
loved the sound of these busy pots with their lively cheer and promise
of supper, a still more delectable thing was the great roast of venison
which Hepsibah had hung before the fire.  He had ignored Catherine's
Dutch oven, or roasting kitchen, of which she was exceedingly proud,
and had replaced that household device with the more primitive
arrangement of a stout hempen string tied to a wooden peg in the
ceiling, to the end of which, in the glowing heat of the fire, he had
securely fastened a haunch of young venison.  By giving this string a
twist now and then, the meat was made to turn slowly for an interval of
several minutes while its juices dripped into the basting pan under it.
That Hepsibah had been watchful of his roast, basting it so frequently
that there was not an inch of dry surface upon it, was evident from its
richly brown and savoury appearance as it swung slowly before the fire
as if unseen hands were attending it.

Housewifely instinct made Catherine give the hempen string a twist
before she took off her cape and hood and patted her hair more properly
into place before a mirror hanging on the wall.  Then she glanced down
the long table which Hepsibah had laid with her pewter in preparedness
for the roast.  Henri knew how fast her heart was tripping as he took
her hands and held them for a moment and saw a mist of tears behind her
lashes.  It had been two years since she had seen Hepsibah, two years
of yearning and praying and hoping for this irresponsible brother, the
last of her close blood ties, who came and went with the inconstancy of
the winds and yet had never succeeded in spoiling her dream of having
him some day as a permanent member of her little family.  Each time he
came to them, Hepsibah was full of promise, swearing upon his soul that
he had made up his mind to remain with them forever, as Catherine
pleaded with him to do; and then, some day or night, he would disappear
with all his belongings, and no one would see or hear him go, and it
might be six months, or a year, or, as in this instance, even longer
before he returned, ready to promise and swear upon his soul all over
again but sure to steal away in the end as before.  Once he had
confided to Henri, "I can't say good-bye, not even to an Indian, and I
surely can't say it to Catherine.  I'd rather leave her smiling and
laughing than crying."

Each time that he came, he bore a huge pack on his shoulders, as if
partly in penance, and the opening of this pack and the distributing of
its contents had come to be the biggest event in Jeems's life, and also
in his mother's in a slightly less degree.  But Jeems had no
trespassing thought of the never-failing bundle as he went back for his
gun in the company of his beloved Uncle Hep.  At the most providential
of moments, his hero of all heroes was at his side, and securing this
mighty personage's pledge of secrecy he lost no time in telling him
about the boy he hated.  Marking the grip of Jeems's hand, and catching
the telltale tremble in his voice, Hepsibah sat down upon the bag of
ground corn and did not leave it until by shrewd questioning and
sympathetic interest he had drawn from Jeems's heart a large part of
what it had withheld from his parents that afternoon.  At a second loud
blowing of Henri's dinner horn they rose to their feet, and as Hepsibah
shouldered the corn, his round red face was like a full moon of promise
and cheer.

"It doesn't take _size_ to win a fight, Jeemsy," he said, speaking in a
confidential way.  "Barring this Dutchman at Albany, I've never been
rib-roasted by a big man yet, and I'm only tolerable sized, you
observe.  I've always had a reasonable preference for the big ones,
come as come can, for they are slower to move and fall harder, and nine
out of ten of them carry fat.  This Paul Tache, now--I know by your
telling of him that you can cob and comb him until he begs for mercy,
which is the proper time, if he's down, to give him a few whops for
good measure and memory.  It's all what you've got your mind made up
to, Jeemsy--nothing more and nothing less.  And you've got your mind
made up to warm him, so go and do it, I say."

Catherine came around the corner of the cabin to meet the plotters, and
Hepsibah discreetly held back further words as he winked broadly at
Jeems.

It was the great night of two long years in the Bulain cabin, and
Catherine's three Betty lamps and her Phoebe lamp and a dozen candles
as well were lighted in honour of it, so that when darkness fell thick
and starless about the wilderness, with masses of rain clouds gathering
overhead, the home at the edge of Forbidden Valley was bright with glow
and cheer.  Even the crash of thunder and a deluge of rain on the
chestnut-barked roof, and hatfuls of wind that rattled the windowpanes,
seemed to pass unnoticed in the joy that was within.  The roast was cut
open, and with attendant dishes of sukquttahhash, Johnnycake, potatoes,
and carrots, and hasty pudding with maple syrup, gave opportunity for
such feasting that an hour was well gone before Hepsibah Adams thrust
back his end of the long table bench and brought forth his fat pack
from under the stairs which led up to Jeems's sleeping loft.

As long as Jeems could remember, this had been a signal to clear the
table of every dish and crumb that was on it, and while his father
smoked a long Dutch pipe and his Uncle Hepsibah fumbled with mock
clumsiness at the tyings of his pack, he ran a race with his mother to
see whose side would be cleaned up first.  When it was done, his mother
put a Betty lamp at each end of the table and then seated herself so
that she was facing her brother, with delight and expectancy equal to
Jeems's flushing her cheeks and brightening her eyes.  Hepsibah buried
his hands in the mysterious depths of his bundle.

"Just a few little trinkets," he began, using the identical words he
had employed one year after another.  "A few whim-whams and baubles for
the boy, a bit of trumpery for Sister, and a farthing's worth of
nothing in particular for you, Henri--all picked up at small cost and
no trouble in the town of Albany, where lives a Dutchman with two of
the biggest and heaviest skull-breakers in the Colonies.  Ah, here we
have the first package, with writing on it in the hand of the scholar
who sold me the goods--a cap, a ruffle, a tucker, and a bolt of lace at
five shillings a yard!  Now who in this room can such sillies be
for--unless----" and at Catherine's delighted exclamation he tossed the
bundle to her.  But scarce had she opened it, with her eyes intent upon
her business, than Hepsibah unfurled a red silk petticoat in the candle
glow, and this time Catherine sprang to her feet with an amazed intake
of breath, for so well had Hepsibah arranged his surprise that, one
after another, he had a white love-hood, a black love-hood, and three
more petticoats on the table--one of scarlet with black lace, one of
coloured drugget with pointed lace, and a third of black silk with
ash-gray lining; and as Catherine stood gazing upon these treasures fit
for a queen he added to them two pairs of stays for an eighteen-inch
waist, and then showered over them such an array of lace drowlas,
gorgets, piccadillies, and other neckerchiefs that Catherine closed her
eyes for a moment and then opened them wide as if there might be a
chance of some clever trickery in it.

"Dear Mother in heaven!" she cried.  "Are all of these ravishing things
for me?"

"Of course not," said Hepsibah drily.  "The stays are for Jeems and the
drugget skirt is for Henri, to be worn when he goes to church on
Sunday."

But Catherine paid no attention to his fun, if she heard at all, for
her slim fingers were running swiftly over her gifts, caressing one and
then another, until Henri forgot to puff at his pipe, and Jeems stood
up better to see the excitement in his mother's face.

"They must have cost a fortune!" she exclaimed, pausing to look at her
smiling brother and at the same time holding up the scarlet petticoat
with black lace.  "This one, for instance----"

"Two pounds fifteen shillings," said Hepsibah, opening his pack wider
and working his hands quickly.  "But an ounce or two of trumpery like
this, ma cherry, costs more," he added, trying to speak a bit of
French.  "A bonnet, and the best in Albany, at four pounds ten, and
here half a bolt of tamboured muslin at eighteen shillings a yard, some
lutestring at twelve shillings, calico at six shillings threepence, and
durant with the figures turned t'other side around, at three shillings
sixpence--enough cloth, the scholars who sold it to me swore, to build
dresses and pretties for as fine a lady as there is in the land.  And
to go with these dresses I have here ruffles and tuckers and threads
and buttons and ribbons, and four pairs of the nicest shoes that ever
came up the Hudson," and placing these last-named articles on the table
with a flourish of his arms, Hepsibah gave a gloating chuckle and
paused to fill his pipe.

Jeems's heart was near breaking with suspense, and it seemed to give an
audible crack when his Uncle Hep's gnarled hands went into the pack
again.  The method of procedure had always been the same--his mother
coming first, and then he, with his father looking on until the last.
But this year Hepsibah had decided upon a change, for he drew a bulky
package from his store and passed it to Jeems's father.

"Three of the finest pipes I ever laid my eyes on," he announced.  "One
made in Holland, one in London, and one in America, and five pounds of
Virginia tobacco to go with them, Henri, along with a hat, a coat, and
a pair o' boots that may take you with honour to any swoirree or gentry
merry-making this side of the sea.  Now, how's that?"  And he stepped
back as if his pack were entirely empty and held nothing at all for
Jeems.

For an eternity, it seemed to Jeems, his uncle remained in this
terrifying posture.  Then, with deliberate and aggravating slowness,
Hepsibah Adams returned to his pack.

No one of the three who were watching him would ever have guessed that
Hepsibah's act was one weighted heavily with the force of destiny, nor
that with dramatic inevitableness it was to change the course of human
lives, bringing the high down to earth, and the earthly to great
heights, loosing passions and hatreds and loves, breeding tragedies and
joys, and ending, at last, in what it is the purpose of this humble
chronicle of human events to narrate.

A swift-coming thought, a deft return into the pack of a small bundle
which he had intended for Catherine, and Hepsibah had changed a world.
On such trivial happenings do the most powerful of the fates sometimes
rest.  Out of the farthest corner of the collapsing pack he brought
this bundle to light once more and unwrapped it as he turned toward
Jeems's big-eyed, anxious face.

"Jeemsy," he said, "if I've put the notches in my memory right, you
were born on the coldest January day I ever saw, and that makes you
just twelve years and four months old this evening, which means, if you
figure it right, that only three years and eight months lie betwixt you
and the day when you can be counted a man.  According to law, you are a
King's subject of maturity from that day and can take life and all its
belongings into your own hands, so long as you are honest about it, and
can stand up in equality before the stiffest periwigged judge in the
Colonies or New France.  In other words, Jeemsy, I mean that in less
than three short years you will be a full-fledged man!"[1]

Having delivered himself of this introductory peroration Hepsibah
finished unwrapping the package, and never had Catherine beheld such a
handsome piece of velvet as that which her brother displayed in the
candle glow.  It was, _par excellence_, the finest of the treasures he
had brought, a cloth of matchless beauty, a crimson glory so filled
with changing humours and colours that it seemed to be alive in his
hands.  Surely this was another present for his mother, Jeems thought.
But to his amazement and Catherine's surprise Hepsibah thrust the cloth
into Jeems's hands.

"For Mademoiselle Marie Antoinette Tonteur from her devoted admirer,
Daniel James Bulain," he announced.  "Jeemsy, don't blush.  Twelve and
ten are not far from sixteen and fourteen, when you will be man and
woman, and if ever a seigneur's daughter finds herself lucky it will be
on the day she marries a son of the tribe of Adams.  The writing on it,
Jeemsy, tells where't came from and how much it cost; and along with it
I have brought you some nankeen for britches and clothes, four shirts,
and a three-cornered hat with a black ribbon, six handkerchiefs, and a
jackknife, two pairs o' serge britches, as many of new shoes,
and--this," and from the now completely emptied pack he drew forth a
beautiful long-barrelled pistol, his eyes aglow with a fighting man's
pride as he fondled it in the light of the candles and pointed out its
merits to Jeems.  "As long as you live, you must never part with this
pistol, Jeemsy," he said.  "It isn't new, you see, but its record is
one of glory as long as my arm, and I'll tell you about it some day.
It's a killer, lad, a killer deadly and sure, good for a hundred paces
with less than an inch of drop," and he gave the weapon into Jeems's
hands.

An instant of disapproval gathered in Catherine's eyes.

"It was kind of you to bring the cloth for Antoinette but I do not care
for the pistol, Hepsibah," she said.  "A pistol makes me think of--men
fighting men.  And here we are at peace, having need only of the rifle
and of Jeemsy's bow and arrows to bring us meat.  I feel it is not
best!"

As she spoke thus confidently of peace, a cloud came over Hepsibah's
face, but in a moment he had laughed it away and was telling her that
within a week she would be as proud of her boy's marksmanship as she
now seemed fearful of the pistol's influence upon his future.

An hour later, when Jeems went to his bed in the loft, it was of
neither pistol nor marksmanship he was thinking, but of the piece of
red velvet which he placed close to his pillow before he snuffed his
candle and laid himself down for the night.  If his heart beat less
swiftly now, he was even more joyously thrilled than when he had been
with his people.  The rumbling of thunder and flashing of lightning had
passed, and the soft spring rain fell steadily on the roof a few feet
over his head, drowning in its drowsy and musical rhythm whatever sound
of voices might have come to him from the fireplace room.  He could
hear the running of water off the roof in a hundred busy trickles and
streams, and caught the mellower sound of it pouring from the
chestnut-bark trough at the edge of the eaves into the wooden barrel
below.

Jeems loved this music of falling water.  It soothed and comforted him
and made his dreams more vivid.  He loved the foot-wide rills in the
forests at snow-melting time; he loved the dark and hidden creeks
stealing their way among the cool and shaded places in summer; he loved
the bigger streams, the lakes, and even the still ponds which in August
were covered with green "frog scum."  But most of all he loved the
rain.  And now, with his hand resting against his present for Toinette,
and with the comradely beating of the rain above him, the world that
had gone to pieces for him that day reassembled itself swiftly in his
mind.  Here, at last, was the kind of gift he had tried to build in his
dreams.  Flowers and feathers and nuts and maple-sugar bars could not
equal one square inch of its beauty.  It was lovelier than anything he
had ever seen Antoinette wear, and his spirit rose in such increasing
exultation that in the darkness of his room his eyes opened wide and
sleep was miles away.

To-morrow was the day of the auction sale at Lussan's place.  Lussan
was a wealthy farmer at the edge of the next seigneurie, ten miles
away.  He was returning to his old home near the Isle of Orleans, a
country he liked better than the Richelieu, and was selling most of his
goods.  Among these were a plough with an iron point, a forty-gallon
soap kettle, and a loom which Jeems's father wanted, so he had planned
to start with the ox early in the morning.  Jeems had heard Tonteur say
he intended to buy Lussan's three slaves, a mother and father and
daughter, and that the young wench was for Toinette.  Toinette would be
with her father.  He would take his treasure package with him to
Lussan's and find an opportunity to give it to her.

Should Paul Tache be there and dare to overlord him again, or laugh in
his meanly suggestive way, or speak sneeringly, or so much as say a
word against his gift for Toinette....

A rumble of fresh-growing thunder was advancing out of the west, and
preceding it came a roar of wind and a deluge of rain.  Lightning cut
once more in vivid flashings across the narrow panes of the bedroom
window, and the roof seemed to bend and groan under a sudden torrential
bombardment.  Jeems fought in unison with the elements.  His spirit
mounted savagely with the turmoil.  He had his enemy down and was
thrusting his head into wet and slimy mud.  He was beating his face and
eyes, and spoiling his splendid raiment, and pulling out his hair.  And
Marie Antoinette was looking on.  With the gorgeous red velvet in her
hands and her eyes big and starry, she was watching him as he choked
and kicked and pummelled the life out of Paul Tache!

The outburst of thunder and wind and deluge, a whim of playful spring,
passed as swiftly as it had come, and, in passing, it left Jeems
breathing quickly and fiercely in his bed.

He had risen in these moments to reckless heights, and his mind, hot
with its desire for action, had settled with grim assurance upon what
would happen the next day.

First he would present his gift to Toinette.

Then he would do what his Uncle Hep had told him to do.  _He would whip
Paul Tache_.



[1] In the middle of the Eighteenth Century both male and female youth
ripened early in its capacities.  Boys became men by law when sixteen,
girls' best marriageable years were from fifteen to seventeen, and a
young lady of ten was deemed no longer a child.  Experience and
education so swiftly developed youth to its maturity that Governor
Winthrop's son became executor of his father's will when he was only
fourteen years of age.




CHAPTER IV

Henri and his wife sat up late with Hepsibah Adams, for this time
Hepsibah had come with a set and determined purpose to his sister's
home.  Had Jeems crept down the stairs toward the end of the evening's
talk, he would have discovered the happiness of earlier hours mellowed
by a tense and almost tragic seriousness that lay in the faces of his
mother and Uncle Hepsibah.  The trader's countenance had grown stern,
and Catherine's cheeks were like those of a pale nun in the
candlelight.  The rich gifts from her prodigal brother were heaped on
the table, but something of deeper import than a contemplation of their
beauty and the thrill of possessing them had gathered in her eyes.  In
Henri Bulain's face were still the cheer and good-humour and unruffled
equanimity of confidence and faith that Hepsibah, with the darkest
pictures he had painted, had been unable to disturb.

They were talking about war.  As early as this spring of 1749, the
American wilderness had begun to stir with whispers of the impending
conflagration which was destined soon to turn the eastern part of the
continent into a seething pot of fury and death.

While George the Second of England and Louis the Fifteenth of France
were playing at friendship after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, France
gasping for breath with the flower of her armies buried on European
battlefields, and England with her fighting forces reduced on land to
eighteen thousand men and to less than seventeen thousand on the sea,
the vast colonies of the two countries, working out their own
salvations, were steadily and surely and with deadly intent encroaching
upon each other.  While the two greatest monarchies in Europe were
disguising their weaknesses under a screen of clever politics and a
shambles of court orgies which transformed their capitals into gorgeous
carnivals of extravagance and sensuality, these rival colonies in
America had learned to distrust, to hate, and to look forward to a day
of extermination and vengeance.

The stage was already set for the writing of the bloodiest and most
picturesque pages in American history.  Southward from the Richelieu
were the bitterest of all the white men's enemies, the warriors of the
Six Nations, and northward, sweeping east and west through the Canadas,
were the forty scattered tribes who bore allegiance to New France.
Behind these savage vassals, on one side, were eleven hundred thousand
English colonists holding the sea-coast lands from Maine to Georgia,
and on the other less than eighty thousand souls, counting women and
children as well as men, to defend and hold the illimitable domains of
New France, which reached from the upper Canadas to the Gulf of Mexico
and from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains.

Of this alarming disparity in power of fighting men, and of the
pitiless scourge which he swore would some day sweep through all the
country of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, Hepsibah Adams had spoken
at length but with small effect on Henri Bulain.

"Let war come if it must," said Henri.  "The heart of New France is set
behind an impenetrable wall of rock and forest, and with these ramparts
in our favour, eighty thousand will be a match for the million English
if they come this way.  But why talk of war, Brother, when there is
peace and plenty and a beautiful world about us to enjoy?  Let kings
fight or play, just as they will, but as for me, should fighting chance
to come--why, I shall be a friend to both sides and strike at neither.
For no matter what cause should bring about the strife, I could not
strike at the people of my Catherine's blood, nor would she have me
turn against my own.  So why move from here?  This is a glorious place.
It is neutral ground, and we, being neutral, are fitly placed here.
Oneidas and Mohawks have eaten under our roof as well as Hurons and
Algonquins, and when deadly enemies such as these meet thus on common
ground, what cause have we for fear?"

A light of pride glowed in Catherine's eyes as she listened to her
husband's words, and she added:

"Henri loves the Indians, and I have grown to love them, too.  They are
all our friends."

"Friends!" sniffed Hepsibah.  "Henri, it is because of Catherine and
Jeems that I call you a fool.  Take them where this danger does not
hang day and night along the edges of the frontiers.  Take them to the
St. Lawrence, if you will, or bring them south into Catherine's
country.  But do one or t'other, for God's sake, or the day will come
when Christ Himself cannot save you," and his voice shook with
earnestness.

"There will be no war," insisted Henri stubbornly.  "England and France
have bled themselves white on Continental battlefields, and the peace
which was signed only last October will surely not be broken again
while you and I are living, for Hanover and Austria have had their
fill, as well as the others, and are like two dead men on their backs."

"That is right," nodded Catherine, with a shudder.  "I think all
fighting is over for many years."

Hepsibah blew out his cheeks like a balloon, then sucked them in with a
smack.  It was a childhood trick he had never outgrown, a way of
telling the world he was fully out of temper, and remembering it as
such Catherine smiled, though her fingers twined uneasily in her lap.

"Fools--innocents!" her brother growled.  "I tell you neither George
nor Louis will have anything to do with the running of this war until
every mile of woods between our Colonies and your city of Quebec is red
with fire and blood.[1]  God love me, it has already begun!  French and
English traders are fighting wherever they come together along the
frontiers, and the hired Indians of one are taking scalps for t'other.
Even white men have joined in that pretty game, for Massachusetts has
sent out Lovewell and his fifty men to hunt the heads of Indians and
French--it makes no difference which, though the order says redskins
only!--at a price of five shillings a day plus a bounty for every scalp
that is taken; and down in New York country Sir William Johnson counts
out English money for human hair, while the French--and you know it,
Henri!--are paying a hundred crowns apiece for white scalps as well as
red.  It's hair the Indians are bringing in instead o' fur, because the
prices are bigger and the market surer, and our own blood, both French
and English, is working harder each day with whisky and money and guns
to turn them into devils.  And here you sit like a couple of foolish
doves with a young one in the nest, your scalps worth fifty pounds
apiece, your windows open, your door unlocked, your senses gone, while
over the hill a few miles away this Tonteur neighbour of yours
loopholes his houses, trains his farmers with guns, barricades his
windows, builds his doors of oak, and makes a fort of his meeting
house.  _He_ knows what is coming up from the Mohawk country and is
preparing himself for it as well as he can."

"His business is soldiering," replied Henri, his serenity still
undisturbed by the grim and forbidding future which Hepsibah had drawn
in his argument, "and it is stipulated in his grant from the King that
he fortress his place whether it be in peace or war."

"And besides," said Catherine, "he keeps his women folk with him, and
surely, if danger were threatening, he would send them away."  She rose
from her seat and came around to her brother so that she stood behind
him with her arms about his shoulders.  "Hepsibah, we know this you
have told us is true," she said, pressing her cheek against his face.
"There is terrible murder along the frontiers from which you have come,
and that is why Henri has brought Jeems and me into this country of his
where are only peace and friendship and no thought of the hideous
killings and ugly traffickings you speak about.  You have argued
against yourself, Brother, for it is you who should move out of strife
and danger and come to live with us.  Then our happiness would be
complete.  I have prayed for many years that you would come--and never
go away again!"

"Together we will have a paradise here," urged Henri.

"And I will find you a wife," added Catherine.  "A wife who will love
you greatly, and until you have children of your own we will give you
half of Jeems."

Hepsibah rose gently out of her arms.

"For Jeems you should change your home to a place where there is a
schoolmaster and more for him to learn," he said, catching desperately
at a last argument where all others had failed.

"In all of New France and the English Colonies there is no better
teacher than our Catherine," answered Henri proudly.  "In English and
French she has given to Jeems more than he could ever have learned in
your town of Albany or our college in Quebec; for there, in one place,
he would have been English, and in the other, French, while here he is
both, like his father and mother, and will never strike at either of
the two bloods that are in his veins."

"Of that I am sure," agreed Catherine.  "I pray God my Jeems will never
be a fighting man."

When Hepsibah went to his cot in the loft, he stood for a moment with
his lighted candle beside Jeems's bed where the boy lay sleeping with
the cloth of velvet close to his hands, a smile on his lips.  Jeems was
dreaming, and the dream took the smile away and put a grimmer thing in
its place, and looking down on it Hepsibah thought of Henri Bulain's
last words and his sister's prayer, and his lips moved whisperingly to
himself, "They can't keep it from you, lad--hope nor prayer nor all
their faith.  It's coming, and when it comes you'll strike and strike
hard, and it's then you'll be what you're bound t'be, Jeems--a fighting
man!"

In the candle glow the piece of red velvet seemed to answer Hepsibah
Adams, but seeing no farther with his eyes, and going no deeper with
his thoughts, the trader undressed himself quietly, snuffed his candle,
and went to bed.


Catherine's breakfast was on the table with the break of sunrise, and
Jeems was even ahead of that, helping his father with the chores.  The
ox was fed and the cart ready for a day's rough travel before his Uncle
Hepsibah came down from his sleep.  Talk of war and massacre and death
had left no shadow in Catherine's heart, and Hepsibah could hear her
singing as he went with naked arms and shoulders to the spring near the
cabin and doused himself in its ice-cold water.  The sound of her voice
made him pause and face the south, where the dusk and mists of early
morning were lifting quickly over the wilderness.  His wide shoulders
twitched as if the chill of the water had sent a shock through them,
and he marked the swellings and dips of the timbered solitudes of
Forbidden Valley, and saw where the Mohawks would enter it and where
they would come out if his prediction and his fears came true.  Then he
heard Henri and Jeems laughing near the barn as if one or the other had
turned a joke or found something humorous in his work.  With the shiver
still in his blood, he turned to the water of the spring again and
found Odd standing close behind him, also facing the stillness and
mystery of the valley, his nose sniffing the air, and his eyes--as the
man's had been a moment before--filled with a steadiness and tenseness
of look which had in it a sombre and voiceless foreboding.  Hepsibah
stared, for about them birds were singing, gray wings of pigeons were
whirring through the air, crows were cawing in the edge of the woods,
and cheerful voices were coming from the barn--all with the red glow of
day breaking over the forests in the east--yet the dog was stiffly
alert and unresponsive, looking past him into Forbidden Valley.

At the touch of Hepsibah's hand the strain seemed to leave Odd's body.

"It'll bear watching, boy," commended the man.  "It'll bear watching
day and night, but 'specially in that hour of darkness which comes just
before the crack o' dawn.  Not now, _but soon_!"--and he turned to his
bath again.


When Jeems went ahead of his father and uncle to Lussan's place, he did
not burden himself with unnecessary habiliments of either peace or war.
He wore his old suit of brown homespun cloth, with Indian-made
moccasins and leggings of doeskin, and on his head was a frontiersman's
cap with an eagle feather in it.  From under this cap his blond hair
fell with its ends touching his shoulders, and with only his bow for a
weapon his slim young body was free and buoyant and much handsomer than
it had been the previous day with its carefully chosen raiment and
warlike accoutrements.

A part of Jeems's very soul was his love for nature, a passion which
was claiming him even more completely than it had his father and
mother, though he had not begun to express it clearly even to them.
From his earliest days, both Henri and Catherine had sown in him the
seeds which had now sprung up to shape the future of the man, and in
the example of their own tolerant and nature-loving lives they had
implanted in him convictions and truths which back in Catherine's
puritanical New England home would have been regarded as blasphemous.
Catherine had taught him that all things had souls and language, even
flowers and trees and the birds and beasts they slew for food, and that
while destruction of life for the achievement of necessities was
neither wrong nor to be condemned, _wanton_ destruction was a sin which
only God Himself could forgive.  In further proof that God had intended
one form of life to exist upon another, and yet within reason and
judgment and charity, Henri Bulain never lost an opportunity to unveil
for his boy the hidden and fascinating manifestations of life in the
wilderness.  Thus Jeems had come to understand that, from the smallest
insect to the largest beast, living things were ceaselessly nourishing
themselves upon other living things in such a balanced and intelligent
way that no one thing in nature ever completely destroyed another.

In New France, where freedom of speech and the poetry and gentler side
of life had found a soil in which to grow, such beliefs as these could
be publicly expressed without fear or danger; but had Catherine been in
her girlhood home she would have shielded Jeems in a cloak of
ignorance, for the days were not gone in the Colonies when the powers
of Satan were accredited to those whose new ideas or broader visions
struck at the deeply rooted and narrowly prescribed laws of religious
thought.

But with this presence of language and the power of heaven in the
forests there were also other interests for Jeems.  The blood in his
veins demanded excitement and activity, and his was only an
intermittent success in living up to what had been so basically a part
of the teachings of his parents.  There were many times when he killed
sheerly for the thrill of slaughter, for the temptations about him were
without number and exceedingly great.  The woods and hills and meadows
were alive with game.  It was so plentiful that wild turkeys were
selling for a shilling apiece in Boston, pigeons a penny a dozen, and
fat young deer as cheaply as six-pence each, while in the town of
Albany the prices were even lower and turkeys were selling for
fourpence, and a stag for a cheap jackknife or a few iron nails.
Squirrels were so numerous that in this same year of 1749 Pennsylvania
paid threepence a head for six hundred thousand that were killed as
pests.[2]

But this morning Jeems had brought his bow and quiver of arrows only
because they were as much a part of him as the clothes he wore and he
had no desire to inflict his might upon bird or beast.  He was filled
with exultation mingled with a determined eagerness.  He knew he would
fight if Paul Tache was at Lussan's place, and what was going to happen
in that fight was as definitely fixed in his mind.  He was on his way
to elevate himself to supreme heights in the opinion of Marie
Antoinette Tonteur--after he had given her the piece of velvet.  The
glory of the morning itself was in his blood.  The sweetness of the
hills and opens, the song of birds, the beauty of blue sky and green
earth all combined in a responsive chord to the song that was in his
heart, a song of emancipation almost--of deliverance from the
oppression of a mind bullied and subdued until this hour.  And now that
he was on the point of achieving the fulfilment of a positively settled
act, he wondered why it had not happened before.

No one was ahead of him when he arrived at Lussan's place.  It was nine
o'clock, and the sale was not until eleven.  Lussan and his wife and
daughter and two sons, and the three slaves who were to be sold, had
been busy since dawn, and Jeems immediately found ways in which to help
them.  Half of a young ox was already spitted on a long iron bar and
slowly roasting over a red-hot mass of hickory coals.  The outside
Dutch oven was filled with a huge baking of bread, and benches were set
with pewter and snow-white dishes of poplar wood.  Lussan was a famous
maker of whisky and flip and beer, and three barrels were ready,
hoisted on chunks of wood with their spigots down, waiting for the
willing hands of his friends and neighbours to turn them.  His brewing
apparatus and still, for which there was bound to be high bidding, lay
close behind the barrels, all polished and bright in the sunlight to
tempt the eyes and purses of the buyers.  About his prosperous home
were the things which were to be sold, and the three slaves were
working among these, their uneasy and aching hearts strengthened by
their master's promise that they would be sold together and not singly.

After a time Jeems found himself with nothing to do and hunted out the
plough and kettle and loom which his father wanted to buy.  While
occupied in this way, he came upon a table piled with a hotchpot of
articles, and his heart gave a jump when he saw a number of books
printed in English.  How Lussan had come into possession of them,
reading only French as he did, Jeems did not try to conjecture, for his
mind was filled with the thought of his mother's joy if he could take
these treasures home to her.  There were five of the books, _Malvern
Dale, Evelina, Telemachus, Eloiza,_ and _Joseph Andrews_, a thrilling
list of titles it seemed to him, and as quickly as he could he
approached Lussan upon the subject of their worth and purchase.  Seeing
no merit in printed English and small chance for their sale, and being
as well a free-hearted man and already warmed by his own excellent
beer, Lussan gave them to Jeems in return for the hour of service he
had rendered.

Overjoyed by this unexpected windfall of fortune, Jeems began to watch
anxiously for the coming of his father and Uncle Hepsibah and for the
appearance of the seigneur Tonteur and whoever might be with him.
Nearer neighbours arrived before his father and uncle came out of the
forest, and he lost no time in depositing his bundle of books in the
cart, after which he fastened Odd with a buckskin thong to one of its
wheels.  He did not have to guess what Odd would do if free when it
came to his fight with Paul Tache.

The hour for the sale drew near, and fully half a hundred men and women
and a score of children had gathered, yet Toinette and her father had
not arrived.  Jeems placed himself where he could see down the road
that came from the Tonteur seigneurie, and when at last he heard the
auctioneer's voice bellowing forth his announcement that the sale was
about to begin, he felt a sombre sinking of his hopes.  They livened
instantly when three figures on horseback appeared at the end of the
half mile of road.  The foremost rider was Tonteur, the second Paul
Tache, and in the third saddle rode a slim, wide-hatted little person
who was none other than Marie Antoinette Tonteur herself.

Concealing himself behind the bole of a tree, Jeems watched them as
they passed, so near that a pebble flung by a hoof of one of the horses
fell at his side.  His courage almost failed him then, for while his
hands clenched at the sight of Paul Tache, his heart faltered in its
beating as his attention turned from his enemy to Toinette.  She had
become, all at once, a young lady whom he could easily believe he had
never seen before, and the change in her held him for a few moments so
forgetful of his own existence that he would have been discovered had
one of the three happened to glance in his direction.  Toinette was
equally unconscious of a certain ten-year-old miss of yesterday, for
one of her dearest anticipations had become reality, and she was
wearing her first riding suit, a gorgeous blue camlet trimmed with
silver, just arrived from Quebec.  With this she wore a smartly cocked
beaver hat which bore a rakish feather, and from under this hat her
long dark hair fell in a cascade of carefully made curls, partly
restrained in their freedom by two or three red ribbons enmeshed among
them.  She was superbly aware of the lovely figure she made, and every
inch of her body was at a dignified tension as she rode past the place
where Jeems was hidden.

After she had gone, Jeems felt an overwhelming sense of littleness and
unimportance.  For Toinette was no longer Toinette, but a real
princess, grown up.  And Paul Tache, riding close beside her, with hair
powdered and tied and with a red velvet coat that could be seen a mile
away, seemed now to be infinitely removed from the plottings which he
had conceived against him.  He stepped from behind the tree and stooped
to pick up the pebble which Toinette's horse had flung at him.  He
could hear the auctioneer's voice, and others bidding for Lussan's
properties.  Then came a burst of laughter which rose with unrestrained
abandon above all other sound, a blast of merriment which he would have
recognized anywhere in the world.  Only his Uncle Hepsibah could laugh
like that.

His spirit leapt like the flare of powder in response to the cheerful
sound of his uncle's voice, and what he had lost for a few moments
became a part of him again, stronger than before.  He returned to the
grass-covered open in front of Lussan's house as Paul helped Toinette
from her horse; and then, to his amazement and increasing admiration,
he observed his Uncle Hep approach the baron boldly and offer his hand.
Tonteur accepted it, and a little later Jeems saw them drinking flip
together.  These matters he made note of as he stood at the outer edge
of the throng gathered about the auctioneer, who was making the welkin
ring with his descriptions of Lussan's goods and his exhortations for
people to buy.  This man, who possessed a huge pair of lungs, had an
ally as well as a competitor in the barrels of whisky and flip and
beer, between which and the table whereon he stood men began to pass
back and forth with increasing frequency; for while these barrels drew
his customers away for a time, they were sure to send them back--as
Lussan had planned--mellower in disposition and heart and with purse
strings looser at every imbibition.

The sights and excitements of the scene about him would have made for
Jeems one of the most thrilling events of his forest-rimmed world, had
his heart not been choked with the emotions of impending drama.  Even
the aroma of many good things to eat held no interest for him.  The
voices of the auctioneer and the bidders, the loud banging of a wooden
mallet which put a note of legality to every sale, the hubbub of men
and women about him, the play of children, the fighting of a couple of
dogs, all seemed outside the things he had come to seek.  Yet he did
not press his desires by undue haste, and it was half an hour before he
found himself close to the one who occupied his thoughts.  This
happened in such a fortuitous way that Toinette, concealed by the ample
forms of Lussan's wife and daughter, was within a foot of his shoulder
before he knew it.  She did not see him, and he stood with wildly
beating heart, breathing the faint perfume from her person, his senses
dazed by the nearness of her splendour and his world of vision filled
only with a great broad-brimmed hat, an enravishing mass of lustrous
curls, a sunset of crimson ribbons, a pair of slim shoulders--and then,
his paradise broken by the ugliness of reality, he discovered Paul
Tache.  The young man was returning from a journey to the barrels, and,
when he saw Jeems, a contemptuous smile twisted his lips.  It was this
look which turned Toinette so that she found Jeems standing beside her,
his cap and a package in his hands, his face tensely set as he fought
himself into obliviousness of his rival's presence.

He held out his gift to her.

"My Uncle Hepsibah has just come from the English Colonies, and he
brought me this that I might in turn give it to you.  Will you accept
it, Toinette?"

He forgot Paul Tache.  Spots of red came into his cheeks as Toinette's
surprised eyes greeted him.  She almost smiled, and as if something
made her forgetful of her magnificence and the dignity it imposed, she
extended her hand to receive the package.  He felt the embroidered
doeskin of her glove against his flesh, and the touch of it, the
gathering colour in her face, the manner in which she accepted his
gift, sent the blood racing through his body.  He had scarcely hoped
for this graciousness after the way she had treated him yesterday, and
Toinette, won by the unexpectedness of his act, was conscious of her
forgetfulness and of the embarrassing nearness of other eyes and ears
about them.  The colour deepened in her cheeks, and, mistaking this for
still greater evidence of the pleasurable thrill he had given her,
Jeems was sure she was about to thank him for his gift, when Paul stood
beside them.  Ignoring Jeems, Toinette's cousin led her away, politely
relieving her of the package as they went.  It was then Toinette turned
to smile at Jeems, in spite of the eyes she knew were watching her.  In
this same moment her escort allowed the package to drop surreptitiously
from his hand.

This act, inspired by a contempt for the forest boy, and urged by a
meanness of spirit hidden under a display of wealth and fine clothes,
swept Jeems's thought from Toinette, whose nearness of person,
surprising beauty, and sweetness of disposition had almost made him
forget his one reason for being at Lussan's sale.  This weakness in the
armour of his intentions was sealed when he saw his present fall to the
ground.  Toinette became instantly immaterial in the path of a storm of
emotion which caught and held him fiercely.  He saw only one person
where there were two, and that one was Paul Tache.  In half a dozen
seconds, as many years added themselves to his shoulders, and with
these years came a fuller capacity for hurt, for hate, and for a desire
to avenge.  In a brain white with the heat of these things, and in eyes
blinded to the presence of all living forms except that of the youth
who had darkened his mind with bitterness, Toinette ceased to exist for
him, and when he sprang forward to recover the bundle, it was not with
the thought that he was rescuing it for her, but that it was to be his
reason for glorious war when the moment was at hand for him to hurl it
in his rival's face.

That this moment should arrive as if inspired by a genius intent on
guiding his destiny did not strike Jeems as unusual.  Detaching
themselves from the shifting groups of which they had been a part,
Toinette and young Tache strolled to their horses, knowing that many
glances followed their elegant departure.  Giving themselves a brief
time in which to be admired, they sauntered into the gardens back of
Lussan's house.

From the flip barrel, where their newly made friendship had been
growing apace, Tonteur and Hepsibah watched the pretty pair, with broad
grins on their faces; and nudging the well-covered ribs of the man he
should have regarded as an hereditary enemy, but in whom he had found a
convivial comrade well suited to his own humours and disposition, the
baron chuckled loudly.

"There they go, friend Adams, a couple of young peacocks on parade!  My
fine lady has grown into a young woman since she put on that costume
and the big hat, and as for the _petit matre_ who thinks himself a
blood and a buck--why, I say, if this skinny little nephew of yours----"

"Sh-h-h!  There goes Jeems!" interrupted Hepsibah.

Unaware of the attention of the old war dogs, Jeems was only a few
steps from Paul and Toinette when they disappeared behind Lussan's
house.  He held back with a feeling of satisfaction when he saw the two
going down a path which took them out of sight of any curious eyes that
might have watched them.  Not until the last flutter of Toinette's
skirt was gone did he proceed with the business of following them, and
then, like an Indian, he slipped noiselessly along the path and found
them standing, somewhat perplexed, at the edge of a soggy and
ill-smelling open space where Lussan had built his barn and wherein his
cattle and pigs had gathered for so long that one was sure of a
precarious and unpleasant footing.  Toinette, her chin tilted, a flash
of indignation in her eyes as she held up her skirt with both hands,
was on the point of loosing her wrath upon her escort for daring to
bring her to such a place of defilement when Jeems stepped out from a
rim of bushes and confronted them.

His face was pale.  His slim body was as taut as a bowstring.  His eyes
were almost black.  He did not see Toinette, scarcely knew that she was
in his world, even as her anger gave place to an exclamation of
surprise when she saw in his hand the package which he had given her a
few minutes before.  He approached Paul Tache, and that youth,
misinterpreting the slowness of his movement and the bloodless pallor
of his face as signs of embarrassment and fear, sought to cover his
disgrace in Toinette's eyes by an explosion of haughty protest at being
followed and spied upon in this way.  Jeems made no reply except to
hold out the package.  Sight of it choked the words in the other's
throat.  Jeems's silence and the way in which he continued to extend
the package brought a deep colour into Paul's face.  He and not Jeems
was conscious of the amazement in Toinette's countenance and of the
intensity of her interest in the situation.  He recovered himself
swiftly and, with a guileful change of manner, held out his hand.

"Pardon me," he apologized.  "It is good of you to bring the
package--which I accidentally dropped."

Jeems came a step nearer.

"You lie!" he cried, and with a furious movement he hurled the bundle
at Tache's face.

The force of the blow sent Paul reeling backward, and Jeems was at him
with the quickness and passion of one suddenly transformed by madness.
He had never fought with another boy.  But he knew how animals clawed
and disembowelled.  He had seen owls tear each other to pieces.  He had
watched a duel between two mighty bucks until one gasped out its life
with a broken neck.  He had looked on the hunter-wasps as they tore off
the heads of their prey.  In a hundred ways he had viewed strife and
death as the wilderness knew these things.  And all that he had
witnessed, all that he knew of torture and violence and the desire to
maim and kill gave to his action a character of such lively ferocity
that it drew a howl of pain from Paul Tache and a shrill little scream
from Toinette.

Jeems heard the scream, but it held no significance for him now.  His
dreams were gone, and Toinette, her presence close to him, her eyes
upon the battle just as he had imagined in the thrill of his mental
visionings, was forgotten in the more vital depths of his interest in
the flesh and blood of Paul.  In the first attack, his fingers clutched
like small iron claws in the folds of Tache's cravat and coat, and the
rending of cloth, a splitting asunder of gorgeous material almost to
the other's waist, was evidence of the strength behind his assault.  He
followed this with a fury of scratching and tearing and both went down
in the mle.  When they rose, Paul heaving himself up with an effort
which flung Jeems from him, they were such a sight of muck and stain
that Toinette forgot her precious dress and covered her eyes in horror.
But she was looking again in an instant, for the spectacle fascinated
even as it appalled her.  Jeems had landed on his feet with a fist
loaded with mud, and this he projected with an aim so accurate that
half of Paul's face was obliterated by it, and as he leapt with a roar
of rage at his smaller assailant, he was such a shocking contrast to
his usual immaculate self that Toinette nearly ceased to breathe.  Then
she saw and heard what her feminine eyes and instincts could not
understand or keep proper count of, a mad twisting and tumbling of
bodies, panting breaths, grunts, and finally a clearly audible curse
from Paul Tache.  With that sound Jeems flew backward and landed on his
back.

He was up almost before he had struck, and with his head ducked low
like a ram's in a charge, he hurled himself at Tache.  This individual,
having cleared his eyes sufficiently to perceive the blindness of the
other's rush, stepped aside and swung a well-directed blow which again
sent Jeems down into the muck.  His hand filled itself with this sticky
substance a second time, and as he returned to battle he let it fly at
Paul.  Profiting by experience, Paul dodged skillfully, and the volley
passed over his head, spreading in its flight, and fell in its
contaminating virulence upon Toinette.  She saw her raiment spotted and
defiled, and such a sudden fury rose in her that she sprang upon Jeems
as he clawed and kicked in a clinch with Paul, and assailed him with
all the strength and bitterness of her small fists and biting tongue.

Jeems had seen the tragedy of the misdirected mud, and he knew that
Toinette's hands and not Paul's were pulling viciously at his hair.
There is a hurt which bears with it a sting of satisfaction, and this
emotion pressed upon Jeems as he fought desperately in front and felt
himself attacked treacherously from behind.  For Paul was accountable
for the mishap to Toinette.  Had the other not dodged in a cowardly
fashion, allowing the stuff to pass on to her, the thing would not have
happened.  It did not take more than a few seconds for the inspiration
of this thought with its apparent justice and truth to fire him with a
determination beside which his former resolution sank to
insignificance.  He was no longer fighting for Toinette's approval, but
against her, against Paul Tache, against all the world.  Toinette,
pulling at his hair, beating at his back, had raised his struggle to
epic heights.  The strength of martyrdom filled his lean arms and body,
and he fought with a renewed fierceness that made his heavier but
softer antagonist give way before the punishment, and both went down to
earth again.  Toinette fell with them, her long skirt impeding the
activity of their legs, her big hat hanging like a sunshade over her
face, her beautifully made curls tangled and spotted with mud, her
hands beating angrily at whichever of the two chanced to come in her
way.

Jeems was aware of her presence and physically sensible of her
combativeness, but in the complexity of action which surged over and
about him he could afford no discrimination in the manner of using his
arms, legs, teeth, and head, and at last, finding herself disentangled,
Toinette scrambled to her feet considerably bruised and in such
disorder that no one would have recognized her as the splendid little
lady of the seigneurie who had come so proudly to Lussan's place a
short time before.  Her handsome hat was a crumpled wreck in the mud.
Her dress was twisted and bedraggled.  Her hands and face were
discoloured with soil, and her hair was so tangled about her that she
was almost smothered in it.  Despite this physical condition, her
mental self was more than ever inflamed with the desire to fight, and
seizing upon the hard and woodlike stalk of a last year's sunflower
which lay in the dirt, she succeeded in bringing it down with such
force that, missing Jeems, it caught Paul on the side of the head and
laid him sprawling flat on his face.  This terminated the conflict for
Toinette, who gave a cry of apprehension when she saw what she had done.

During the half minute or so preceding Toinette's well-intended but
mismanaged blow, Jeems had felt the discomfort of an increasing lack of
wind, and would have made testimony that either Paul or Toinette, or
both, were hammering him with wooden mallets similar to the one he had
seen employed by the auctioneer.  This impression was created solely by
Paul's fist, animated to redoubled strength and action by the fact that
Jeems's teeth were fixed in a vulnerable part of his anatomy.  Paul had
recovered from Toinette's blow before Jeems could take advantage of it,
and what happened during the final round of contention remained largely
a matter of speculation in Jeems's mind.  He was sitting up, after a
little, and there was no one to strike at.  Paul and Toinette were out
of his reach yet he heard their voices, and, turning his head, he
discovered them, oddly indistinct, moving in the direction of Lussan's
house.  He tried to call out, thinking that Tache was escaping like a
coward, but something in his throat choked him until it was impossible
for him to get breath enough to make a sound.  He made an effort to
rise that he might pursue his beaten enemy.  The earth about him swam
dizzily.  He was gasping, sick at his stomach, and blood was dripping
from his nose.

A horrifying thought leapt upon him, and so sudden was the shock of it
that he sat staring straight ahead, barely conscious of two figures
emerging from the concealment of a thick growth of brushwood twenty
paces away.  The thought became conviction.  He had not whipped Paul
Tache!  Paul had whipped him--and his enemy's accomplishment had been
so thorough that he could still feel the unstability of the world about
him as he drew himself to his feet.

His eyes and head cleared as the realization of defeat swept over him.
Then he recognized the two who had appeared in the edge of the open.
One was his Uncle Hepsibah, the other Toinette's father.  Both were
grinning broadly at the spectacle which he made, and as they drew
nearer he heard Tonteur's voice in what was meant to be a confidential
whisper.

"Is it really your _petit-neveu_, friend Adams, or one of Lussan's pigs
come out of its wallow?  Hold me, or what I have seen will make me
split!"

But Jeems heard no response from Hepsibah, for the trader's face
suddenly lost its humour, and in place of it came a look which had no
glint of smile or laughter in it.



[1] This prophecy of Hepsibah Adams came strictly true.  England and
France did not declare war upon each other until May and June of 1756,
although for several years preceding this date many wilderness
massacres and bloody battles occurred, including Braddock's defeat and
the battle of Lake George.

[2] Indians have always been conservationists.  But it was at this
period in American history that the frightful slaughter of wild life by
white people began.  As many as a thousand deer were killed in a single
drive by a merciless system of fire-hunting.  The carcasses were left
to rot, for the animals were taken for their hides alone, which were
worth from ten to forty cents each.




CHAPTER V

Half an hour later, Jeems was scrubbing himself in a hidden pool of
creek water not far from Lussan's place while close to him his uncle
cleaned his battle-stained clothes.

Hepsibah Adams talked as he worked.

"I say it again--that with a few tricks o' the trade you'd have cleaned
his batter good, Jeemsy.  And those are the tricks I'm going to make
you acquainted with from this day on.  It's fists you want to use and
not so much the Frenchywoman's way o' teeth and nails.  Biting is all
right if you can get hold of an ear or some other killing thing, but
when you set out to bite off a leg or an arm, why, Jeemsy, you're
likely going to die at that post of duty, unless the other fellow has
lost the use of his driving hams.  And that's mostly what you were
doing, lad, biting when you weren't kicking or scratching, and a mighty
good job you made of it, too!  If that little cat Toinette hadn't
jumped in after she got your handful of mud, you'd have had more to
your credit still, for if ever your hair got a tugging it was the
little lady herself who did the job, and pulled your head back so that
Paul had good driving space and something to hit each time.  You got a
good roasting, Jeems, a trouncing and basting as good as I ever saw,
especially the last part of it; but it's a matter of education to be
fustigated like that and nothing for which you need blush with shame.
Why, when I came to my senses I gave that Albany Dutchman the primest
beaverskin west of the Hudson for walloping me!  It was a joy I shall
never forget, and taught me a lot.  A man must be flayed now and then
to keep him in shape.  For that reason, you're a better man now than
you were an hour ago."

Jeems was doubtful of this final statement as he drew himself from the
pool.  Cool water had refreshed and strengthened him, but one eye was
closed, there were bruises and scratches on his face, and his body was
lame in many joints and parts.  His anger, however, had subsided, and
there was something different about him as he came from the water, a
change that was slight, but one which his uncle's shrewd eyes did not
fail to perceive.  The lad was not crumpled by his defeat, nor was
there a suspicion of humiliation or embarrassment in his attitude.  The
cold and steady light which gleamed in his good eye delighted Hepsibah.
To that individual, exultant over the Adams spirit which he had seen
displayed so energetically in the fight, Jeems seemed to have grown an
inch or two in height and to have added twice as many years to his age.
Even Odd, who was in their company, appeared to regard his master with
a new and inquisitively analytical respect.

Jeems was drying himself in the air and Hepsibah was absorbed in his
monologue on the art of fighting when a distant crash in the underbrush
drew them to attention.  This interruption to the solitude of the pool
continued until, through a disruption of bushes, appeared Tonteur, who
came down to them with such a wild flourish of an object in his hand
that Odd gave a contemplative growl.  Jeems stared with all the power
that was left of his vision, and a shiver ran through him, for he
beheld in the almost unrecognizable thing in Tonteur's hand what was
once the beautiful hat worn by Toinette.

"Look upon it, friend Adams!" cried Tonteur.  "_Her hat_!  And every
inch of her is like that from the tips of her toes to the top of her
head.  They're combing and cleaning her now, Madame Lussan and her
girl, and my Antoinette screaming all the time for this little monster
of yours that she may scratch out his eyes!  It is so funny I can only
look at her and laugh--and she must go home bundled up in Jeanne
Lussan's clothes, which are seven sizes too large!  I swear you have
missed the sight of your life in not seeing her at close range, so
messed and tangled that she has commanded Madame Lussan to burn her
riding suit and everything that goes with it.  But if you have missed
this spectacle, which I would not exchange for the half of a
seigneurie, you have at least won our wager, for it is true your
_petit-neveu_ is the greatest fighting man of his size and weight I
have ever seen, and has placed my daughter _hors de combat_ for many a
day, though her spirit yearns for a new trial at him!"

Taking notice of Jeems's bruised face and the distress which had come
into it, he stumped quickly to him and laid a friendly hand on his
shoulder.

"Tut, tut, my man, don't look so blank and miserable!  It isn't
entirely your fault this fiery minx of mine got into the fight, and a
lot of her ego has been lost in her dishevelment, if you know what I
mean.  If you don't, just bear in mind that her young stalwart is also
rigging himself in homespuns, and that you've left marks of equal merit
all along the battle line.  Some day you'll put him in the mud and keep
him there, and when that day comes, if you'll let my eyes have proof of
it, I'll give you a horse to ride home from Tonteur Manor, and you may
keep him for your own."

Whereupon, holding the wreck of Toinette's hat before his eyes, Tonteur
broke into laughter.

"If only her mother could have seen it," he said, calming himself at
the thought and heaving a deep breath of regret.  "The patrician blood
of the _ancien rgime_ mingling with the ignoble dirt of a barnyard!
The exalted brought to earth at the hands of the lowly Goth and Vandal!
The daughter of a noble dame cleaned of her pride and vainglory by a
backwoods cub like Jeems Bulain!  A peasant and a princess in a battle
royal, with the salt of the earth on top, to say nothing of the
three-tailed bashaw who is the pet of her sister's eyes--all down in
the muck at the same time!  Could she have seen that, I would willingly
pay the price of being buried alive along with this!"

Hepsibah Adams had given a grunt midway of this speech and now gazed
upon the seigneur with a sombre eye.

"I don't make it clear just what you mean by Goth and Vandal, and I
can't remember what the Bible says about the salt of the earth, but
when you call Jeems a backwoods cub and a peasant, and in the same
breath ride him along with the dirt of a barnyard, your language comes
nearer to my understanding," he growled.  "And that being the case, I'm
telling you there never was another tribe like the tribe of Adams, in
spite o' what you're saying about the noble dames in your family, and
this Jeems you are tongue-tying into hard knots is an Adams, and a good
one, too, though his mother had the misfortune to marry a Frenchman
when I wasn't looking.  From the day Old Nick put his hoof into the
Garden of Eden, the Adamses have been the flower of the human flock.
We've been fighters from the time fighting began, and when the
contention of man gives way to everlasting peace there'll be an Adams,
and not a Frenchman, somewhere about to put a period to the story we've
helped to write.  So if there is any doubt in your mind as to the
quality of this lad you're talking about, you'd best set yourself
straight or take a measure or two with me to test the truth of the
things I've said!"

Tonteur's face had grown red with indignation.

"What!  You dare to insinuate that Jeems's mother dishonoured herself
by marrying a Frenchman?" he demanded.

"I didn't go quite that far," said Hepsibah, "but I might make it clear
by saying that any Frenchman is a dog for luck when he marries into the
tribe of Adams, and this holds good for all and sundry princesses who
may go by the name of Tonteur."

Tonteur dropped Toinette's hat to the ground.

"No Frenchman would stand for such insult, sir," he retorted.  "And, to
drive it deeper, are you inferring that my daughter was responsible for
the disgraceful scene in Lussan's barnyard?"

"Not entirely responsible," said Hepsibah, "but subscribing to and
largely abetting.  That is what I would truthfully say."

"Your nephew forced the fight without pretext or excuse!"

"And your daughter jumped in where she had no business to be, just to
set the fur flying faster!"

"Jeems struck her with a handful of mud!"

"Which was an accident!"

"It was deliberate, sir!  I saw it!"

"It wasn't!" shrieked Jeems.  "I didn't mean to hit her!"

But the two men, their fervour inspired by persistent attention to the
barrels of flip and strong beer, scarcely heard his protest.  They had
drawn close to each other, and the seigneur was swelling as if on the
point of bursting his waistcoat, while Hepsibah Adams, his round face
lighted by a grin of anticipation, began to roll up his sleeves.

"You call me a liar, then?"

"Yes, and all of your tribe of Adams!"

Jeems gave a cry and Odd a fierce howl, for something happened so
suddenly that both were startled by it.  Hepsibah had made a pugnacious
lunge, but faster than his movement, and infinitely more skillful, was
that of Tonteur's wooden peg, which rose with vigour and precision and
smote him a resounding thwack on the side of the head that knocked him
off his feet.  With such celerity had the friendliness of the two men
transformed itself into belligerency that Jeems stood aghast as he
heard the sound which he thought must either be the cracking of his
uncle's skull, or the rending of the wood in Tonteur's leg.  To see his
intrepid relative spread out like this robbed him for a time of the
power to move or breathe; but when he saw this fallen idol half on his
feet and witnessed Tonteur's hickory peg as it made another vicious
assault upon Hepsibah's pate, knocking him flat again, Jeems's pent-up
breath released itself in a yell and he began to hunt for a club.  By
the time he had armed himself, Hepsibah, half stunned, had contrived to
avoid a third swing of Tonteur's underhung weapon, and the two men were
hugged in a fierce embrace, choking and gouging each other at the sheer
edge of the pool.  Desperately Jeems manoeuvred to employ his club, but
before he could get in a blow the soil gave way and the combatants
plunged into the water, out of which, after a turmoil in which Jeems
thought that both must drown, Hepsibah came floundering and puffing
ashore dragging the baron after him.

Then to Jeems's amazement his uncle stood back and, surveying Tonteur,
who had also clambered to his feet, doubled himself over with laughter.
With his brain cooled by the chill of the water, Toinette's father
seemed in no way resentful of this; and while Jeems stood with his
stick half poised, ready to deliver a _coup de grce_, he was treated
to the spectacle of the two men, so recently at each other's throats,
closely gripping hands.

Dropping his club he hurried to his clothes and began to put them on,
while Odd stood beside him, sensing the presence of a situation which
was beyond his comprehension.  The merriment of the two who had been
fighting became greater until, at last, seizing upon an inspiration,
Tonteur proclaimed that only one thing could fittingly put a cap to the
incident and that was a bottle of Madame Lussan's wild plum brandy.

Jeems waited until they were gone in the direction of Lussan's house,
having made no answer to the recommendation that he remain where he was
until his uncle returned.  This he had no intention of doing.  Even the
comradely praise which Hepsibah had given him before Tonteur's arrival,
and afterward the unexpected embroilment which resulted from their
meeting, had not abated the painful sensations in his breast.  That his
uncle had commended him for the valiancy of his fight with Paul Tache
and had championed him to the point of blows with their neighbour
filled him with courage and pride.  At the same time, there was an ache
within him that overshadowed these things and that became a poignant
misery as he looked upon Toinette's battered and desecrated wreck of a
hat.  A vision rose before him of an hour ago, when under this hat he
had seen a glory of soft curls, a face of pink loveliness, and a pair
of bright eyes smiling with a new friendliness upon him.  In the heat
of his battle with Paul, these details had gone out of his mind, but
now they came back and pressed themselves upon him more vividly than
when they had existed in the presence of Toinette.

Dejectedly he gazed upon her hat.  For him it stood as the tragic end
of all his hopes, and nothing in its forlorn wretchedness roused in him
a desire to smile or laugh.  It was more than a crumpled bit of finery.
It was Toinette herself, a part of her crushed and broken at his feet,
a token of the bitter hatred which she must forever hold against him
after this.  He stooped and picked it up.  The jaunty feather was gone.
The rim was broken.  In the scuffle between his uncle and the baron,
Tonteur's wooden peg had put a great hole through it.  It was caked
with dirt and mud that was beginning to dry.  Yet Jeems's fingers had
never thrilled as they did when he held it in his hands and looked
cautiously about to make sure no prying eyes were watching his act.  A
lump came in his throat, and Odd, standing quietly with his eyes on his
master's face, saw the starting of tears.  Jeems blinked these away.
Then he knelt at the edge of the pool and washed the hat until it was a
shapeless mass in his hands, but with some of its softness and lustre
revealed again.  Completing his task, he returned to his father's cart
for his bow and arrows.  He did not feel he was running away when he
left on the homeward trail without letting his father or uncle know.

He disappeared into the woods and walked swiftly through the deep
aisles of the forest with Odd at his side.  A new emotion burned in
him, one of change, of spiritual transformation, of physical growth.
The world about him was not the world through which he had travelled
this trail in the early morning, nor was he the same Jeems.  Had
Jeems's mother known what had happened, she would have understood the
story unfolding slowly in the boy's face, and it would have frightened
her, for a mother dreads the day when childhood draws itself away, like
a beautiful shadow, to be replaced by the sterner form of maturity in
her offspring.  Catherine had held this day back from Jeems as long as
she could, even in a time and place where the ruggedness of life and
its social conditions schooled plastic youth to early duties and
responsibilities.  Now it had come in spite of her.  Jeems was unaware
of the fact, though he felt the new sensations pressing upon him.  The
events of an hour had made him older.  It was an hour in which he had
lost, and yet in losing trivial things he had unconsciously achieved
greater ones.  Paul Tache had whipped him.  Toinette's cool friendship
had turned to hatred.  His dreams were wrecked, his rose-hued hopes
sunk into oblivion.

Yet a different poise was in his chin as he walked through the
solitude, a different swing in his step.  Morning had sent him on an
errand of hysterical desire, now he was returning home vaguely
appraising the folly of an act which seemed to have been born a long
time ago, in a period of uncertainty, of half faith, of ill-defined and
divided yearnings.  Through Paul and Toinette and his defeat at their
hands, he was beginning to see the wider horizons of the world that was
shaping itself in his brain and in which the vital factor was
_himself_.  When he fought Paul Tache again, he would not be the Jeems
of Lussan's barnyard, and when that time came, as it surely would, he
would not throw mud into the face of Toinette Tonteur!

Hepsibah would have rejoiced greatly in this breaking down and building
up of fabrics in Jeems's visionings, and would have sworn it was the
blood of the Adamses rising in him, a fighting strain, an unconquerable
spirit, the beginning of a sure and steady resolution born of the lad's
first contact with strife and adversity.  Even Catherine had not
guessed the depth of affection which the adventurous Indian trader held
for her boy, nor the fear that lived with it, the jealous and yet
unspoken apprehension that a caprice of fate, like her marriage to
Henri Bulain, would at last turn an Adams into a Frenchman.  But within
the few hours he had been at Catherine's home, this misgiving had
subsided in his breast, for Jeems was more than ever like his mother,
with something in his face and a quietness of manner which her brother
failed to discover in Henri Bulain, with his foolish confidence and
dreams of enduring peace.  Jeems's battle with Paul Tache had cemented
Hepsibah's conviction that he was every inch an Adams, and his
happiness, with the opportunity so near at hand, had found expression
in a triumphant return with Tonteur to the barrels of flip and beer.
Could Catherine have beheld the fight which gave to Jeems's uncle such
pride and satisfaction, she would, like Toinette in a moment of awful
suspense, have shut her eyes with horror.  For she sometimes recalled
with a shudder Hepsibah's frequent and bloody battles in the days of
his early boyhood, when to engage in physical combat was his greatest
joy, and when--though one would never have guessed it now--he had been
so much like Jeems in his thinness and fury of action that in a
scrimmage the two could scarcely have been told apart.

It was not long after Jeems's departure from Lussan's place that
Hepsibah discovered he was gone, and with a quick adieu to Tonteur and
a word to Henri he set out after him.  Sharp walking and the cool
earthy smells of the forest cleared his mind of the mellowing effects
of Lussan's brews, and he began to feel certain qualms rising in him as
he progressed.  He did not like the thought of Jeems going off alone in
this way, which had the appearance of retreat, and under his breath he
swore at the baron for luring him from the pool and at himself for
yielding to temptation.  Few men could keep pace with the trader on a
trail, despite the rotundity of his bulk, and at the end of an hour he
came to a halt, with Jeems stepping from behind a bush half a dozen
paces away, an arrow fixed to his bow.

If Hepsibah had a doubt of his nephew's courage, it was dispelled by
this watchfulness and the lad's readiness for action.

"I'm dead, looking at the theory o' the thing," he commented.  "Jeemsy,
I'm ashamed o' my carelessness and proud o' your discretion.  At that
distance you could stick an arrow half through me!"

"Clear through you," corrected Jeems.  "I've done it with a buck."

Hepsibah's eyes glowed with pleasure at the note of calm boastfulness
in the boy's voice.

"Why did you run away?" he demanded.

"I didn't," replied Jeems, meeting his uncle's look with a flash of
resentment.  "You ran away from me--with Tonteur.  I wouldn't go like
that with Paul Tache!"

They continued along the trail, and in the boy's steady silence
Hepsibah's face wore a pondering seriousness.  Then he said, laying a
hand tenderly on Jeems's arm:

"Son, what do you think of me for doing that?"

"I wouldn't do it--with someone I hated," answered Jeems, looking
straight ahead.

"But I don't hate Tonteur.  I like him."

"Then why did you fight him?  And why did he almost kill you with his
wooden leg?"

Hepsibah was not quick in answering such a fine point of logic, and the
hardness in the voice at his side, so unlike that of the boy whom he
had comforted and encouraged at the pool, drew his gaze casually, and
yet more shrewdly, to the other's face.  Twice he started to speak, and
each time his lips were closed by the memory of his sister and of the
talk which had passed between them when Jeems was in bed.  Then the
thoughts in his mind burst forth in spite of his worship for Catherine
and his desire not to overstep the importunities she had placed upon
him in respect to the use of his tongue when in the presence of Jeems.

"Fighting," he began in a subdued voice, treading softly upon the
forbidden subject as if Catherine might be near and listening, "is the
breath o' life, the spice of existence, and the most reasonable thing
ever invented.  Without fighting the earth might as well turn up its
toes and die.  It's a sort o' medicine, you'll see in time, lad.  It
clears the complexions o' nations, makes religion what it is, and irons
out the troubles o' people just as the Lord o' Hosts intended it
should.  By which I mean, Jeems, that the biggest and best friendships
are made through fighting, with nations as well as men, and that when
you shake hands with a man you've fought, granting the grip is a good
and honest one, you've made a friend forever."

"I wouldn't shake hands with Paul Tache," said Jeems.  "Not ever.  Some
day I am going to kill him."

The quietness of his voice stirred Hepsibah with a feeling of
uneasiness.  He was thinking of Catherine again as he continued his
measurement of the boy.

"Killing, except in the case o' war, is not a good thing to have on
your mind," he remonstrated.  "And there will be plenty of that before
you're much older, Jeems.  Until then, learn the tricks I'm going to
show you, whip this young Tache, and then offer him your hand to shake.
That's the glory o' the game."

The tenseness in Jeems's face gave way a little before his uncle's
words and the good-natured laugh which followed them.

"I'll never shake hands with Paul Tache," he repeated.  "I'm going to
whip him.  Some day I may kill him."

"That's better," approved Hepsibah.  "You _may_ kill him, which doesn't
set the mark o' surety on your intention.  But if you ever find it
necessary to put an end to his days, don't do it in a spirit o' hatred,
lad.  Fighting, if jolly and well intended, lifts the soul to glorious
heights; it makes you laugh as well as cry, and cleans out all the
thistles and weeds in the back yards o' your life, making you
broader-minded and stronger o' blood.  But when that fighting is
poisoned by hatred and you reach a point where you can't laugh at the
cracking o' your own pate as well as the other fellow's, then it's a
_dee_structive thing and the worst that can empty its vials o'
desolation upon the earth.  Jeemsy, that's what is spreading like a
plague over the land right now, the same poison o' hatred with which
you fought young Tache, and the time is coming--it's almost here--when
it's going to burn up this world of yours in flames so red and terrible
that God A'mighty Himself won't be able to stop them!"

Hepsibah let his voice rise with the emotion which was never entirely
quiet within him, and at the astounding words he was saying, Jeems's
thoughts lost their hold of Tache and he stared wide-eyed and
wondering.  Hepsibah went on, seeing the visions of impending events
which he had described to Catherine and Henri the night before, and
Jeems's blood ran fast at the pictures his uncle painted of their
wilderness world in the grip of massacre and war.

"All this you should know," said Hepsibah defiantly, thinking of the
futility of his arguments with his sister and her husband.  "You're
coming to manhood, Jeems, and if your mother and father won't look
after themselves, you must do it for them.  There's fighting in your
future, and you might as well make yourself ready for it, though I
can't see any reason why you should tell your mother about it or what
I've said.  She'd punish me, I swear, and your mother's sweetness is no
sweeter than the bitterness of her reproach when she doesn't say a
word, but just looks at me as if I'd struck her with my fist.  You
won't tell her, will you?"

Jeems shook his head and promised.

"Then I'll go to the end of what I had in my mind," continued Hepsibah.
"It begins with this thing we call hate.  When you say you hate Paul
Tache, you're simply giving evidence o' the fact that you've been
bitten by a snake you can't see or feel or hear, a snake beside which
the copperhead o' the swamps is a gentle and kindly creature and one we
should look in the eye with friendship and love.  This snake lives in
our own blood, Jeemsy, and it's a cuss for brewing trouble.  It has
been hard at work for years in this country of ours until hate is
becoming the biggest part o' the air we breathe.  White men like you
and me set this snake at work.  First, down there, we began hating the
French and the French began hating us; and then we set the Indians to
hating our enemies and our enemies did the same; and after that, not
being content with the deviltry we'd done, we started the Indians to
hating among themselves.  _We_ did that, lad, we white descendants o'
the Son o' God, with our greater wisdom, our whisky, our guns and lies,
until in a hundred tribes o' redskins between the Upper Canadas and the
Ohio there isn't a tribe that doesn't hate some other tribe, and all
because we hate the French and the French hate us.  Jeemsy, bear this
in mind--it wasn't the Indians who brought hair to us--_we sent them
out to get it_.  We wanted proof of their killings, so we asked for the
scalps and paid cash money for them, and the French did likewise;
until, with prices for the hair of men and women and children rising
steadily, white men took to the dirty trade they had taught the
savages.  And this has brought about such a competition in the taking
of human blood that the cover won't keep the pot down much longer, and
when the cover blows off, the sky itself won't be big enough to hold
what comes from under it.  That is what hate will do, the hate o' two
breeds o' white men for each other; and when it's over--mark me,
Jeems!--they'll blame the Indian for it.  There's no hate like a white
man's hate, not even an Indian's, for it's deadlier because o' the
power and knowledge behind it, which have taken advantage of simpler
folk from the beginning of time.  So I say it is a point in your
disfavour to go on hating Paul Tache."

For a little while Jeems had forgotten Paul.  It seemed to him the
world of peace which he had always known was suddenly gone.  In vague
and scarcely believed whisperings and rumours he had heard of dark
happenings along the farther frontiers.  But his father and mother,
living their lives of persistent hopefulness, had smoothed away the
thoughts to which his uncle's unleashed tongue now gave freedom.  As
Hepsibah Adams went on with what his conscience urged him to say, even
pausing to trace with a stick in a spot of open sand a map of the
countries which would soon be at grips in war, pointing out their
places of weakness and strength, Jeems's soul had entered another life
and world.  And when, after making tiny trails to mark the paths of
invasion and greatest danger, Hepsibah put a finger on what he called
Forbidden Valley and stated his conviction that the Mohawks would come
that way with fire and tomahawk, Jeems caught his breath with a throb
of suspense.

"Again I'm telling you that you have reached a time in your years when
you should know these things," continued Hepsibah, rising from the plot
of sand.  "And now that I've unburdened my mind and set you straight in
spite o' your father and mother, I'm ready for that first lesson in the
art o' defence and offence which will show you why you didn't whip
young Tache.  There is much to learn, the fine points o' sparring and
squaring away, the justle-holds and grapple, knee-gouging and choking,
and the proper way to kick when down as well as up--so we might as well
begin."

To this suggestion Jeems willingly acquiesced, and for half an hour
Hepsibah trained his pupil in a little open near their path.

The sun was slanting well to the westward when they came out of the Big
Forest and looked down the slope upon Jeems's home.  Peace and
happiness seemed to have spread their golden wings over Forbidden
Valley, and as Jeems gazed upon its stillness and beauty, its
never-ending lure and tranquil friendliness, his uncle's words of
warning faded before the more pleasant things in his mind.  Smoke was
rising in a silvery spiral from the big stone chimney, and forgetting
the tragic occurrences of the day, his heart throbbed with the thrill
which would never grow old as he saw his mother among her flowers.  He
raised his eyes to the face of the man beside him as if to challenge
the truth of the foreboding things he had said, and he found that
Hepsibah Adams was not looking at the woman or the cabin below him, but
straight out over the broken roofs and pinnacles of the great forest
which ended in an azure haze on the far side of Forbidden Valley.

And Odd, standing between them, was also gazing steadily beyond the
green and brown opens as if in the vast distances were an unsolvable
mystery which his soul was struggling to understand.

Breaking from his thought and smiling with good-humoured cheer,
Hepsibah put his hand on Jeems's shoulder.  A pair of culprits
conscious of their duty, they descended slowly to explain to Catherine
why Jeems had one closed eye and a puffed-up lip and his uncle a
swollen jowl.




CHAPTER VI

On Saturday, Henri Bulain and Catherine took up the regular routine of
their springtime work again.  This had been interrupted in several ways
of late.  Heavy rains at night had impeded planting and the little
ploughing which remained to be done, and time had been lost in the
trips to Tonteur Manor and Lussan's place.  At the breakfast table,
where Catherine presided with a formality which assured Hepsibah and
Jeems that she had not forgiven them for the embroilments they had
brought upon themselves, Henri said that Saturday was as good a day as
any on which to resume his work, and Hepsibah eagerly agreed with him
and offered his assistance.

That her brother, of all men, should have engaged in a common brawl
with the baron of the seigneurie, whom she had planned to bring into
closer intimacy with her home and family, filled Catherine's sensitive
soul with a shock the effect of which it was impossible for her to
conceal.  She placed small credence in Hepsibah's assurance that he and
Tonteur had parted the best of friends; and when Jeems declared this to
be true and testified that he had seen them shake hands, lack of
convincement still lay in her eyes and with it a deeper suspicion of
the one whom she believed was leading Jeems astray in the telling of
the truth.  Hepsibah knew he was in disgrace and probably would remain
so for some time, and his discomfort was increased by the fact that his
head had swollen larger during the night, so that every time his sister
looked at him she was reminded of the shame he had brought upon her.
Yet her displeasure was less than she permitted him to believe, for she
could never hold resentment long against her brother, whose genial
recklessness and irresponsibility made her regard him with almost the
same mothering tenderness with which she looked upon her boy.

On this day the little clearing at the edge of the valley hummed with
industry.  So filled with beauty and freshness were the sky and air, so
glorious was all the world about them, that Catherine sang at her tasks
in spite of her wounded feelings.  Her outdoor oven of clay and stones
breathed fragrantly of baking things, and in one end of it, apart from
her bread and cakes, was Hepsibah's favourite dish, a huge meat pie
with thick upper and lower crusts between which were the choicest parts
of Jeems's turkey.  Her laying hens were cackling cheerfully about the
barn, and to make the morning a greater success, a family of chicks had
come triumphantly out of their shells during the night.  There was
little left for Catherine to desire as she looked out over their
fields.  At the end of them she could see Henri and his ox turning over
the rich brown soil, and not far from him, in a clearing filled with
stumps, Hepsibah and Jeems were at work with grub hoes and axes.  A
gentler spirit of grace and indulgence filled her bosom as her eyes
rested on these toiling members of her family, and when she called them
to dinner she had made up her mind to forgive her brother for what he
had done.

When he had washed himself and his ruddy face was before her, she put
an arm about his neck and kissed his cheek.

"I am sorry I had to be cross with you," she said, and the day was
brighter for Hepsibah.

In the stump field that afternoon he came in closer intercourse than
ever with Jeems, and the two dug and pried and pulled together,
triumphing a little at a time over the tough snags and roots, and
finding breath in their labour to talk of many things filled with
lively interest for the younger of the two.  As Hepsibah's powerful
muscles strained and sweat rolled from his face, Jeems found a new
thrill in putting his own body to work, for in this toil at his uncle's
side there seemed to be a greater thing than the mere act of exertion,
a building up of something within him which gave him increasing
satisfaction.  Hepsibah talked and worked with him as if he were a man,
and discoursed on so many things foreign to his life, from politics and
his own adventurings to the opportunities awaiting young men along the
frontiers, that Jeems's head at times had difficulty with the matters
which he was struggling to absorb.  Hepsibah was also discovering in
his nephew qualities of comradeship and understanding which answered a
yearning that had long been in him.

In the evening, when housework and chores were done, Henri and
Catherine often strolled about the clearings enjoying the contemplation
of achievement and pointing out to-morrow's work, and always looking
ahead to the day when the Bulain farm would reach far and wide on all
sides of them, with two hundred acres of cleared land in it instead of
thirty.  In their mind the fields and meadows and orchards of the
future were painted as vividly as though they already existed, and so
often had they gone over their plans together that Catherine had placed
the fences with their gates and stiles and had marked the groves and
trees which she did not want an axe to touch.  To-night their gladness
was heightened by Hepsibah's presence, and Catherine told him of her
dream of a great orchard of apple trees covering the sunny slope
southward from the Big Forest, and named her favourites among the trees
to be planted--the Newton pippin and the spitzenburgh, the Poughkeepsie
swaar, the red streak, and the Gueldering, with a few russets and
costards for eating out of hand.  Where they had a dozen trees now,
just coming into juvenilish bearing, they would have a hundred or more
within a few years, she said.  Seeing the nearer and hardier things to
be done, Henri pointed out the acres of forest to be cut and stumped,
the lowlands to be cleared and ditched, and the stretch of swamp land
beyond the maple hardwoods which he would some day drain and turn into
a meadow.  There were five arpents, or seven and a half English acres,
in the stump-filled field where Hepsibah and Jeems had worked, and he
planned to have this cleaned and ready for the plough by another
spring.  Five arpents a year was what he had set for himself, which
would give him more than a hundred acres in crops at the end of another
ten years.  Neither of the two was afraid of work.  Their faces glowed
with the joy of an imaginative building of their little world.

"No place in New France will be more beautiful than ours at the end of
that time," exclaimed Catherine.  "Jeems will have a wife then, and
little children to play and laugh in this paradise--and there,
Hepsibah, where you see the great oaks and the two big chestnuts, is
the spot we have set aside for Jeems's home."

Later, before he went to bed, Hepsibah stood smoking his pipe under a
sky that was an arch of glowing stars.  A great silence lay about him,
a stillness made deeper by the little sounds of life which came out of
it, the breathing movement and pulse which were of the earth itself,
the whispering of growing things, the faint and ever-present melody of
air stirring softly among seas of forest tops.  He could hear the
homelike sound of Henri's ox in the barn and the purling of water in
the creek.  Not far away, a whippoorwill swelled its throat in lonely,
beautiful song, and from the edge of the distant swamp another answered
it.  More than all other birds of night or day Hepsibah loved the
whippoorwills.  Their solitariness and brooding melancholy touched a
sympathetic chord somewhere in his nature, and when the humour was on
him he imitated their notes so perfectly that the birds called back to
him in a friendly way.  But to-night he scarcely heard their cry, nor
did his blood react with pleasant thrill to the beauty of the
star-filled heavens with their touch of silvery flush in the east where
the moon was about to thrust itself over the top of Squirrel Rock.  His
eyes saw only one thing, and that was the pit of darkness which hung
over Forbidden Valley, and his ears were tensed even now for that which
he believed would come out of it some day.  He was thinking of the
plans Catherine had made for the years ahead, of her dreams impossible
for him to break down, of her faith and happiness which he could not
darken with his warnings.  He felt his failure.  He knew he was
powerless against all that he had seen growing up about him.  Forbidden
Valley, treacherous in its beauty, brewing horror behind its smiling
mask of peace, had conquered him, and he sensed something almost
physical in its triumph.

He thought he was alone, but when he turned toward the cabin he found
Jeems standing near him.  The boy had come so quietly that Hepsibah's
skilled ears had caught no sign of his presence, and for a moment he
stared in silence at his face, illumined by the star glow.  There was a
strange beauty about the lad as he stood there which even the
wilderness man's eyes could not fail to see, a thing more fragile than
flesh and blood, something built up of a haunting vision of other years
when in the empty days that had followed their mother's death he had
seen that same questing, yearning light in Catherine's face that he now
saw in her boy's.

It was Jeems who broke the spell by coming nearer to his side.

Then Hepsibah thrust an arm toward the submerging sea of darkness
before them.

"Do you know that valley well?"

"As far as the lakes, where we go for berries and to shoot wildfowl in
season," said Jeems.

"No farther?"

"A little.  Hunting is nearer and easier between here and the
seigneurie, but we get our candle fat there because it is a good
feeding place for bears and the lakes are full of fish with which to
bait our deadfalls."

"And you have seen no trails except those made by deer and bear and
porcupine?"

"Yes, we have found moccasin tracks."

The flush of moonrise had grown into a flaming ball climbing over
Squirrel Rock, and Jeems's eyes were on it.

"I am making a trip to the lakes to-morrow," said his uncle, "and it is
my intention to find what lies beyond them.  Do you want to go?"

"I am going over there," said Jeems, and he nodded toward the rising
moon.  "I want to see Toinette and tell her I am sorry for what
happened yesterday."

Hepsibah thumbed fresh tobacco upon the spark still left in the bowl of
his pipe.  He looked sidewise at Jeems, and in the boy's profile, so
like his mother's in the soft radiance of the night, he saw a
resoluteness of purpose as unimpassioned as the voice in which Jeems
had answered him.

"That's a decision born o' the Adams blood, lad," he approved.  "There
never was a day when an Adams failed to be a gentleman in the
vicissitudes of either love or war.  It's a fine and inspiring thought
to want to apologize to Toinette--even though you were right.  I'll go
with you and leave the valley for a later day."

"I'm not going to fight," said Jeems.  "I'm going to see Toinette--and
I want to go alone."

On Sunday morning, when he set out for Tonteur Manor, this was the
thought deeply entrenched in Jeems's mind--that he would not fight Paul
Tache that day no matter what temptation might be placed in his path.
He had told his mother where he was going and what he was planning to
do, and with her encouragement to spur him on he felt eager and hopeful
as he made his way toward the seigneurie.

This feeling was unlike the one with which he had set out to fight Paul
Tache, and what he had to do loomed even more important than any
physical vanquishment which he might bring upon his rival.  To soften
Toinette's heart, now so bitterly against him, to bring back the
friendliness of her smile, and to see her eyes alight with the
sweetness which she had been on the point of yielding to him at
Lussan's place were foremost in his mind.  His memory of her and of the
greeting which had flashed in her face made him forget her blows and
the fury of her tongue.  A little at a time, it had been growing
stronger in him from the moment he had washed her hat at the edge of
the pool.  It had not left him during the day he had chopped and dug
with his uncle.  Now it seemed a part of the sunlight about him, a part
of the song of birds, a part of the cool fragrance of the forest
through whose soft shadows he travelled.  He was anxious to see
Toinette again and to offer her all that his small world held, if
thereby he could make amends for the ruin and humiliation he had
brought upon her.  A spirit of chivalry in him, older than his years,
rose above the lowly consideration of rights and wrongs.  He was sure
he was right.  Yet he wanted to say he was wrong.  Though he did not
know it, years had passed since two days ago, and he was a new Jeems
going to a new Toinette.  His fear of her had vanished.  He was no
longer borne down by a feeling of littleness and unimportance, and for
the first time he was visiting Tonteur Manor without the thought of
inferiority sending its misgivings through his soul.  In some
mysterious way which he did not understand, but which he strongly felt,
he had passed away from yesterday forever.

When he came to the open where he had shot the turkey cock, he scarcely
thought of the part it had played as a stage for his emotions three
days before.  Paul Tache had become an unimportant factor for the
moment, except as he might seek to interfere with the directness and
purpose of his mission.  Even if this happened, he was sure that he
would not fight.  Both pride and courage were strong in him as he
neared the seigneurie, and if the blood of knights ever ran through the
veins of the Adamses, it was stirring in his own when he saw Tonteur
Hill ahead of him.

On the crest of this hill he paused, and no knight ever looked on a
lovelier kingdom than the wide domain which lay below him.  Until
to-day it had filled him with a kind of awe, and when trespassing upon
it he had felt like a trivial creature treading the realm of a princess
who was farther away from him than the sun.  Tonteur's power and riches
had frightened him.  The length and breadth of his fertile acres.  His
fortressed church and manor.  The great river which he guarded for the
King of France.  The miles upon miles of wilderness terrain, Lake
Champlain agleam in a blue haze of distance, mystery, romance, the
thrill of things he had never lived or known, all forcing themselves
upon him and oppressing him with a sense of his smallness.  It was
here, a long time ago, as they rested before making the descent, that
he had first heard his mother and father talk of the wars in which
Tonteur had fought--how he had won the favour of the King, and why it
was, through her mother's side, that Toinette had in her a drop of
blood inherited from a queen of France.  His mother had laughed merrily
at that, and he had wondered, just as he had wondered at her quickened
seriousness when in almost the same breath, his father had told of the
days when Tonteur's great-grandfather, Abraham Martin, was a King's
Pilot at Quebec and a friend of the great Champlain.[1]  So his heart
had never been confident, no matter how bravely he tried to make it so,
when he came into the bottom lands where his princess lived.

Now it was different.  It was as if he had been on a long journey and
had returned in every way an equal of those who lived in the valley of
the Richelieu.  With Odd, he sat for a time on the hilltop gazing upon
the proud glory of the seigneurie.  A strange fantasy grew in his
brain.  He saw himself fighting, as his uncle had predicted he would
fight, and as Tonteur had fought to make himself a powerful lord of the
land.  Ambition clutched tightly at his heart.  He was seeing a world
larger than he had ever conceived a world could be, and everywhere in
it was Toinette.  For her he would make himself what her father was--a
great man!

But first he must tell her he was sorry.  This had ceased to be a duty.
It was the flame behind his newly awakened consciousness, an act which
had raised itself to the level of a crusade filled with possibilities
which set his imagination aglow.

He was about to descend the winding path when a horseman rode across
the bottom lands and started up the narrow trail.  It was Tonteur.
Concealed in a thicket Jeems watched him pass and wondered why he was
riding in the direction of Forbidden Valley with such a dour and
unpleasant look on his face.

He went down the hill, and at the foot of it made Odd understand that
he was to remain there until he returned.  Then he struck out boldly
for the manor house.  This building was made of logs, for Tonteur had a
love for trees which was stronger than any temptation to build of
stone, as other seigneurs up and down the Richelieu and St. Lawrence
had done.  It was a palace of giant timbers richly darkened by age and
weather, and in Jeems's eyes it might have been the home of a king.  It
was loopholed for defence, and its windows were protected by huge oaken
shutters which could be closed and barred.  Not far from it was the
church, even more a fortress than the dwelling, for its windows were
higher, its one door heavier, and under the eaves was a long bevelled
slit through which fifty men might fire down upon a foe.  From both the
church and the house, defenders could sweep the river with their guns.
In the other direction were the gristmill and barns, and as far as
Jeems could see through the clearings were the loopholed and
window-shuttered homes of the vassal farmers of the seigneurie.

Soon his feet were in the path which led to the manor.  It was so still
he could have believed that everyone was asleep as he courageously
mounted the wide steps to the door of Toinette's home.  On this door
was a great black knocker of battered iron.  The face of the knocker
was a grinning ogre, a gargoylish head which, from his earliest memory
of it, had fixed itself upon him as a symbol of the grim and
unapproachable spirit that guarded the rooms within.  Only twice had he
heard its resounding summons to the inhabitants of the house.  Now his
hand reached out to awaken the dull thunder of its voice.

His fingers touched the cold iron.  He hesitated in the moment he was
lifting it, for he observed that the door was open by a space of a few
inches.  Through this aperture a voice came to him clearly.  It was a
high, biting, angry voice, and he recognized it as Madame Tonteur's.
He raised the weight from its metal panel and would have knocked when
he heard a name which made him pause in rigid silence.  It was his own.
Without trying to listen, yet with the discomfort of an eavesdropping
position forced upon him, he learned why Tonteur had ridden up the Hill
with such stern displeasure in his face.

"It is no fit place for a gentleman of New France to be going," he
heard Toinette's mother say.  "Henri Bulain was a fool for marrying
this good-for-nothing Englishwoman, and Edmond is a greater fool for
not driving her from the country when her breed is murdering and
killing almost at our doors.  The woman was made for a spy, despite the
pretty face which has softened Edmond's silly heart, and that boy of
hers is no less English than she.  The two should not be allowed to
live so near to us, yet Tonteur brazenly sets forth to visit them and
maintains they are his friends.  The place they have built should be
burned and the Englishwoman and her boy sent where they belong.  Let
Henri Bulain go with them if he chooses to be a renegade instead of a
Frenchman!"

"Fie upon you for such thoughts, Henriette," chided the milder voice of
Madame Tache.  "I despise the English as much as you or Toinette, but
it is unfair to voice such invective against these two, even though the
woman is proud of her pretty face and her boy is a mud-slinging little
wretch.  Edmond is a big-souled man and simply befriends them out of
pity!"

"Pity!" sniffed the other.  "His pity, then, is an insult to Toinette
and me.  This English person has become so bold at his favour that she
smiles and laughs in my face as freely as any fine lady in the land,
and like a charlatan she lets down her hair for you to rave about!"

"Because I asked her to," said Madame Tache.  "Are you angry because of
that, Henriette?"

"I am angry because she is English, and her boy is English, and yet
they are allowed to live among us as if they were French.  I tell you
they will be traitors when the time for treachery comes!"

Jeems had stood with his fingers clenched at the unyielding iron of the
knocker.  Now he heard another voice and knew it was Toinette's.

"I think Jeems's mother is nice," she said.  "But Jeems is a detestable
little English beast!"

"And some day that beast will help to cut our throats," added her
mother unpleasantly.

Madame Tache laughed softly.

"It is too bad the woman is so pretty," she said good-humouredly.
"Otherwise, I am sure she would have less of your disfavour.  As for
the boy, we should not blame him for what he cannot help.  I have
sympathy for the unfortunate little vagabond."

"Which is not a reason why my husband should degrade himself and
humiliate me by going to see his mother!" snapped the baron's wife, "If
her indecency attracts him there----"

The great iron knocker fell with a crash, and almost before the sound
of it reached a servant's ears, the door swung open and Jeems stalked
in.  The women were speechless as he stood in the wide opening to the
room in which they were seated.  He scarcely seemed to realize they
were there and looked only at Toinette.  He remained for a moment
without movement or speech, his slim figure tense and gripped.  Then he
bowed his head in a courtesy which Catherine had carefully taught him.
When he spoke, his words were as calm as those of Madame Tache had been.

"I have come to tell you I am sorry because of what happened at
Lussan's place, Toinette," he said, and he bent his head a little lower
toward her.  "I ask you to forgive me."

Even Henriette Tonteur could not have thought of him as a beast after
that, for pride and fearlessness were in his bearing in spite of the
whiteness of his face.  As the occupants of the room stared at him,
unable to find their voices, he drew back quietly and was gone as
suddenly as he had appeared.  The big door closed behind him, and
turning to a window near her Toinette saw him go down the steps.  An
exclamation of indignation and amazement came at last from her mother,
but this she did not hear.  Her eyes were following Jeems.

He went across the open and into the fields.  As he drew near the foot
of Tonteur Hill, Odd came cautiously forth to meet him, but not until
they reached their old resting place at the crest of the ascent did he
pause or seem to notice the dog.  Then he looked back upon the
seigneurie.  A bit of iron had sunk into his soul.  The sun was still
shining, the birds were singing, the miles of wilderness were golden in
their beauty, but his eyes were seeing with a new and darker vision.
From the rich valley which had been the fount of all his dreams they
turned to the faint gleam of distant water in the south where lay Lake
Champlain, and beyond which, not far away, were the Mohawks and the
English and the land of his mother's people.  It was the blood of that
land, running red and strong in his veins, which Toinette and her
mother hated.

He dropped a hand upon Odd's head, and the two started over the
homeward trail.  The dog watched the forest and caught its scents, but
he watched and guarded alone, for Jeems gave small heed to the passing
interests of the woods and thickets.  In many places the hoofprints of
Tonteur's horse were left clearly in the earth, and Jeems noted these,
for Tonteur and his visit to Forbidden Valley were a part of the
thoughts burning in his head.

He walked more slowly through the Big Forest and approached his home
from its eastern edge.  He could not see Tonteur or his horse or any
life about the cabin, but when he came near to it, he heard an alarming
sound through the open door.  His mother was crying.  He ran in and
found her with her head bowed upon her arms and her shoulders shaking
with sobs.  In response to his startled voice, Catherine raised a face
wet with tears and, seeing the effect of her grief upon him, tried to
smile.  The effort fell halfway and in a moment she was almost weeping
again, with her face pressed to his shoulder as if he were a man in
whose strength she was seeking comfort.

Her words came brokenly, and Jeems's mind was a turmoil of misgiving
and fear as he listened.

First he gathered that his mother had been very happy at the beginning
of the day.  Holding him in an hysterical embrace, and weeping afresh
by turns, she told him that his departure to ask for Toinette's
friendship, together with Hepsibah's presence in the bosom of her
family, had filled her with joy and pride.  In addition to these
things, Tonteur had come over from the seigneurie, and with that event
her morning had overflowed with gladness.

"They seemed delighted to see each other--your uncle and the baron,"
she said, with a moan that sent increasing apprehension through him.
"We talked about Toinette and you--and they laughed and joked
together--and he was so pleased when I asked him to stay and have
dinner with us--and they walked off--arm-in-arm--and then--oh, Jeems,
Jeems, they went down into the stump field and had a terrible fight!"

Her arms relaxed and, as she dabbed at her eyes with a wet and crumpled
handkerchief, she gave a little wail of despair.

"Your father is going now--with the ox and cart--_to get Monsieur
Tonteur_!"

Through the window Jeems caught a glimpse of the farm conveyance
plodding in the direction of the stump field, with his father
flourishing a long whip beside it.  Excitement replaced the suspense
under which his mother's condition had placed him, and without waiting
to see whether she continued the drying of her eyes or fell to weeping
again, he darted out of the cabin and ran toward the scene of battle.
He took a short cut across the planted ground and arrived ahead of his
father, his wind half gone.  It was Odd who told him the field was not
empty, for nowhere could he see his uncle or the baron.  Following the
dog's lead, he found them both at the end of the clearing close to the
pile of stumps which he had helped to tear from the earth the preceding
day.  Before he could see them, he heard a voice and knew that Tonteur
was not dead.

"I'll cut the liver out of the dishonest scoundrel who made me this
leg!" the seigneur was crying in a great rage.  "He should be quartered
and hung for using a hickory stick with a crack in it!  With a sound
leg, sir, I've have sent you over that pile of stumps, for it was as
clever a blow as I ever struck!"

Jeems stopped, and as he gasped for breath he thought it was strange
that he did not hear a reply.

Then he ventured a few steps nearer and beheld Hepsibah Adams sitting
on the ground with his back against a stump, his arms hanging limply at
his sides, his round eyes wide open, and with a set and stupid look in
his face.

"It's a damnable outrage!" came Tonteur's voice again.  "_Hickory_,
sir--not ash or elm or chestnut--seasoned a year, he told me--and here
it is with a crack half the length of it, and an old crack, as you can
see with half an eye!  I'll murder him!"

Jeems stared at his uncle.  Hepsibah was rolling his eyes and making an
effort to answer.  A sickly grin spread over his countenance.

"I'll make you a leg--that'll last--friend," he said weakly.  "A good
leg--better leg than that--hickory, too--an honest leg--carrying no
hidden crack in it."

"With a leg like that, no crown in Christendom could have stood the
blow I gave you," Tonteur answered from a point which Jeems could not
see.  "A blow having just the right slant to it, and catching you
properly as you lunged.  It wrenched my backbone, sir--the sheer force
of it!  Do you declare yourself vanquished, or will you take advantage
of my condition, with only one pin to stand on and none whatever to
fight with?"

"I'm a little stunned, brother," acknowledged Hepsibah, managing at
last to get a hand to his head.  "But atop o' your luck I don't like
this bit o' vainglory in your talk.  I've been harder hit, but never
before with wood.  You couldn't do it again in a brace o' years, and as
soon as I've made you another leg I'll prove it to you!"

Jeems heard the rattle of the approaching cart and advanced into the
presence of his uncle and the baron.  Toinette's father, like Hepsibah,
was on the ground.  His clothes were awry and stained with earth, a
great lump was rising on the side of his face, and, as Jeems quickly
observed, his wooden leg was broken off close to the knee.  Upon this
scene, over which a profound silence had fallen at his appearance, his
father came with the cart.

Henri first gave his assistance to Tonteur.

"If this humiliation and disgrace becomes known, sir, I'm ruined," the
baron declared, allowing himself to be lifted until, with Henri's
support, he stood balanced on his one good leg.  "To hop like a frog,
and be carried behind an ox like a bag of wheat--my God, sir, it makes
me blush with shame!"

Jeems went to his uncle, and with his aid Hepsibah climbed to his feet
and stood dizzily, watching with cheerful appreciation as Henri Bulain
hoisted Tonteur into the cart.

"He's a most ree-markable liar, Jeemsy, this man Tonteur," he said.
"I'll swear it wasn't his wooden leg that hit me, but a jemmy of iron
wielded by the devil himself, or one o' these stumps flying on its own
account.  It was a mighty blow!"

He made an effort to walk and would have fallen if Teems had not
exerted his strength to hold him up.  Henri having successfully loaded
Tonteur, returned to assist Hepsibah; and the trader, struggling like a
drunken man to maintain an appearance of proper equilibrium, permitted
himself to be lifted in beside the baron.

From the window of her cabin, Catherine saw the cart coming with its
human load.



[1] Toinette's great-great-grandfather, Abraham Martin, allowed his
cattle to wander at will over the fields adjoining his farm where a
part of the city of Quebec now stands, and to this tract was later
given the name of the Plains of Abraham, on which was fought the battle
that changed the history of the world.




CHAPTER VII

Never had any period in Catherine's life been filled with such a
variety of incidents as this Sunday in May.  How men could fight and
batter each other and at the same time declare themselves the best of
friends, she could not understand even with her eyes beholding the
truth of it.  When Henri unloaded his cargo of damaged humanity, she
was faint from shock.  The first break in her despair came when the
presence of an affectionate good cheer between the two men forced
itself on her attention.  Hepsibah, whose dizziness still made it
difficult for him to stand, insisted that he would not lose a minute in
making a new leg for Tonteur and suggested for this article a hickory
bar, dried hard as bone, which Henri was saving for a shaft in the
gristmill he was planning to build another year.  When this stick was
brought to him, the baron burst forth in a paean of enthusiasm and
declared that in all his experience he had never seen a more admirable
piece of material.  This Catherine observed and overheard as she looked
from the corner of a curtained window, and somewhat relieved by the
humour the two were in and seeing no serious damage had been done she
made up her mind to act as if nothing had happened to mar the amity of
the day.  That her deception might be less burdened with the danger of
exposure, she contrived to get Henri and Jeems into the cabin, and
impressed her resolution on them.

So Tonteur was their guest at dinner, and with a great lie, which was
whole-heartedly endorsed by Hepsibah, he explained the reason for their
facial disturbances, their ride in the cart, and his broken peg,
unconscious of the fact that Henri had rushed in to tell his wife about
the combat and its results when he came for the ox.

"Wrestling, madam, is a sport of the gods," he said to Catherine, as
she cut open the huge turkey pie.  "I've had a passion for it since
boyhood, and it ran in my family long before the day when Abraham
Martin, in Quebec, offered the finest cow in his herd to any man who
could put him on his back.  It's my fault, and not your brother's, this
mess we are in.  We were wrestling fair and doing it in a gentlemanly
way, as your husband will make oath if you ask him, when my accursed
peg-leg caught in one of the stumps in a big pile out there, and down
they all came on us, until it is a wonder we are left alive!  My good
friend, Monsieur Adams, was caught with a hundred pounds of green oak
in the pit of his stomach, and with the sickness which came of it and
my having only one leg to hop on, we were compelled to avail ourselves
of the services of the cart.  To-morrow, Jeems, when you dig out
stumps, don't make the piles so confoundedly high!"

"Why?" asked Catherine gravely.  "Are you and Hepsibah going to wrestle
there again?"

"It may be, madam.  I am teaching him something new!"

"The devil you are!" exclaimed Hepsibah, then caught himself.  "I
mean," he added apologetically, "it isn't so new as it was."

When the baron left for home late in the afternoon, equipped with a new
peg which pleased him greatly, he promised that he would return soon
and bring Toinette with him if he could, and went off merrily with
Hepsibah and Jeems, who accompanied him up the long slope to the edge
of the Big Forest.  There Tonteur turned and waved his hat at Henri and
his wife, and after that Catherine saw him lean over to give Hepsibah a
jolly thump on the shoulder and to shake hands with Jeems.  While her
eyes were shining at these signs of friendship, which she believed
would be permanent, the seigneur, unmindful of Jeems's presence, was
saying to Hepsibah,

"I'll give your head a few days' rest, sir.  Then, if you don't mind, I
shall be grateful for the opportunity of trying out this new leg of
mine on it.  That is, if you have further desire to compete with me and
we can meet where Madam Bulain will know nothing of our _rencontre_.
But if you have had enough----"

"I haven't begun," growled Hepsibah.  "The luck o' the devil has been
in that scoundrelly stick o' yours.  To be struck by such a low-down
instrument o' war is an insult to my nature, and in our next debate,
it's my intention to lay you so cold that you'll be satisfied forever!"

Tonteur rode into the shadows of the woods, laughing as he went.  When
he had disappeared, Hepsibah turned to Jeems.

"I want no better friend than a man like that!" he exclaimed.  "A
fighting man after my own heart, lad, and one it is a pleasure to
debate with.  If there were only more Frenchmen like him and more of
our blood like myself, what pleasure we would find along the
frontiers!"  A thought coming to him of his nephew's adventure, he
asked, "What happened when you went to Toinette?  Did you see young
Tache?  And what did Toinette have to say?"

"I didn't see Paul Tache," replied Jeems, still looking in the
direction Tonteur had gone.  "Toinette called me an English beast."

What he had decided to keep from his mother he told to Hepsibah,
repeating all that he had heard at the door of the manor, in such a
quiet way that he might have been recounting an incident which had
occurred in another life than his own.

"They hate us because my mother is English," he finished.  "Madame
Tonteur said that some day we would be cutting their throats."

A few moments passed before Hepsibah spoke.  In that time his face had
grown dark and thoughtful.

"They were harsh words to use against neighbours, Jeems," he said then,
"and hard ones to stand when pointed at those we love.  But it's the
nature o' the human race when divided against itself, and which mostly
worships God for spite.  And maybe they were right.  Some day we may
cut their throats!"

"Are the English--as bad--as that?" asked Jeems, seeing quickly what
the other had meant.

"Yes, that bad," nodded Hepsibah, an almost imperceptible note of
menace in his voice.  "For more than half a century they have been
hunting Frenchmen's throats to cut, and, likewise, over that same
period o' time the Frenchmen have been hunting ours for the same
purpose.  That's why, down in the Colonies, some of us are getting
tired of a game so bloody and vile and are beginning to call ourselves
Americans.[1]  It's a new and wholesome name, Jeems, and one that is
bound to grow.  And for a like reason, because the shortcomings of a
parent sometimes give birth to pride in a child, a lot of the people of
your father's race are beginning to call themselves Canadians.  It's
six to one and half dozen to the other when it comes to counting the
blame for all the killing and burning that's going on along the
frontiers, and the Indians, who started out as brave and honourable men
who wanted to be our friends, have been made the instruments o' these
two God-worshipping devils named France and England, who have been
spattering the world with gore and hate until no mile o' land or sea is
free o' the stench of their discord.  So while it may be hard to bear,
lad, you mustn't condemn Toinette for what she said, for you are a
beast in her eyes, painted by her mother and all the French before
them, but I'm predicting the time when she will see the truth as she
has never been allowed to see it yet.  Youth like yours and Toinette's
is bound to hold the glory o' this great country in the hollow of its
hand!"

Jeems's eyes were filled with a slow-burning fire, as if he were
looking ahead to a vision of that day.

"If war comes, on which side are you going to fight?" he demanded.
"Will you help cut the throats of Tonteur and his people?"

"God knows!" replied Hepsibah, startled by the bluntness of his
nephew's question.  "I've asked myself that question many a time, lad,
when I've lain alone o' nights in the deep woods.  As I've said before,
fighting is the breath o' life when it's done with honour and
discretion, but no Adams this side o' the sea has ever sunk to murder
and massacre, and that's what this is going to be--until the horror of
it wipes out hate and brings back reason to our brains.  And so,
answering you as an Adams should, Jeemsy, I'd say we must watch the
ones we love and fight for them if we have to, no matter where our
bullets go," and his gaze travelled sombrely over the wide expanse of
Forbidden Valley.

After a brief silence, he added:

"I've asked myself who is right and who is wrong, the French or the
English, and there isn't any answer, except to say that one is as black
as the other.  I've roved the frontiers for twenty years now, and no
matter what others may say or history may write in days to come, I know
the facts.  I've lived and slept and fought with these facts until the
truth is as clear to me as the sun out there.  It's the Indian part o'
what's coming that fills me with fear, and one half o' you is as much
to blame for that as t'other half, Jeems, you being equally split by
birth.  Down in the Colonies we use money and whisky and dishonesty of
every kind to stir the Indians to madness against the French, and the
French work this same evil and to the same bloody end mostly through
the use o' the Word o' God.  If there is anything to be said in favour
of either, it's on the side o' the Jesuit Fathers, for they're a brave
and courageous lot o' men, and we can't place a sermon on a level with
a keg o' whisky even though it stirs up the same hell.  But a scalp
ripped from a human head because o' the urge o' religion is just as red
as one taken through the influence of a quart o' rum.  It isn't the
priests' fault.  They preach first and are patriots after that.  But
the result is identical, and so we have a mess of it, with all the
Indians in the country prostituted to the selfish and criminal
ambitions o' two white peoples who go to church and sing psalms and
claim there is a heaven.  As one who loves to fight when the fighting
is clean, I can't answer your question any better than I have, Jeems.
When the time comes, we'll both find our work to do."

In the days and weeks that followed, the spirit of comradeship between
Jeems and his uncle grew stronger.  This closer consociation with a man
whose knowledge of the frontiers and their conditions was excelled by
few, and who had supplemented his enlightenment by an acquaintance with
the history and political strength and weaknesses of the mother
countries that controlled them, gave to Jeems a scope for thought that
every hour helped to broaden.  With his illimitable resources of
information about the wilderness world of half a continent, Hepsibah
also possessed a kindly and homely philosophy which, striking deeply at
the truth of many things, planted in Jeems's widening viewpoints of
life constructive guideposts to the future which he was determined not
to forget.  To Hepsibah the intimate nearness of a growing mind and
body which he loved held a greater appeal for him to remain in
Forbidden Valley than his sister's pleadings, and with each day that
they went out to the stump field to hew and dig, their affection became
more settled and satisfying, until at last it made Jeems almost
forgetful of his feud with Paul Tache and helped to heal the aching
wound which had come with the certainty that Toinette despised him.
Unknown to him, the question he had asked his uncle at the edge of the
Big Forest and his disclosure of what he had overheard at Tonteur Manor
had struck a significant note in the leather-stocking's heart, and from
that time his friendship for the baron assumed a different aspect, not
less warm and appreciative but free from the abandonment of personal
desire which had already brought about two conflicts between them.
After an open challenge and its refusal by Hepsibah on the point of his
sister's feelings in the matter, Tonteur, like the chivalrous soldier
he was, put a muzzle to his inclinations, and thereafter the intrepid
veterans disported themselves, for a time at least, like brothers.  But
Toinette did not come with her father to the valley, nor did Jeems
expect she ever would.

Late spring, then the beginning of summer, followed Hepsibah's arrival
at the Bulain home, and still he gave no betrayal of the restlessness
which presaged his usual disappearance for another long period into the
fastnesses of the wild.  This season of the year was always one of
torment for the forest dwellers because of the winged pests which
crawled the earth and filled the air, and Jeems had come to dread it as
an indescribable nightmare of discomfort and suffering.  From the first
of June until the middle of August, such plagues of mosquitoes bred and
multiplied in the swamps and lowlands and woods that beasts were half
devoured alive and the pioneers literally fought for their own
existence, smoking their cabins incessantly, covering their flesh with
hog fat and bear grease, and resorting to every known subtlety that
they might snatch a little sleep at night.  Within a few days, it
seemed to Jeems, a world that had been a paradise of flowers, of sweet
scents, of ripening fruits and delicious air was transformed into a
hell of insect life which shut out travel in all directions and which
invested with poisonous torture every spot where it was not partly
subjugated by fire and smoke.  The timber was heavy and dark, swamps
were undrained, rivers and lakes were shadowed by dense vegetation, and
in the humid, sweating mould of these places, the malevolent pestilence
was born and rose in clouds that sometimes obscured the face of the
moon.  During these weeks a cordon of decayed stumps and logs
smouldered night and day about the Bulain cabin, screening it in
pungent smoke, and outside this small haven, work on the farm was
continued at a price of physical martyrdom, except under a burning sun,
when the insects sought refuge from the glare and heat.

But this summer Jeems's body as well as his mind had found something
new with which to grapple, and instead of remaining in the shelter of
smoking logs, he greased himself like an Indian and worked shoulder to
shoulder with his father and uncle.  The trader's leathery skin was
toughened by years of exposure until it was immune to the discomfort of
mosquito venom, and Jeems struggled to keep in his company and
succeeded in doing it, though on close and sultry days or when a storm
was brewing, his father advised him to leave the fields.  Hepsibah
exulted in this fortitude of his young companion, and when the trying
weeks were over and late August brought relief, he had put Jeems
through a course of training which he swore would make it easy for him
to defeat Paul Tache when they came together again, and had taught him
the tricks of small-arm loading and firing until at thirty paces his
pupil could send a pistol ball into a four-inch target three times out
of five.  Jeems's pride in this weapon was almost as great as that
which he took in his bow, in the use of which his expertness in sending
an arrow to its mark never failed to draw expressions of amazement and
approbation from his uncle.

Jeems did not go to Tonteur Manor, though occasionally he heard news
from the seigneurie.  Twice Henri and Hepsibah made journeys there
during July and August, and twice the baron rode over to eat Sunday
dinner with the Bulains.  It was quite comfortable at the big house,
their visitor said, as he had cleared and drained the land adjoining it
and, in addition to this, he had brought some newfangled cloth from
Quebec with which they had made tentlike protections for their beds.
Everyone was in high humour there because of the activities going on in
preparation for the exit of the entire family for Quebec early in
September.  Toinette was going to school at the convent of the
Ursulines, and now that her ambitious mother was about to launch her
upon a fashionable career, fortified by the devout teaching of the
nuns, Tonteur declared that he was losing the little spitfire he adored
and would have returned to him in three or four years a splendid young
lady all ready for marriage to some lucky blade who would not half
deserve her.  Jeems listened with a feeling of loss which his
countenance did not betray.  It was as if the fire of his dreams had
not only burned itself out, but even the ash were being cleared away.
For with an emotion which he made no effort to conceal, Tonteur let it
be known that Toinette would not spend much of her time on the
Richelieu after this, with so many things to attract and hold her in
Quebec, which was one of the fashion spots of the world.  Soon there
would be plenty of smart young gentlemen at her feet, and he was sure
that Madame Tonteur would bag the finest one of the lot for her
daughter.

"You are lucky in having a boy instead of a girl," he said to
Catherine.  "When Jeems marries, he will bring his wife to live near
you."

Autumn came, and with it a great glory in the wilderness.  Jeems loved
these maturer days of golden ripeness, of first frosts, of painted
hardwood forests, and of crisp, tangy air when all life seemed
rejuvenated and his own veins danced to the thrill of unending promises
and expectations.  But this year a heaviness of heart was in him with
the changing of the seasons.  Toinette and her people left for Quebec,
and one evening, a week later, Hepsibah gravely announced that he could
no longer delay his departure for the far frontiers of Pennsylvania and
the Ohio, where his obligations as a trader called him.  Catherine was
silent for a while, then cried softly to herself.  Jeems drew back
where his uncle would not see him clearly.  Henri's cheerfulness died
out like a lighted candle extinguished by a breath of wind.  Hepsibah's
face was grimly set, so hard was he fighting to hold a grip on his
emotion.  He promised that he would never again remain away long at a
time.  He would return during the winter.  If he failed to come, they
would know he was dead.

When Henri got out of his bed to build the fire the next morning
Hepsibah was gone.  He had stolen off like a shadow in some still hour
of the night.



[1] British intolerance of this early day, which had already begun to
plant the seeds of American independence, was epitomized within five
years of Hepsibah's utterance by General Wolfe, who wrote from
Louisbourg, "The Americans are the dirtiest, most contemptible,
cowardly dogs that you can conceive.  They fall down dead in their own
dirt, and desert by battalions, officers and all.  Such rascals as
these are rather an incumbrance than any real strength to an army."




CHAPTER VIII

More determinedly than when his uncle had been with him, Jeems
continued at his work and at the mental efforts with which he was
struggling to reach out into the mountains and valleys of experience
ahead of him.  His father came to depend upon him in many ways, and
with eyes which were constantly discovering some new change in him,
Catherine put greater effort into her tutoring.

Through the fall and winter the Bulain cabin was visited by wandering
Indians who had learned that food, warmth, and a welcome were always
there.  Jeems's friendship for them was tempered by the things Hepsibah
had told him, and while he brought himself closer into intimacy with
these uninvited guests, winning their confidence and making himself
more efficient in their speech, he was also watching and listening for
the signs of hidden dangers against which his uncle had repeatedly
warned him.  Most of the Indians were from the Canada tribes, and among
them he found no cause for unrest, but when occasionally an Onondaga or
an Oneida came, he detected in their manner a quiet and sleepless
caution which told him these visitors from the Six Nations considered
themselves over the dead line which marked the country of their
enemies.  And he made note that they always came through that part of
Forbidden Valley which Hepsibah had predicted would be a future warpath
for the Mohawks.  Still, there seemed to be no sinister thought behind
the visits of the savages, and now that his powers of observation had
increased, he was impressed by the reverence and devotion with which
they regarded his parents, and especially his mother.  With a granary
filled to the roof and dugout cellars choked with products of the soil,
Henri had more than enough for his family and these wilderness guests,
and never did Catherine see a brown face turn from her place that its
owner did not carry a burden of food on his shoulders.  This spirit of
sympathy and brotherhood had its effect on the Indians until at times
Jeems doubted the suspicions of his uncle and found his own mind in
accord with the deeply rooted faith which was the abiding and
regulative principle of his home.

This winter he went farther in his adventurings.  Captain Pipe, the old
Caughnawaga, had a habit of spending several of the hardest weeks near
the Bulains, and with his two sons.  White Eyes and Big Cat, Jeems
travelled to the shores of Lake Champlain for the first time.  He was
gone a week and planned with his friends to make a longer expedition
the following year, as far as Crown Point and a place called
Ticonderoga, where the French were going to build a fort some day.  On
this excursion he experienced the real thrill of danger, for White Eyes
and Big Cat, both of whom were young braves who had won their spurs,
moved with a caution which was eloquent in its significance.

True to his word, Hepsibah returned in January, coming up from the
English forts on Lake George.  He remained only a week and then was off
again for an important consignment of goods in Albany, from which point
he was going to trade among the Oneidas, if weather conditions
permitted him to reach the upper waters of the Mohawk River.  This
visit, though a brief one, was a relief from the monotony of Jeems's
winter and added to the desire which was growing in him to accompany
his uncle on one of his journeys.

With Toinette and her people away from the seigneurie, he had no
hesitation in going to the Richelieu, and made trips there with his
father on snowshoes; and in March, during a break in a spell of intense
cold, he went alone and remained overnight in the house of the baron's
overseer with whose young people he had become acquainted.  This
overseer was Peter Lubeck, an old veteran for whom Tonteur held a warm
affection, and through his son, Peter the younger, Jeems had his first
news of Toinette.  She was at the Ursuline school, and her parents had
taken a fashionable house in St. Louis Street.  Peter said Tonteur
wrote in every letter to his father that he was homesick to get back to
the Richelieu.

As another spring and summer followed those which had gone before,
Jeems knew he was fighting something that had to be conquered, a
yearning for Toinette which filled him with a bitter loneliness when
its hold was strongest.  With this feeling was curiously mingled an
increasing sense of pride and resentment which at times made him hear
Toinette's clear voice calling him a detestable beast and Madame
Tonteur condemning his mother as unfit to be her neighbour.

For two years Toinette remained in Quebec without making a visit to the
Richelieu.  During these years, the tragedy of his divided birth was
forced upon Jeems.  There was no doubt that the English in him was
uppermost or that the urge in his blood was toward the southern
frontiers and the colonies of Hepsibah Adams.  Yet he loved the place
where he lived with a sincere passion--the Big Forest, Forbidden
Valley, all the miles of wilderness about him as far as he could look
to the horizons.  This was New France.  It was his father's country and
not his mother's.  Between his father and himself a comradeship had
grown up which nothing could break, but his worship for his mother was
a different thing, as if something besides motherhood bound him to her.
His friends had Increased in number.  He came to know people along the
Richelieu but was always conscious he was not entirely one of them.
Toinette's words and her hatred for him persisted in his memory and
kept recalling this truth.

Catherine did not guess that a shadow was gathering in his mind.  Now
that she had reconciled herself to the period of rapid development in
her boy's life she was proud of his growth, both physical and mental,
and her happiness continued as she saw those maturing qualities which
left him no longer dependent upon her but made him a factor of
protective strength which she had found only in her husband.  No span
of her life had been filled with such a fruition of hopes and dreams.
Hepsibah was away for only a few months at a time.  Henri and Jeems had
improved the farm beyond their expectations, and in the second year
half of the big slope was planted to apple trees.  The creek was dammed
and its pent-up force turned the wheel of a small gristmill.  The chief
treasure in her home, her books, had grown with every trip her brother
made from the South.  No mother or wife in the Colonies or New France
was happier than she, and this love of life and its blessings gave to
her a spirit of youth which never seemed to grow older and of which
Jeems became almost as proud as his father.  For them Catherine was
more than a wife and a mother.  She was a sweetheart and a comrade.

Late in August of the second year of her absence, Toinette returned to
Tonteur Manor for a month.  Jeems's heart ached with the old yearning,
but he did not go to the seigneurie.  The days dragged as if weighted
with lead, and a hundred times he subdued the desire to make a visit to
Peter Lubeck that he might catch a glimpse of her.  Paul and his mother
were also at the baron's and he felt a sense of relief when he learned
that all of them were on their way to Quebec with the exception of
Tonteur, who remained for the harvesting of crops.  A fortnight after
they had gone, Peter told him about Toinette and Paul Tache.  He had
scarcely recognized Toinette, he said.  She had grown taller and more
beautiful.  His mother declared the nuns had accounted for a great
change in her, but Peter was sure that Toinette, with all her
loveliness, was still ready for a fight if one urged her to it.  Peter
was several years older than Jeems, and as he was to be married in
December, he spoke with the assurance of one who had gained through
experience a definite understanding of ladies.  Tache was a full-grown
man and dressed like a young noble.  One with half an eye could see
that he was desperately in love with Toinette, Peter avowed.  But if he
were a judge of such affairs, and he considered himself to be that,
Tache was a long way from a realization of his desires, even taking
Toinette's tender years into consideration.  She granted him no
favours.  There had actually seemed to be a little coolness in her
attitude toward him.  When Jeems smiled at this information and gave it
as his opinion that Toinette would marry Tache as soon as she was old
enough, Peter shrugged his shoulders and declared that he possessed
good eyes and ears, and that he was not ordinarily taken for a fool.

Peter's words stirred Jeems with a satisfaction which he did not let
the other see, and not until he was on his way home did he pull himself
from the folly of his thoughts about Toinette.  Even if she were not
smiling on Tache as warmly as he had supposed, he knew she was as far
removed from him now as the sun was from the earth.  Yet, as time went
on, this fresh contact with her presence, though he had not seen her,
gave a determined impetus to his plans for the future.  His memories
and visionings other inspired him with a force which was frequently
hostile instead of friendly, and this force demanded more of him for
that reason.  It was a challenge as well as an urge, something which
roused his pride.  It provided a furtive nourishment for the English
side of the two opposing parts of him, and there were hours in which he
saw himself a splendid enemy where fate had ordained that he could not
be a friend.  With increasing maturity giving to him a deeper and more
understanding passion for his mother, and a fuller comprehension of the
noble qualities in his father, he was harassed by a confliction of
emotions which he revealed to neither, and confided only in Hepsibah
Adams.  The difficulty of solving the problem which confronted Jeems
was as great for Catherine's brother as it would have been for
Catherine herself, for as early as the spring of 1753, when Jeems had
passed his sixteenth year, there was no longer a doubt in the minds of
the people of the Colonies and New France as to the surety of the
struggle which was impending.  While France and England were officially
at peace, the forces of the two countries in America were on the verge
of open war and were instigating the Indians to a strife of
extermination.  Celoron had been ordered to attack the English at
Pickawillanay in retaliation for the activities at Detroit.  Marquis
Duquesne, the new Governor at Quebec, had reviewed the troops and
militia of New France and was sending fifteen hundred Canadians and
French colonists to drive the English from the upper waters of the
Ohio.  Everywhere along the unprotected frontiers the Indians were
killing and burning and such vast sums were being expended by both
sides for human hair that scores of white men had taken up the
lucrative business of hunting for scalps.[1]

Almost at the door to Jeems's home, war preparations were in progress,
for every landed baron along the Richelieu was training his vassal
farmers, and when the wind was right the Bulains could hear faintly the
twice-a-week firing of muskets at Tonteur Manor.  Being free of the
seigneurial protection and laws, Henri did not go to drill.  Nor did
Jeems.  Yet Tonteur rode frequently to their home, especially when
Hepsibah was there.  He was in better spirits than usual, and it was
all on account of Toinette, he said.  After all, there was a lot of
himself in Toinette, and he thanked God for that blessing.  She was
homesick for the Richelieu.  Her letters to him were filled with a
longing for it, and she declared that, in another twelve months, when
her schooling would be finished, she wanted to live at the Manor and
not in Quebec.  That was enough to make him happy, and he laughed at
the thought of danger for womenfolk along the Richelieu--in the
fortified places.  The English and their savages would not get nearer
than the lower end of Lake Champlain when war came; and they would be
driven from there very shortly, and also from Lake George.  But on such
an outlying farm as the Bulain place, which had no protection whatever,
there was the possible peril of wandering scalp hunters and he never
tired of urging Henri and Catherine to make their home within the
safety of the seigneurie.

He asked Jeems and Henri to come to his drill, and that they did not
respond made no difference in his friendship.  He could understand how
hard it would be for Henri to prepare for war against his wife's
country, and his secret adoration for Catherine was greater because of
her courage and her faith in both peoples with the catastrophe so near.
It delighted him to think that his own confidence was a comfort to her,
and the eagerness with which she accepted his opinions as a soldier
encouraged him to go beyond what Hepsibah considered intelligent bounds
in giving easement to her mind.  He did not guess what was in Jeems's
heart, nor did the boy's father or mother.  Only Hepsibah knew fully
what was there.

Early in the autumn, the trader took Jeems on a journey to the English
fort on Lake George, thence travelling into the New York country,
returning in November.  They found a change in Catherine.  She was not
less confident or less contented in the paradise she was helping to
build, but something had come into her life which she was accepting
bravely and courageously and even with pride.  One evening, she spoke
of the military activities along the Richelieu.  Many river youths were
training with their elders, she said, and it did not seem right that
Jeems should not be among them.  While killing was wicked and
inexcusable, it was a God-given privilege to defend one's home and
family.  She quoted Tonteur to substantiate her belief that war would
never reach them, and she knew that Jeems would not seek it any more
than his father.  But she thought it would do no harm for Jeems to
prepare himself along with the other young men of the seigneurie.

To this suggestion Hepsibah's homely philosophy made objection.  He
told Catherine the day was coming when Jeems would be compelled to
fight and that he would have to choose one side or the other to
champion.  When that day arrived, sentiment would not stand in the way,
for, with a world in turmoil about them, one could not be English and
French at the same time.  He declared that even Henri would be drawn
into the struggle, unless the scalp hunters came to solve the problem
for them all.  No man could tell on which side they would be when
forced to it, and as he despised a traitor more than anything else, it
was his opinion that Jeems should not be taught the ways of war under
the flag of France and then, it might be, fight for the English.  As a
frontiersman, he maintained that the finest fighting man was the Long
Rifle, a free wanderer of the forests, a leather-stocking trained to a
hundred greater things than the firing of a musket in company with a
score of others.  That was what Jeems should be.  He was already fitted
for it, lacking only a wider experience.  As a Long Rifle he could
serve where honour and duty called him when the act became necessary.

This discussion was the beginning of another phase in Jeems's life.  It
placed before him certain definite obligations of manhood which even
his mother had to recognize, though she wanted to hold him as long as
possible in his boyhood years.  During the next year he made several
trips with Hepsibah, going to Albany and as far as the country of
Pennsylvania.  Each time he returned to his home something held him
more closely to it.

In the autumn of 1754, after four years at school, Toinette returned to
Tonteur Manor.

In this same month of September the seventieth acre of land was cleared
on the Bulain place.

Peace and happiness lay over the Richelieu.  It had been a splendid
year for France along the far frontiers.  Washington had surrendered at
Fort Necessity, and Villiers was triumphant at Fort Duquesne.  England
and France were still playing at the hypocrisy of friendship.  While
they played, thrusting at each other secretly and in the dark, not an
English flag was left waving beyond the Alleghanies.  French arms and
Indian diplomacy were victorious along the Ohio and westward to the
plains.  The policies of the British Royal Governors were alienating
their Indian allies, and in spite of their million and a half
population against eighty thousand in New France, Dinwiddie had
frantically called upon England for help.  In response, England was
sending General Braddock.

Paeans of gratitude and triumph were sung in the churches throughout
New France because of the beneficence of this year, and in a double
rejoicing over Toinette's homecoming and his country's success at arms,
Tonteur planned a levee and barbecue at the seigneurie.  Hepsibah was
away at the time, which disappointed the baron, who insisted that Henri
and his family must attend the celebration or he would never call them
friends again.

Jeems felt a thrill growing in him as the day drew near.  With it was
no apprehension or thought that it would be easier not to go than to
go.  He was no longer the Jeems of Lussan's place as he set out in the
company of his father and mother with Odd pegging along faithfully at
his side.  In January he would be eighteen.  The alert and sinuous
grace of one of the wild things of the forest was in his movements.
Catherine was more than ever proud of him and rejoiced in the cleanness
of his build, in his love of nature and God, and in the directness with
which his eyes looked at one.  But she was not more proud than Hepsibah
Adams, who had seen in this pupil of his flesh and blood the qualities
and courage, the lock, stock, and barrel, as he called it, of a
fighting man.

Yet, on the morning when they started for the levee, much of the boy of
years ago was in Jeems's heart, though it did not reveal itself in his
face and actions--not the boy who had thrown mud but the boy largely
moulded by the Indian trader.  To this part of him Toinette would
remain a living memory forever, no matter what happened--the Toinette
of his earliest days, the Toinette to whom he had carried his presents
from the woods, the Toinette who had accepted his gift at Lussan's
sale.  He had wondered at the fate of the piece of red velvet, and
once, a long time ago, when hunting near Lussan's, he had dug the old
barnyard half over in search of the unrecognizable rag into which its
glory must have fallen, if, as he believed, it had been trampled into
the mire by the conflict of that day.

He was anxious to see Toinette, but with this desire there remained
none of the old yearnings which had once oppressed him.  She whom he
was going to regard to-day was a stranger, one into whose presence he
was determined not to force himself again.  This resolution was not
inspired in him by a lack of boldness or an uncertainty as to his own
social fitness.  An immense pride upheld him.  The spirit and freedom
of the forests were in his blood, and behind these things was also the
spirit of Hepsibah Adams.  He knew that he could meet Toinette coolly
and without embarrassment should they chance to stand face to face, no
matter how splendid she had grown.  And he realized there must be a
great change in her.  She was fifteen now.  A young lady.  At this
period of his life, five years seemed a long time, and he thought it
was possible he might not recognize her.

An overwhelming moment of shock seized him when at last he saw her.

It was as if a yesterday of long ago had come back into this to-day, as
if a picture which had been burned and scattered into ash had
miraculously been restored.

She was taller, of course.  Perhaps she was lovelier.  But she was the
same Toinette.  His dazed senses almost resented the startling fact,
which broke down the barriers he had built up about his dreams and
castles as the walls of a pearl build themselves about a hurt.  He
could see no change in her except that she had become more a woman.
Hepsibah's work, his own, his freedom, and his courage were dissipated
like dust as he looked at her, and once more he felt himself the
inferior being offering her nuts and feathers and maple sugar and
praying in his childish way that she might smile on him.  This was not
a new Toinette removed another million miles away from him, as he had
supposed she would be, but the old Toinette, commanding him to slavery
again, stirring anew the rubbish heap of his broken and discarded
hopes, touching fire to half-burned-out desires, challenging him,
dragging him from his pride and his strength and making his blood run
hot in his body.

_Yet she had not seen him!_

At least, he thought she had not.  With a group of young ladies from
the neighbouring seigneurie, she had come down from the big house, and
he was almost in her path, with Peter Lubeck at his side.  It was Peter
who advanced a step or two toward them.  Except for his action,
Toinette would not have turned, Jeems thought.  He pulled himself
together and stood with his head bared, as cold and impassive in
appearance as a soldier at attention, while his heart beat like a
hammer.  Toinette had to face him to return his companion's greeting.

It was impossible for her not to see him when she made this movement.
But there was a slowness in her discovery, an effort to keep from
looking at him which was more eloquent than words.  Toinette had known
he was there.  And it had not been her desire to speak to him.

If he needed courage, it was this enlightenment which gave it to him.
He inclined his head when she met his gaze.  Her face was flushed, her
eyes darkly aglow, while his own cheeks bore only the colour of sun and
wind.  He might never have known her, so unmoved did he stand as she
went on her way.

She had slightly nodded, her lips had barely formed a name.

In spite of all his uncle had said, there were hatreds which would not
die!

Later, after the feast on the green, came Tonteur's spectacular feature
of the day, a military review of his tenants, with wives and children
witnessing the martial display.  The male guests, who had drilled in
their own seigneuries, joined Tonteur's men.  Only Henri Bulain and
Jeems were not among them.  Henri, sensitive to the fact, and to save
Catherine from the hurt which might arise because of it, had started
with her over the homeward trail half an hour before.  Jeems had
remained.  This was his answer to Toinette's contempt--that he was not
of her people, that his world was not circumscribed by the petty
boundaries of the seigneurie.  He stood with his long rifle in the
crook of his arm, conscious that she was looking at him, and the
invisible shafts from her eyes, poisoned with their disdain, stirred
him with the thrill of a painful triumph.  He could almost hear her
calling him an English beast again.  A coward.  One to be distrusted
and watched.  He did not sense humiliation or regret, but only a final
widening of what had always lain between them.

He bore this feeling home with him.  It grew as time went on, and with
its growth an increasing restlessness came over him.  The nearness of
Tonteur's princely possessions to Forbidden Valley cast a shadow which
sometimes repelled him and at others drew him toward it, until in one
way or another he was beginning to find himself never quite free from
its influence.  Events of the winter added to its effect upon him.
From the sharp, frosty days when the chestnuts began to fall from their
opening burrs, Tonteur Manor became a place of life and gaiety.
Toinette seemed always to have friends about her after this, young
gentlemen as well as ladies.  They came from the seigneuries along the
two big rivers, and also from Quebec and Montreal, and the parties they
held, the nightly dances at the Manor, the presence of wealth and
fashion almost at the doors of his own humble home set for him more
vividly the dead lines over which even his thoughts might not pass
without punishment to his soul.  The gulf between reality and the
visions of his childhood became so vast that in a little while he was
scarcely able to see across it.  As this happened, his eyes turned the
other way as if drawn by a gentle and yet irresistible force which was
determined to impress on him more and more the fact that down there, in
his mother's country, were freedom and happiness and equality among men
which the growing shadow of the Tonteur seigneurie was holding back
from him here.  Against this call of a new motherland to which he was a
stranger fought his love for the things to which he had been born, and
so twisted did his thoughts become with the conflicts within him that
only hard, long miles of travel through the forests could subdue the
fires they built.

News creeping through the wilderness and reaching every corner, like
the whispering winds, kept an unquenchable heat under the ash of these
fires, fanning the embers into flame in spite of him.  Secrets were no
longer secrets.  Rumours had grown into facts.  Fears had become
realities.  England and France were still playing at peace in their
mighty courts.  In the sunlight they were friends, in the dark they
were seeking each other's lives like common cutthroats.  Their
catspaws, New France and the Colonies, had been prepared for their
immolation--Wilderness Children, plastic, moved by youth, inspired by
faith, filled with courage, urged to destroy and to pile destruction on
destruction by two scoundrels aged in their cleverness, France and
England.  Two freebooters of the sea, two footpads on solid ground,
deep in the mire of their plottings, and, unconsciously, building the
foundation for a nation greater than themselves.

But New France, with a child's blindness to the faults of its parent,
loved the rotten court of Louis XV, which it called home.

And the thirteen little Colonial governments of the English,
quarrelling like small boys among themselves, just beginning to walk
alone, feeling the significance of the new word _American_, cheated by
their parent, laughed at by their parent, hated by their parent, still
yearned for the love of that parent as children have wanted love from
the beginning of time, and were loyal to it.

So tragedy began to move, to build out of death, out of betrayed
confidence, out of dishonour and fraud and pitiless murder the American
and Canadian nations of the future.

Without declaring war, England was sending General Braddock and an army
to kill off the French and their Indians in the American wilderness;
and, trying to outdo the other hypocrite, France was sending Baron
Dieskau and an army to reap the waiting crop of Colonial lives.

Glorious France!

Honourable England!

Eighty thousand French and more than a million English in the New World
cried these untruths as they made ready for the sacrifice.
Massachusetts enlisted one man out of eight of her male population.
Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, New York, and the others
followed her example.

Children, loyal, proud to fight--and hating the French ferociously!

Then came Braddock, preceding Wolfe, to call them worthless trash.

And New France, a glory of sun and land even now gutted of her
prosperity by corruptions brought from Louis and La Pompadour, sent out
her own sons to fight and kill, valiant, glad, confident--and hating
the English implacably!

With them, on both sides, went Indians from almost a hundred
tribes--red men who had once found honour in fighting, but who, now,
skulking and murderous and vengeful, found their souls in pawn to the
great White Fathers across the sea who had prostituted them with
whisky, bought them with guns, maddened them with hatreds, and who paid
them for human hair.

Proud old England!

Chivalrous France!

Pride and chivalry and love--of these things Jeems was thinking as
winter grew into spring and spring into summer.  Only love held him
from leaping to the temptations which were drawing closer about him,
love for his mother whose happiness marked the beginning and the end of
all action on the part other men folk.  And in this hour, when three
out of four of the fighting men along the Richelieu were preparing to
join Dieskau, when half of his acquaintances at the Tonteur seigneurie
had already gone to fight Braddock, when the forests trembled at the
stealthy tread of painted savages, and when the Frenchman who did not
rise to his country's call was no longer a Frenchman, Jeems observed
that the strain upon his father was more difficult to bear than his
own.  For Henri, in spite of his worship of Catherine, was of New
France to the bottom of his soul, and now that other men were making a
bulwark of their bodies against her enemies, his own desire to make the
same sacrifice was almost beyond the power of his strong will to
control.  In their years of comradeship, Jeems and his father had never
come so near to each other as in these weeks of tension.

Almost as painful to them as the sting of a wound was the day when
Dieskau came up the Richelieu with a host of three thousand five
hundred men and made forever a hollowed ground at the Tonteur
seigneurie by camping there overnight.

When she knew they were coming, Catherine had said:

"If your hearts tell you it is right, _go with them_!"

But they remained.  For Henri it was a struggle greater than Dieskau
fought, greater than that in which Braddock died.  For Jeems it was
less a torment and more the mysterious madness of youth to tramp to the
clash of arms.  For Catherine it was the gehenna of her life, a siege
of darkness and uncertainty in her soul which gave way suddenly before
news which swept like a whirlwind over the land.

God had been with New France!

Braddock and his English invaders were destroyed!

No triumph of French arms in the New World had been so complete, and
Dieskau, the great German baron who was fighting for France, moved
southward to crush Sir William Johnson and his Colonials and Indians,
planning not to stop until he had driven them to the doors of Albany.

With him were six hundred and eighty-four of the loyal men who were
beginning to call themselves Canadians.

Tonteur rode over to bring the news to Henri Bulain.  To Catherine he
recalled his prediction that the English would never get into this
paradise of theirs.  Now the whole thing was settled for many years to
come, for Dieskau would sweep their last enemy from the Champlain
country as completely as a new broom swept her home.  A dozen times he
insisted on shaking hands with Hepsibah, who was with the Bulains this
summer, repeating that he loved him personally and that no ill thought
could exist between them.  But he was frank in his avowal that he held
a mighty grudge against the encroaching English.  He had sent almost
every man he had to the scene of fighting, and only his wooden leg had
kept him from joining Dieskau.

_Even Toinette had wanted to go!_

This recalled an important matter to his mind.  Toinette had entrusted
him with a letter for Jeems.  Boiling over with his own selfish
exultations, he had forgotten it.  He hoped it was an invitation for
Jeems to come to the seigneurie.  He had often told his girl she should
be more friendly with the lad.

Jeems took the letter and went off by himself.  It was the first
recognition from Toinette since the day of the levee.  He had not seen
her and had tried not to think of her.  Alone, he read the words she
had written him.

With pitiless coldness and brevity, they called him a renegade and a
coward.


On a September morning some days later, Jeems stood watching his uncle
as he disappeared into the frost-tinted woods of Forbidden Valley.  It
seemed to him that Hepsibah's suspicions and guardianship of the valley
had become greater with the growing news of French triumphs in the
south which so positively assured their safety.  Only yesterday Tonteur
had brought the latest word from Dieskau.  The German had been on the
eve of smashing Sir William Johnson and his mob of Colonials and
Indians when his messenger had left.  By this time the event had
probably happened, Jeems thought.  Yet his uncle was going into
Forbidden Valley with a look in his face which puzzled him.

Restlessness possessed Odd after Hepsibah had gone.  Years were
beginning to leave their mark on the dog.  He was past the prime of his
splendid strength, and the hair about his muzzle was graying a little.
He was gaunter, shaggier, limped a bit more heavily, and some of his
habits had changed.  He was not as eager for the long and tireless
hunts in the forest, and liked the warm sun.  He was growing content to
watch life with Jeems instead of ceaselessly pursuing it.  He was not
old, and yet he was no longer young.  With increasing age, which was
leading him down into the shadows slowly, had come a deeper wisdom,
sharper instincts, keener visionings even where he did not see so far
or so clearly.  There remained one thing which did not fail to stir in
him the tense fierceness of his youth.  This was the Indian smell.  He
always told Jeems when one of their wilderness visitors was near,
sometimes many minutes before the savage appeared from the woods.  And
he never tired of watching Forbidden Valley.  In the dawn he faced it.
At midday he dozed with his half-closed eyes turned toward it.  In the
evening he sniffed its scents.  Yet he did not go down into the valley
unless Jeems or Henri was with him.

During the morning, Odd's uneasiness began to reflect itself in Jeems.
Soon after noon, he left his work and told his mother he was going in
the direction of Lussan's place.  Catherine walked with him through the
young orchard and up the slope.  Never had she seemed more beautiful to
Jeems.  The glory of the day, its warm blue skies, the tinted forests,
the golden pools of sunlight over the earth all seemed a part of her.
His father was right--this mother of his would always be a girl.  From
above the orchard, standing on a little plateau that overlooked the
Bulain farm, they called to Henri, who was in his turnip field, and
waved at him.  Jeems stood for a few moments with his arm about his
mother.  Then he kissed her, and Catherine watched him until he was
lost to her sight in the Big Forest.

Jeems did not have the desire to hunt, nor did Odd.  Unexplainable
impulses were pulling at them both.  Odd's restlessness was unlike his
master's.  Whenever Jeems paused, the dog turned and sniffed the air of
their trail, facing Forbidden Valley in an attitude of suspicion and
doubt.  Jeems observed his companion's enigmatic actions.  Odd was not
giving the Indian signal.  It was as if something without form or
substance, a thing bewildering and unintelligible, _lay behind them_.

The counter impulse in Jeems was to go on.  Without a reason or a
purpose, except that the disquiet in his mind demanded it, he was
heading for Lussan's place.  The air was crisp.  Fallen leaves rustled
under his feet.  From the hilltops the country lay about him in
sweeping panoramas of reds and golds and yellows and browns, and he
began to look back from these hilltops--far into the Indian summer haze
which hung like a gossamery veil between him and the adventure-filled
country of Lake Champlain and Lake George, where so many things were
happening.  It was the kind of day, trembling with promise and lure, to
stir more deeply and with almost a savage insistence the yearnings that
had for so long been smouldering in his breast.  Off there was where he
wanted to be, where dramas such as he had heard about but had never
seen were being played, where men were fighting and where the chivalry
and courage of which he had dreamed himself a part were painting
themselves in colours of triumph and glory in the history of his world.
And there was where he should be.

They came to Lussan's, nine miles from their home.  Since Lussan's
departure, the place had been abandoned, and in those five years the
wilderness had largely reclaimed what man had taken from it.  The big
green open in which the crowd had assembled and where Toinette and Paul
Tache had walked so proudly was overgrown with sumacs and blackberry
bushes.  Tall grass nourished about the house.  Where the gardens had
been was a tangle of weeds and briars.  A few rose bushes struggled
against the Inundation, and a single sunflower, a last survival of
propagation through many seasons, stood with its black-seeded face
toward the western sun.  Porcupines had eaten at the doors of the
house.  Shutterless windows gaped to the winds and rains.  The path
leading to the barn was cluttered with growth, and at the end of it the
barn itself was a dead thing hidden from the sun.  A tree had fallen,
crushing in its roof; poison ivy festooned its rotting foundations, and
shadows were all about it.  The cow yard was rank with burdock,
ragweed, and thistles.  Sections of the pole fence about it had slumped
to the ground.

Jeems stood where he had fought Paul Tache, and ghostly whispers crept
about him in the stillness.  They stirred an aching loneliness in his
heart, as if this desertion and ruin were all that remained of his own
hopes and ambitions.  Then came a feeling of dread, almost of fear.  He
turned back to the house and to the open, where long ago he had stood
with Toinette and all her loveliness so near to him.

The sun had set and dusk was gathering over the land before he drew
himself away from the ghosts which haunted Lussan's place.  Night could
add nothing more to his gloom.

Odd whined frequently in his eagerness to reach home.  Sometimes he
showed impatience at his master's slowness by running ahead.  Jeems did
not hurry.  He unslung his bow, which was the only weapon he had
brought, and carried it ready in his hand.  Yet if Odd had hinted of
danger he would have paid no attention to the warning.  Danger was
miles away on the other side of Dieskau and his men.  It would come no
nearer and he would never have a chance to meet it.  In Toinette's eyes
he would always remain a renegade and a coward.

Night thickened.  The stars came out.  Deepening shadows lay about them
as they climbed the tallest of the hills, from which they could look
over the ridges and woods between them and Forbidden Valley.

From this hill, which was four miles from the Bulain clearing, they had
gazed many times upon an amazing world.  In all directions but one
their eyes could reach over endless miles of unpeopled domain until the
sky seemed to touch the timber.  But on the point from which they might
have viewed the Tonteur seigneurie, trees had grown tall and thick,
shutting out their vision.

Because from this hill it was possible to see over the Big Forest which
sheltered their farm from the north winds, Jeems and his father called
it Home Mountain.

Odd whined as he climbed it to-night.  He went ahead of Jeems, and when
he gained the crest his whining changed to a howl, so low that one
would scarcely have heard it at the foot of the hill.

Jeems came to him and stopped.

For a space, there was no beating of a heart in his breast--nothing but
a stillness that was like death, a shock that was like death, a horror
that could come only at the sight and the feeling of death.

Rising from the far side of the forest into which Hepsibah had gone
that morning was a distant glow of fire.  Nearer, over the rim of
Forbidden Valley, the sky was a red illumination of flame.  And this
illumination was not of a burning forest.  It was not a torch of
burning stumps.  It was not a conflagration of dry swamp grass
reflecting itself against a moonless heaven.  It was a tower of blazing
light, mushrooming as it rose, flattening itself in a sinister scarlet
radiance under the clouds, dripping at its edges into colours of silver
and gold and blood.

_His home was burning!_

With the cry that came from his lips, there leapt madly into his mind
the words that Hepsibah had spoken to him a last time that morning:
"_If ever I'm off there and you see afire lighting up the sky by night,
or smoke darkening it by day, hurry to the seigneurie with your father
and mother as fast as you can go, for it will mean my hand has set the
heavens talking to you and that the peril o' death is near._"



[1] Until 1637 scalping was unknown in New England.  The church-loving
Puritans began by offering cash for the heads of their enemies.  Later
these God-fearing people accepted scalps if both ears were attached.
Bounties differed over a period of one hundred and fifty years, and in
different parts of the country.  The French were first to offer
bounties for the scalps of white people, the English quickly following
suit.  At the time of this story, the English were offering as high as
$500 for a warrior's scalp, and from $150 to $50 for those of women and
children, including the scalps of unborn babes torn from their mother's
wombs.  French prices were somewhat lower than the English.  Over a
long period of years, human hair was a larger item of traffic than fur,
and _in one lot_ the Senecas delivered and received payment for _ten
hundred and fifty scalps_ taken from the heads of white men, women, and
children along the frontiers.  Christian races, not savage ones, were
the inspiration behind these horrible deeds in that bloody dawn of our
history when the United States was about to be born.




CHAPTER IX

For a space Jeems could not move as he gazed at the crimson sky.  Doubt
might have eased the thoughts that crowded on his senses, but during
the time in which he stood numbed and voiceless there was no doubt.
His home was in flames.  This alone would not have deadened him with
horror.  His father was there to care for his mother, a new home could
be built, the world did not end because a house burned.  But there were
two fires--and the other, farther on, reflecting itself dimly and yet
more sombrely, was the one that terrified him.  It was Hepsibah's fire
talking to him through the night!

Then the choking thing in him gave way, and as the power to act
returned, he saw Odd facing the lighted heavens--and in every muscle
and line of the dog's rigid frame the Indian sign was clearly written.
Until now this admonition had never sent through him a thrill of dread
or fear.

He set off at a run down the hill, and as he ran bushes whipped at his
face and shadows gathered under his feet and long arms of gloom reached
out from among the trees to hold him back.  When he came to the bottom
he ran faster, and so thick and dark were the walls of the forest about
him that they hid the radiance in the sky.  Silvery threads of
starlight illumined his way, and he darted through splashes and pools
of it and crossed opens where it swallowed him in cobwebby seas.  He
could not come up with Odd.  Like two shadows in a playful night, one
closely pursuing the other, they ran until Jeems's breath began to
break from his lips in gasps, and at the end of a mile he fell back to
a walk.  Odd lessened his pace to his master's.  They climbed a lower
hill, and once more Jeems could see the glow of fire.  In the upper
vault of the sky it was fading to a ghostly pallor against the sweeping
arc of the Milky Way.

They ran on, and the spirit of hope began to fight for a place in
Jeems's brain.  He seized on this ray of light shining out of the
darkness of shock and panic and hugged it to him eagerly.  It gave life
and force to the arguments with which he now made an effort to hold
back the grimmer thing.  His home was burning.  But it must be an
accident, nothing that should fill him with fright.  The other
fire--off in Forbidden Valley--was no more than a coincidence, probably
a conflagration started by a careless Indian or a white man's pipe.
The woods were dry.  Windrows of fallen leaves carpeted the earth ready
to catch the spark from a bit of steel, a crumb of tobacco, or a
smouldering wad from a gun.  He had never been afraid of forest fires!

He paused again to get his breath, and Odd stopped with him.  They
stood in one of the pools of starlight, their ears straining, their
eyes staring, and it was the dog who held back a greater triumph of
optimism.  His shaggy body was trembling with the pent-up emotions of
suspense and passion which possessed him when he caught in the air the
deadly poison to his nostrils--the Indian smell.  The crest along his
spine had stiffened.  His eyes shot flame.  His powerful jaws were
drooling as if hunger instead of hatred were moving him.  Jeems
struggled not to believe the evidence which he saw, and told himself
that if by any chance there were Indians at his home they were friends
helping to save what they could from the tragedy of the fire.

A faint wind whispered in the treetops as he listened.  Dry oak leaves
rustled on their branches as if fleshless hands were shaking them.
Then the rustling and the whispering passed, and shadows lay like solid
substance on the earth.  Out of the silence Jeems heard a sound which
rose above the pounding of his heart.  It was so far away, so
indistinct, that the stirring of the leaves had kept it from his ears.
The wind began to play softly among the oaks again, as if that were its
intent.

But Jeems had heard.

He had heard the firing of guns.

Over the hills and forests the sound had come to him from the direction
of the Tonteur seigneurie.  He did not wait for the oaks to drowse
again.  Odd led him in their last heartbreaking race into the Big
Forest.  Leaden weights seemed to be dragging at his feet before they
were through it.  He had run too hard.  He stopped and sagged against a
tree, with Odd growling in a low and terrible way close to his knees.
He was not trying to prove or disprove matters now.  A catastrophe had
happened to his thoughts with the firing of the guns.  Taking the place
of hope, even of his fears, was the one great desire to reach his
father and mother as quickly as he could.

His exertions had beaten him when they came to the edge of the forest
and he could have run no farther without falling.  Before them was the
slope, a silvery carpet of the starlight.  At the foot of it was what
had been his home.

That it was a red-hot mass without form or stability, a pile out of
which flame rose lazily, its fierceness gone, added nothing more to his
shock.  He had unconsciously looked for this.  The barn was also a heap
of blazing embers, and what remained of the smaller buildings near it
glowed like the stub ends of huge candles against the earth.
Everything was gone.  Even this fact was not the one which began to
break down his reason, which he had struggled so hard to keep.  It was
the stillness, the lifelessness, the lack of movement and sound that
appalled him at first and then closed in about him, a crushing,
deadening force.  The fires lit up the bottom land.  He could see the
big rock at the spring.  The paths between the gardens.  The bird
houses in the nearest oaks.  The mill.  A patch of sunflowers like
slim-bodied nymphs.  Details were there, clearly illumined, down to the
little heap of cider apples which his mother and he had gathered a day
or two before.  But he could see nothing that had been saved from the
burning house.  He could not see his father or his mother or Hepsibah
Adams.

Even Odd's heart seemed to break in these moments, A sound came from
him that was like a sob.  He was half crouching, no longer savage or
vengeful.  But Jeems did not see.  He was trying to find some force in
him that could cry out his mother's name.  His lips were as dry as
sticks, his throat failed to respond.  The silence was terrific.  In it
he heard the snapping of an exploding ember, like a pistol going off.
He could hear the water in the creek where it splashed over the stones
near the mill.  In the woods behind him an owl hooted, half subdued by
the starlight.  He could hear no one talking, no voices calling.

Fear, the repulsion of flesh and nerves to danger, was utterly gone
from him.  He was impelled only by thought of his father and mother,
the mystery of their silence, his desire to call out to them and to
hear their voices in answer.  If there was a spiritual self alive in
him, that alone kept him from shouting at last.  It was not because he
was afraid.  He did not fit an arrow to his bow as he walked down
through the starlight, his feet travelling a little unsteadily.  What
was there or was not there could not be changed by an arrow.  He did
not screen himself in the shadows.  He was looking for nothing and
wanting nothing but his father and mother.

Unexpectedly, he came upon his father.  Henri was on the ground near
one of Catherine's rose bushes, as if asleep.  But he was dead.  He lay
with his face turned to the sky.  Firelight played upon him gently, now
increasing, now fading, as the embers flared or died, like fitful notes
in a strain of soundless music.

As softly as the light, without a sob or cry, Jeems knelt beside him.

It was strange that in this moment he could speak, while a little
before that power had been choked in him by things less terrible than
death.  There was no hysteria in his voice.  His own ears caught it as
one which did not seem to come from himself.  He spoke his father's
name, yet knew that no answer would rise from the lifeless lips.  He
repeated it in an unexcitable way as his hands clutched at the silent
form.  As death draws near, numbing the senses and drawing a golden
veil of relief over pain, it brings with it a great calm, and it was
this--the mental inertness of death without its physical change--that
came over Jeems.  For the starlight left nothing unrevealed; his father
dead, his white lips twisted, his hands clenched at his side, the top
of his head naked and bleeding from the scalping knife.  Jeems slumped
down.  He may have spoken again.  He may have sobbed.  But the thing
like death that was creeping over him, its darkness and vastness, hid
him from himself.  He remained beside his father, as motionless and as
still.  Odd crouched near.  After a little, an inch at a time, he crept
to the dead man.  He muzzled the hands that were growing cold.  He
licked Jeems's face where it had fallen against his father's shoulder.
Then he was motionless again, his eyes seeking about him like balls of
living flame.  Death was in the air.  He was breathing it.  He was
hearing it.  It was in the mournful rustling of the oak leaves.  The
softly dancing shadows of the fire flung it at him.  A nighthawk
swooping near the glow bore it with his wings.  The stillness was
weighted with it.  At last, irresistibly impelled to answer the spirit
of death, he sat back on his haunches and howled.  It was not Odd's
howl any more than it had been Jeems's voice speaking to his father a
few moments before.  It was a ghostly sound that seemed to quiet even
the whispering of the leaves, an unearthly and shivering cry that sent
echoes over the clearing, with grief for company.

It was this which brought Jeems out of the depths into which he had
fallen.  He raised his head and saw his father again, and swayed to his
feet.  He began seeking.  Close by, near the pile of apples which she
had helped him gather from under their trees on the slope, he found his
mother.  She, too, lay with her face to the sky.  The little that was
left of her unbound hair lay scattered on the earth.  Her glorious
beauty was gone.  Starlight, caressing her gently, revealed to her boy
the hideousness of her end.  There, over her body, Jeems's heart broke.
Odd guarded faithfully, listening to a grief that twisted at his brute
soul.  Then fell a greater silence.  Through long hours the burning
logs settled down into flattened masses of dying embers.  A wind came
dismally over the Big Forest.  The Milky Way began to fade.  Clouds
gathered to shut out the stars.  The darkness came which precedes the
day, and after that, dawn.

Jeems rose to face his blasted world.  He was no longer a youth but a
living thing aged by an eternity that had passed.  It was Odd who led
him in the quest for Hepsibah Adams.  He sought like one half blind and
yet sensed everything.  He saw the trampled grass, the moccasin-beaten
earth at the spring, a hatchet lost in the night, and on the hatchet
_an English name_.  But he did not find his uncle.

In the same gray dawn, stirring with the wings of birds and the play of
squirrels among the trees, he set out for Tonteur Manor.

He carried the hatchet, clutching it as if the wood his fingers gripped
held life which might escape him.  Because of this hatchet there grew
in him a slow and terrible thought that had the strength of a chain.
The weapon, with its short hickory handle, its worn iron blade, its
battered head, might have been flesh and blood capable of receiving
pain or of giving up a secret, so tenacious was the hold of his hand
about it.  But he did not see the iron or wood.  He saw only the name
which told him that the English had come with their Indians, or had
sent them, as his uncle had so often said they would.  The English.
Not the French.  _The English_.

And he held the hatchet as if It were an English throat.

But he was not thinking that.  The part of him conscious of the act was
working unknown to the faculties which made him move and see.  His
thoughts were imprisoned within stone walls, and around these walls
they beat and trampled themselves, always alike, telling him the same
things, until their repetition became a droning in his brain.  His
mother was dead--back there.  His father was dead.  Indians with
English hatchets had killed them, and he must carry the word to Tonteur.

The whole thing was like a twilight of unreality through which he was
passing, a grotesque nightmare of some kind.  The rising sun did not
dispel this illusion, which came and went like waves of light and
darkness in his brain.  Day with its warmth and beauty, the hundreds of
birds gathering for their southward flights, the cheerful calling of
turkeys under the chestnut trees, the soft blue in the skies all added
to it.  At times he almost cried out the impossibility of what had
happened, and only a little less than believed that his eyes had lied
to him.

After a time, the effect of these things began to give way before the
steady progress of other forces in him, the saviours that rise or fall
between madness and reason, between hysteria and calmness.  He paused
when he came to Squirrel Rock and looked over Forbidden Valley.  With
its autumn colourings it was more than ever like an Oriental tapestry
laid out under his eyes, its lakes gleaming with friendliness.  He
could see no smoke and no sign of invasion or enmity.  The song of the
squirrels floated up to him.  The wings of two eagles he had known
since childhood flashed against the sky.  His mind cleared, and he was
conscious of regaining strength which he had lost.  He spoke to Odd,
and the dog pressed close to his knee and looked up at him with the
language which he, too, had allowed to grow numb and dead for a space.
Courage grew between them.  When they turned away from the valley,
Jeems's eyes were filled with a different light.

Thought which had been wrecked and beaten until now possessed him with
a flame behind it that began to burn fiercely but which seemed to give
no heat or excitement to his flesh.  Only his eyes changed, until they
were those of a savage, flinty in their hardness and without depth in
which one might read his emotions.  His face was white and passionless,
with lines caught and etched upon it as if in bloodless stone.  He
looked at the hatchet again, and Odd heard the gasp which came from his
lips.  The hatchet was a voice telling him things and gloating in the
story it had to tell.  It made him think more clearly and pressed on
him an urge for caution.  He did not follow this immediately, for what
lay behind made the matter of personal danger a trivial thing, not
because of his courage, but because he was deadened to fear.  As he
drew nearer to Tonteur Manor, the instincts of self-preservation awoke
in him.  They did not make him leave the open trail or travel less
swiftly, but his senses became keener, and unconsciously he began to
prepare himself for the physical act of vengeance.

To reach Tonteur was the first obligation in the performance of this
act.  Tonteur still had a few men who had not gone with Dieskau, and as
Jeems recalled the firing of guns, a picture painted itself before his
eyes.  The murderers of his father and mother had swung eastward from
Forbidden Valley, and the seigneur, warned by Hepsibah's fire, had met
them with loaded muskets.  He had faith in Tonteur and did not question
what had happened in the bottom lands.  Before this no doubt had
crossed his mind as to Hepsibah's fate.  The English hatchets had
caught him, somewhere, or he would have come during the long night when
he and Odd had watched alone with death.  But now a forlorn and
scarcely living hope began to rise in his breast as he came to
Tonteur's Hill--an unreasoning thought that something might have driven
his Uncle Hepsibah to the Richelieu, a hope that, after lighting his
signal fire, he had hurried to the Manor with the expectation of
finding his people there.  His father must have seen Hepsibah's warning
across Forbidden Valley, and had waited, disbelieving, while death
travelled with the shades of night through the lowlands.

He might see Hepsibah, in a moment, coming over the hill....

Hepsibah, and the baron, and men with guns....

Even Odd seemed to be expecting this as they sped through the last oak
open and climbed the chestnut ridge.  There were partridges here from
dawn until half the morning was gone, and a covey rose before them with
a roar of wings.  Maples grew on the side toward the Richelieu, and the
leaves were knee-deep.  Beyond these were the thick edging of crimson
sumac, a path breaking through it, and the knob of the hill where they
had always paused to gaze over the wonderland which had been given by
the King of France to the stalwart vassal Tonteur.

Jeems emerged at this point, and the spark which had grown in his
breast was engulfed by sudden blackness.

There was no longer a Tonteur Manor.

A thin, earth-embracing fog covered the bottom lands.  It was a veil
drawn lightly to cover the ugliness of a thing that had happened,
something that was not entirely unbeautiful, a cobwebby, multi-coloured
curtain of pungent smoke drifting in the sunlight, a fabric strangely
and lazily woven by whitish spirals that rose softly from wherever a
building had stood in the Tonteur seigneurie.

Now there were no buildings but one.  The great manor house was gone.
The loopholed church was gone.  The farmers' cottages beyond the
meadows and fields were gone.  All that remained was the stone
gristmill, with the big wind wheel turning slowly at the top of it and
making a whining sound that came to him faintly through the distance.
That was the only break in the stillness.

Jeems, looking down, saw in the drifting veil of smoke a shroud that
covered death.  For the first time he forgot his father and mother.  He
thought of someone he had known and loved a long time ago.  Toinette.




CHAPTER X

Hidden against the scarlet-topped sumac Jeems stood for many minutes
gazing upon the scene of ruin in the valley, too heavily scarred by his
own tragedy to be conscious of great shock again.  The thing was an
enormity which stunned him, but it did not lock his reason and his
power to act as the other had.  Here his hopes were set at an end, and
his mind, seizing upon facts as the death shroud in the valley told
them to him, cut away with the keenness of a knife the mental umbra
which had obscured his visions.  The last of his world which might have
remained was destroyed, and with it, Toinette.

Below the thin veil of smoke through which he surveyed the bottom land
there was no sign of life, and no movement except the turning of the
wheel at the top of the mill.  The wide pasture which extended to the
river was empty.  Cattle and horses and sheep were gone.  This
emptiness lay over the earth as far as he could see.  Death had gone
its way as swiftly as it had come, and no enemy remained to exult over
what had happened.

As he had stood at the edge of the Big Forest seeking for a figure that
might have been his mother's, he now quested for one that might be
Toinette's.  But the same hope was not in his breast, nor the same
fear.  Certainty had taken their place.  Toinette was dead, despoiled
of her beauty and her life as his mother had been.  A fury triumphed
over him that was as possessive in its effect as the colour which
blazed about him in the crimson bush.  It had been growing in him since
the moment he knelt at his father's side; it had strained at the bounds
of his grief when he found his mother; it had filled him with madness,
still unformed in his brain, when he covered their faces in the early
dawn.  Now he knew why he gripped the English hatchet so tightly.  He
wanted to kill.  It was a terrible and totally unexcitable feeling in
him.  It did not give him the desire to cry out defiance or to hurl
himself headlong at something.  The passion which consumed him, searing
his veins while it left his flesh calm, was a thing whose object of
vengeance was not an individual or a group of individuals.  He did not
analyze the philosophy or the absurdity of this fact, but his eyes
turned from the smoke-filled valley of the Richelieu to the south where
Champlain lay gleaming in the sun miles away, and the hand which held
the hatchet trembled in its new-born yearning for the life blood of a
people whom he hated from this day and hour.

He was vaguely conscious of the whine of the mill wheel as he went down
into the valley.  He did not feel fear or the necessity for concealing
his movement, for death would not trouble itself to return to a
desolation so complete.  But the wheel, as he drew nearer, touched the
stillness with a note which seemed to ride with strange insistence over
the solitude, as if calling to someone.  It became less a thing of iron
and wood that was crying in its hunger for oil, and more a voice which
demanded his attention.  It seemed to him that suddenly he caught what
it was saying: "_the little English beast--the little English
beast_"--repeating those words until they became a rhythm without a
break in their monotony except when a capful of wind set the wheel
going faster.  It was as if a thought in his brain had been stolen from
him.  And what it expressed was true.  He was the English beast, coming
as Madame Tonteur had predicted.  Toinette had been right.  Fiends with
white skins, who were of his blood, had sent their hatchet killers to
prove it.  And like a lone ghost he was left to see it all.  The mill
wheel knew and, even in moments of quiet, seemed to possess the power
to tell him so.

With stubborn fortitude he faced the gehenna through which he knew he
must pass before he could turn south to find his vengeance with
Dieskau.  Toinette belonged to him now as much as his mother, and it
was for her he began to search.

In a ditch which had run almost under the eaves of the loopholed
church, he stumbled on a body.  It had fallen among tall grass and
weeds and had remained hidden there.  It wore a Mohawk war tuft, and in
one of its stiffened hands was another English hatchet like the one
Jeems had.  A scalp was at the warrior's belt, and for a moment Jeems
turned sick.  It was a young girl's scalp, days old.

As he advanced, he could see there had been an alarm and a little
fighting.  There was old Jean de Lauzon, the _cur_, doubled up like a
jackknife, half dressed and with a battered old flintlock under him.
He was bald, without a hair that an enemy might take, so he had been
left unmutilated.  He had fired the gun and was running for the
fortressed church when a bullet had caught him between his thin
shoulder blades.  Jeems stood over him long enough to make note of
these things.  He saw several more dark blotches on the ground quite
near to where the thick oaken door to the church had been.  There were
Juchereau and Louis Hebert, both well along in years, and not far from
them were their wives.  Raudot was a fifth.  He had been a slow-witted
lad, and now he looked like a clown who had died with a grin on his
face.  These people had lived nearest to the church.  The others had
been too far away to answer the alarm quickly, but the result had been
the same.  Some had come to meet their death.  Others had waited for it.

Between this group and the smouldering pile that had been the Manor, a
lone figure lay on the ground.  Jeems went to it slowly.  The
smoke-scented air suffocated him as if it were a fragile weave which
lacked the gift of life.  This oppression was heaviest when he saw that
the sprawled-out form was Tonteur.  Unlike the others, the baron was
fully dressed.  He undoubtedly had been armed when he rushed forth from
the house, but nothing was left in his hands but the clods of earth
which he had seized in a final agony.  A cry broke from Jeems.  He had
loved Tonteur.  The seigneur had been the one connecting link between
his older years and the dreams of his childhood, and it was because of
him that he had never quite seemed to lose Toinette.  Until now he had
not realized how deeply Tonteur had found a place in his affections or
how necessary he had been.  He crossed his hands upon his breast and
loosened the earth from his fingers.  He could feel Toinette at his
side, and for a brief interval the sickness in his head and body
overcame him so that he could not see Tonteur at all.  But he could
hear Toinette sobbing.

Against this clouding of his senses he felt himself struggling as if
swimming in an empty space.  Then he could see Tonteur again, dimly at
first, and for an instant he had the impression that a long time had
passed.  He picked up his hatchet and his bow and rose to his feet.  He
had not lost sound of the mill wheel even when Toinette's sobbing had
seemed to be at his side.  It was crying at him now, but before he
turned toward it his eyes rested on Tonteur's wooden peg.  It was half
cut off, a mark of grim humour on the part of a butcher.  The mill
wheel was forcing his attention to that fact.  "_Look--look--look_"--it
said, and then repeated the old song, calling him an English beast.

He faced it in a flash of resentment, not because of the wheel alone
but on account of what lay at his feet and what he knew he would find
nearer to the walls of the manor.  Between him and the mill was a low
current of air with which the smoke drifted in a sun-filled fog which
gave to this remaining building an unreal and grotesque appearance.
Through the smoke he could scarcely see the wheel as it turned at the
top of the tall, pyramid-shaped structure of stone.  He was silent,
listening for other sound in the sleeping stillness.  But his mind was
hurling anathema at the wheel.  He wanted to tell it that it lied.  In
this hush of death he wanted to cry out that he was not of the
murderous breed who had sent the killers.  Proof was over there, in the
valley which at last was well named.  His mother.  His father.  His
Uncle Hepsibah.  Not one of them had been of this breed in their
hearts, and all of them were dead by its hand.  He had been left
alive--by chance.  That was proof.  The wheel was wrong.  It lied.

He looked at Tonteur again, strengthening himself to go a little
farther and find Toinette.  He knew how it would be.  Toinette's young
body, even more pitiful than his mother's.  He forced himself to turn
toward the smouldering walls.  _Toinette--dead_!  His father might die,
and Tonteur, and all the rest of the world--but these two, his mother
and Toinette, inseparable in his soul forever, the vital sparks which
had kept his own heart beating--how could they die while he lived?  He
advanced, pausing over one of the slaves, a woman almost unclothed,
inky black except the top of her head, which was red where her scalp
was gone.  In the crook of her arm was her scalpless infant.  White,
black, women, babies--the loveliness of girlhood--it made no difference.

Jeems scanned the earth beyond her, and where the smoke lay in a white
shroud he saw a small, slim figure which he knew was Toinette.  Another
young body might have lain in the same way, its slenderness crumpled in
the same manner, a naked arm revealed dimly under its winding sheet of
smoke.  But he knew this was Toinette.  The dizzying haze wavered
before his eyes again, and he put out his hand to hold it back.
Toinette.  Only a few steps from him.  Dead, like his mother.

Odd went ahead of him halfway to the still form and stopped.  He sensed
something Jeems could not see or feel through the smoke mist which
undulated before their eyes.  Warning of impending danger confronted
the dog, and he tried to pass it to his master.  In that moment, a shot
came from the mill, and a flash of pain darted through Jeems's arm.  He
was flung backward and caught himself to hear echoes of the explosion
beating against the forested hills and the wheel at the top of the mill
screaming at him.

He answered the shot by dropping his bow and dashing toward the mill.
Odd was a leap ahead of him when they reached its broken-down door, and
the dog stopped as he faced the shadows that lay within the stone
walls.  Jeems went on.  Death might easily have met him at the
threshold, but nothing moved in the vaultlike chamber he had entered,
and there was no sound in it except that of his own breath and his
racing heart.  Odd came in and sniffed the grain-scented, musty air.
Then he went to the flight of narrow steps which led to the tower room
and told Jeems that what they sought was there.  Jeems ran up, his
hatchet raised to strike.

He must have been an unforgettable and terrifying object as he appeared
above the floor into the light which forced its way through the dusty
glass of three round windows over his head.  There must even have been
a little of the monster about him.  He had left some of his garments
with his mother and father, and his arms and shoulders were bare.  Char
and smoke and the stain of earth had disfigured him.  His face appeared
to be painted for slaughter and a greenish fire glittered in the eyes
that were seeking for an enemy.  Blood dripped to the oaken planks from
his wounded arm.  He was a Frankenstein ready to kill, dishevelment and
fury concealing his youth, his stature made appalling by his eagerness
to leap at something with the upraised hatchet.

If the hatchet had found a brain, it would have been Toinette's.  She
faced him as he came, holding the musket which she had fired through a
slit in the wall as if she still possessed faith in its power to defend
her.  Her pallor was heightened by the silken darkness of the long hair
which streamed about her.  Her eyes had in them a touch of madness.
Yet she was so straight and tense, waiting for death, that she did not
seem to be wholly possessed by fear or terror.  Something unconquerable
was with her, the soul of Tonteur himself struggling in her fragile
breast to make her unafraid to die and giving to her an aspect of
defiance.  This courage could not hide the marks of her torture.  Death
had miraculously left her flesh untouched in passing, yet she stood
crucified in the mill room.

Expecting a savage, she recognized Jeems.  The musket fell from her
hands to the floor with a dull crash, and she drew back as if
retreating from one whose presence she dreaded more than that of a
Mohawk, until her form pressed against the piled-up bags of grain, and
she was like one at bay.  The cry for vengeance which was on Jeems's
lips broke in a sobbing breath when he saw her.  He spoke her name, and
Toinette made no response except that she drew herself more closely to
the sacks.  Odd's toenails clicked on the wooden floor as he went to
her.  This did not take her eyes from Jeems.  They were twin fires
flaming at him through a twilight gloom.  The dog touched her hand with
his warm tongue, and she snatched it away.

She seemed to grow taller against the gray dusk of the wall of grain.

"_You--English--beast!_"

It was not the mill wheel this time, but Toinette's voice, filled with
the madness and passion which blazed from her eyes.

With a sudden movement she picked up the musket and struck at him.  If
it had been loaded, she would have killed him.  She continued to
strike, but Jeems was conscious only of the words which came from her
brokenly as she spent her strength on him.  _He_ had come with the
English Indians to destroy her people!  _He_ and his mother had plotted
it, and they were alive while everyone who belonged to her was dead!
The barrel of the gun struck him across the eyes.  It fell against his
wounded arm.  It bruised his body.  Sobbingly, she kept repeating that
she wanted to kill him, and cried out wildly for the power with which
to accomplish the act as he stood before her like a man of stone.  An
English beast--her people's murderer--a fiend more terrible than the
painted savages ...

She struck until the weight of the musket exhausted her and she dropped
it.  Then she snatched weakly at the hatchet in Jeems's hands, and his
fingers relaxed about the helve.  With a cry of triumph, she raised it,
but before the blow could descend she sank in a crumpled heap upon the
floor.  Even then her almost unconscious lips were whispering their
denunciation.

He knelt beside her and supported her head in his unwounded arm.  For a
moment it lay against his breast.  Her eyes were closed, her lips were
still.  And Jeems, sick from her blows, remembered his mother's God and
breathed a prayer of gratitude because of her deliverance.

Then he bent and kissed the mouth that had cursed him.




CHAPTER XI

Toinette was alone when she awoke from the unconsciousness which had
come to ease the anguish other mind and body.  It seemed to her she was
coming out of sleep and that the walls which dimly met her eyes were
those of her bedroom in the Manor.  That a truth whose evidence lay so
horribly about her could be reality and not a dream broke on her senses
dully at first and then with a swift understanding.  She sat up
expecting to see Jeems.  But he was gone.  She was no longer where she
had fallen at her enemy's feet.  But Jeems had made a resting place for
her of empty bags and must have carried her to it.  She shivered when
she looked at the musket and the stain of blood on the floor.  She had
tried to kill him.  And he had gone away, leaving her alive!

As had happened to Jeems, something was burned out of her now.  It had
gone in the sea of darkness which had swept over her, and she rose with
an unemotional calmness, as if the tower room with its dust and cobwebs
and store of ripened grain had become her cloister.  Passion had worn
itself away.  If a thought could have slain, she would still have
wreaked her vengeance on Jeems, but she would not have touched the
musket again that lay on the floor.

She went to the head of the stair and looked down.  The son of the
Englishwoman had left no sign except the drip of blood that made a
trail on the steps and out of the door.  Exultation possessed her as
she thought how nearly she had brought to the Bulains the same shadow
of death which they and their kind had brought to her.  The thrill was
gone in a moment.  The red drops fascinated her, painted brightly by
the sun.  Jeems Bulain--out there with her dead!  The boy her mother
had tried to make her regard with bitterness and dislike from
childhood--a man grown into an English monster!  She struggled to bring
back her power to hate and her desire to kill, but the effort she made
was futile.  She followed the crimson stains, hearing nothing but the
mill wheel over her head.  Emptiness was below, a loneliness wherein
the sun itself seemed to lose its warmth.

She stood in the doorway, and all about her was the haze of smoke, soft
and still in the air.  In the distance, obscured by the fog which ran
from the smouldering ruins, she saw a form bent grotesquely under a
burden.  It was a shapeless thing, distorted by the sun and the smoky
spindrifts dancing before her eyes, but living because it was moving
away from her.  Behind it was a smaller object, and she knew the two
were Jeems and his dog.

She watched until they were blotted from her vision, and minutes passed
before she followed where they had gone.

Jeems must have seen her, for he reappeared with the dog like a
werewolf at his heels.  He had found a coat somewhere and did not look
so savage, though his face was disfigured and bleeding where she had
struck him with the barrel of the musket.  He was breathing deeply, but
his face was as dispassionate as it had been in the tower room--an
Indian's face, with flesh tempered by the impassiveness which she had
assaulted so bitterly.  She tried to speak when he stopped before her.
Accusation and a bit of ferocity remained in her soul, but they were
impotent in the silence between them.  His eyes meeting hers steadily
from under the lurid brand of her blow, seemed less like a murderer's
and held more the gaze of one who regarded her with a cold and terrible
pity.  He did not put out a helping hand though she felt herself
swaying.  He was no longer youth.  He was not the boy her mother had
trained her to hate.  He was not even Jeems Bulain.

But his voice was the same.

"I am sorry, Toinette."

Jeems scarcely knew he spoke the words.  They rang back through the
years as if a ghost had come to life whose memory they had flayed out
of their hearts a long time ago.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded.

She might have asked that same question in those unimportant years when
he had dared to visit Tonteur Manor with his foolish gifts.  _Why was
he here_?  He turned in the direction from which he had come and held
out his hand, not for her to take, but as a voice.  She understood what
his burden had been.  Tears?  Such trivial things could not exist in
the after-heat of the holocaust that had consumed them.  A stray
undercurrent of wind flung back her hair in a lacy mantle of jet silk.
Pride, defying grief, raised her chin a little as she obeyed Jeems.  It
shone in her widening eyes and in her parted lips as she looked ahead.
She knew to what she was going.  And when she came to the place which
Jeems had prepared, she was like a white angel who had appeared to gaze
for a moment or two upon the dead.

With a tool he had found, Jeems had made a grave.  It was shallow and
made less unbeautiful with a bed of golden grass.  Tonteur did not seem
unhappy as he lay upon it.  The top of his head was covered so Toinette
could not see.  She knelt and prayed, and Jeems drew back, feeling that
to kneel with her, with the marks of her hatred on his face and body,
would be sacrilege.

Even now, when it should have known better, the mill wheel continued to
whine and scream, and suddenly it occurred to Jeems that it could not
have been that way yesterday when Tonteur was alive.  A devil must have
come to abide at the top of the mill!

He waited, scanning the horizons that were thinning of their smoke.
Death had passed and death might return over its own blackened trail.
Toinette, beside her father, made him think of that.  It seemed a long
time before she rose to face him.  She was not crying.  Her eyes were
blue stars in a countenance as pale as marble.  The sun shone on her
and gave an unearthly radiance to her hair.  Her beauty held him
stricken just as his own terribleness forced from her a gasp of protest
when he drew off the coat borrowed from one of the dead men and spread
it over Tonteur.  But she did not speak.  Only the mill wheel continued
its virulent plaint as the loose earth fell on the baron.  Toinette
looked steadily toward the sky, and when Jeems was done she companied
him back to the mill.  She watched him go for his bow, where he saw
that the form he had thought was Toinette was the wife of Peter the
Younger.

He came back and spoke to her a second time.  The lips she had broken
with the musket barrel were swollen, and the brand across his forehead
was turning a dark and angry colour.  The cloth he had twisted about
his wounded arm was red.  Sickness and pain were forcing their way into
his eyes.

"I must take you away," he said.  "There is not time to care for the
others.  If they come back----"

"They will not harm _you_," she said.

Jeems made no answer but looked away over the Richelieu toward
Champlain and Dieskau.

"And they will not harm your father or your mother or anything that
belongs to the Bulains, but will reward them for their loyalty to
murder and outrage.  Is not that true?"

Still Jeems did not answer, but stood listening for sound to come out
of the distance.

Her voice was quiet and mercilessly unmoved by the marks of the
punishment which her hands had inflicted.  He had received less than
her own people, and it was only an accident of her weakness and want of
skill that he had not suffered equally with them.  She saw the sickness
gathering in his face and eyes, but pity for him was as dead in her
breast as her desire to live.  She knew where he would take her.  To
his home--a place left unscathed by the killers.  To his mother, the
soft and pretty woman in whom her father had believed so faithfully.
To Henri Bulain, the traitor, who had bartered his honour for an
Englishwoman.  Over her father's hill, in Forbidden Valley, were safety
and mercy at the hands of her country's enemies.

Her lips found a way to cut him deeper.

"Your father and mother are waiting for you," she said.  "Go, and leave
me here.  I prefer to wait for the return of your Indian friends.  And
I am not sorry because I tried to kill you!"

He moved away from her to where Hebert and Juchereau and the
simple-minded Raudot lay on the ground.  This time it was the idiot's
coat he took, a fine coat made by the idiot's mother.  The boy had
loved birds and flowers, and on the lapel of the coat was a faded
geranium bloom.  Jeems took it off and tucked it between the dead lad's
fingers.

Then he went back to Toinette and said, "We had better go."  After that
he added, "I am sorry, but I must go to my mother and father first."

He staggered as he set out, and Tonteur Hill dipped and wobbled before
his eyes.  There was an ache like a splinter twisting in his head, and
as she followed him, Toinette could see the effect of her unresisted
blows with the iron gun barrel.  For she did follow, out of the smoke
fumes into the clearer air of the meadows and across them to the worn
path that led to the Indian trail and the home of Catherine Bulain.
She followed as if drawn by chains, but after a little the weight of
these chains seemed to leave her, and when Jeems stumbled and caught
himself from falling, she almost breathed a cry.  The hardwoods
swallowed them, and about them now even more than in the earlier
morning were the warmth and golden riot of the Algonquin Indian summer
which precedes the killing frosts and the opening of the chestnut
burrs.  In this autumnal peace and quiet, gentle with the subdued notes
of birds and with the fragrance of a ripened earth between her and the
blue of the sky, the bitterness she was fighting to hold against the
one ahead of her became almost dispelled at times.  In these moments
the spirit of her father was with her again.  This was the path he had
loved best, over the hill and through the forest to the clearing in
Forbidden Valley.  His horse's feet had worn it smooth, and in the
earth were hoofprints so clear and fresh he might have ridden it an
hour ago.  Close to Squirrel Rock he had always loitered to look over
the grandeur of the valley, and there Toinette paused with Jeems,
standing in the worn spot her father had made.

"They're down there," said Jeems, and pointed, speaking to Odd more
than to her.

He took the hatchet from his belt and carried it in his hand.  They
crossed the open where he had killed Paul Tache, the turkey cock, and
passed through the screen of brush which the fairies had built.  They
entered the greater stillness of the Big Forest, and Odd, who had
travelled between them, dropped back to Toinette's side and thrust his
muzzle against her hand.

She did not snatch it away from him now.

They came to the slope, and Jeems forgot that Toinette was behind him.
He walked straight down like a tall, thin ghost--and the girl stopped
and stood alone, staring at the place where his home should have been,
a cry wringing itself at last from her lips.

Jeems did not hear.  He saw nothing but the clump of rose bushes and
the place where his mother lay.  He went to her first, oblivious of
other presence, unconscious of the sun, of the ruins still smouldering,
his soul stirring once more with the faint mad spark of incredulity.
But she was dead.  He saw her with clearer eyes, though he was sick
with hurt.  He knelt beside her calmly for a little while.  He touched
her face gently f with his hand, and then went to his father.  Odd
trailed at his heels.  In the stump field was a shovel, and they found
it and bore it back with them together.  Under his mother's big tree he
planned to dig.

When he returned, his mother was not alone.  Toinette was there, on the
ground, with the English woman's head in her lap.  Her eyes blazed up
at Jeems, and something like defiance was in them, something that was
possessive and challenging and which hid whatever pity she might have
had for him, or pleading for his forgiveness.  Her hands were pressing
the cold face of the woman she had wanted to hate, and she continued to
look at Jeems, so hard, so terribly, so understandingly that she seemed
almost to be waiting for him to punish her with a blow.

Then she bowed her head over his mother, and the shining veil of her
hair covered death.

Under the big tree he began to dig.




CHAPTER XII

It was late afternoon when they left the valley, a still, slumbering
hour when the sun was about to go to its early rest, leaving glows and
sunset paintings behind that might have been made of swimming metals.

Toinette's hand lay in Jeems's as they went.

They were like a young god and goddess ready to face the hazards of a
savage world with a strength wrought out of fire.  The sickness had
left Jeems.  His wounded arm was cared for by fingers as gentle as his
mother's had been.  Hot tears caressing his flesh from Toinette's dark
lashes had cured his physical pain.  Words spoken in a voice he had
never heard from her lips entreating his forgiveness for years of
misunderstanding were like the peace of the day itself about his heart.
Out of ruin she had raised his soul to splendid heights of courage and
resolution.  Seared by grief, but a grief no greater than her own, he
saw once more the ghosts of dreams.

Toinette, at his side, had gone back to the days when those dreams were
in the making.  He might have imagined her the Toinette of Lussan's
place except that she was less than magnificent now, with her dress
soiled and torn and her hair in a braid of straight tresses instead of
lustrous curls.  Under the big tree, with his mother, things had broken
away from her--a great deal of her strength, a little of her courage,
but chiefly years of pride built out of hollow teachings.  There, just
as the fires had changed Jeems in another way, they had made of her the
child whom Catherine had prayed would come to her some day.

She was not so tall at Jeems's side.  She was not so dispassionately
cold and white, ready to hold out her arms to death if it should come
her way.  The glow in her eyes was a different glow.  It was dark with
desolation and held imperishable depths of torture.  But in it were
other things.  She was seeing the endless walls of the forest again,
the coming of night, the loneliness of the world, her helplessness, and
the strength of the one at her side.  Her cup filled with horrors had
turned her, like Niobe, to stone, but now warm flesh was returning with
its frailties and weaknesses, giving her once more a recognition of
life and a hunger for it.  She looked at Jeems.  As a child, years ago,
she might have let him lead her in this way deep into a forest where he
was unafraid and sure but where shadows and mysteries set her heart
quaking.  Her fingers clung to his.

They passed his mother's gardens of flowers where choice blooms were
nodding, filled to overflowing with ripening seeds; they skirted the
turnip field where a purple-breasted crop lay waiting for spicy frosts
to give crispness and flavour to its flesh; they cut through the heart
of a new clearing where many shag-toothed stumps were piled ready for
winter use in the cabin fireplace.  In a place where fresh dirt was
scattered about were tools used yesterday--axes and shovels and hickory
prying poles and the big double-bladed grub hoe which Hepsibah had made
at Tonteur's forge.  On a stump partly dug from the earth was one of
Hepsibah's pipes made of half a corncob with a hollow reed for a stem.
Near this stump, looking at them shyly, was the gopher who had once
lived under it.

Jeems stopped and looked about, his throat almost tensing for the old
familiar call to Hepsibah.  Many times he had made the woods and the
lower lands echo with that cry and had heard his uncle answer it.  But
now the stillness warned him.  Like a friend it was whispering the
sacredness of another trust.  His eyes turned to the lovely head near
his shoulder.  In a moment Toinette raised her eyes to meet his, and
even with his mother they had not been so deep and gentle.

"They must have caught my uncle out there," he said, keeping his voice
steady and gazing over the forest tops of Forbidden Valley.  "He set
the signal fire for us and then was killed.  I would go and find him,
if it were not for you."

"I will go with you," answered Toinette.

But Jeems turned west and did not look back at his home or betray the
choking in his breast.  In the maple wood, where the sap spigots and
poplar troughs were still under the trees, fallen leaves made a
frolicsome sound as they went through them.  Their loudness did not
alarm Jeems and he found himself talking to Toinette as if she were the
child of the old days, and he, changed into a man, were explaining
things.  He described for the first time how the savages had come while
he was on his way home from Lussan's place, and gave his reasons for
believing they had departed in haste, leaving many things, like the
gathered crops of fruit and grain, which they would surely have taken
had they not been pressed by circumstance.  He thought their number
must have been as great as Toinette supposed--and she had seen them by
scores from her bedroom window at the Manor.  He was sure they had not
gone farther down the Richelieu but had turned back through Forbidden
Valley to the Mohawk country.  Their own hope was to swing westward out
of the path of stragglers, then eastward again toward Lussan's.  He
told her not to be frightened at the noise the leaves made.  They would
soon be out of them and would come to hidden trails which he knew and
to the shelter of woods and swamps where were fastnesses so thick and
untrodden that it was dark in them now, with the sun still glowing in
the west.  To-morrow or the day following, he would have her safely at
the next seigneurie, and there she would find means to be taken to her
friends in Quebec.  He would then join Dieskau to fight the English.
He made this statement without passion or boastfulness, as if to fight
were the one thing to do, a fact settled in her mind as well as in his
own.  The important thing was to reach Lussan's to-night.  The Indians
would not go near there, for they believed all abandoned places to be
inhabited by ghosts and evil spirits.  If they stumbled upon it by
accident they would get away as quickly as possible.  While he talked
of these matters, he wanted to ask her questions.  How had she got into
the mill-tower room--unhurt?  Where was her mother?  But he set his
lips tightly, knowing that he must heal her wounds a little if he could.

In the deeper woods where the Big Forest began were greater stillness,
more gloom, endless and mysterious aisles of twilight all about them.
The sun went out.  Under their feet was no beaten trail but only the
rough and uneven mould, a pad of spongy softness incapable of giving
sound.  He still held her hand as darkness gathered closer.

In this gloom she whispered:

"Does your arm hurt, Jeems?"

"No.  I had forgotten it."

"And your face--where I struck you?"

"I had forgotten that, too."

Something touched his shoulder lightly.  He could not tell what it was,
for they were in a pool of darkness.  But whatever it might have been,
a falling leaf, a twig, even shadow itself--it filled him with a
strange exaltation.

He would have felt the same if his mother had been at his side, as
helpless as Toinette and as dependent upon him.  Out of the wreck of a
world obliterated in a scourge of horror he had a soul besides his own
to fight for.

Twice in the next hour Odd halted and gave a growl which warned of
danger in the air.  Jeems strained his eyes to see and his ears to
hear--and once more, when they stopped to listen, he felt the gentle
touch against his shoulder.

They struck a deer run and followed it into a plain between two lines
of hills where a devastating fire had passed some years before.  Here
they travelled through a young growth of bushes and trees reaching
scarcely above their heads, with the light of the stars falling on
them.  It stirred a soft radiance in Toinette's smooth hair and
illumined Jeems's face until the wounds made by her hands were plainly
revealed.  They climbed the northernmost hill after a time, and at the
top of it stopped again to rest.

Jeems, like Odd, stood tense and listening, searching the slumbrous
distance of the wilderness which lay about them.  He caught all
movement and all sound, the direction of the wind, the shifting play of
the shadows, the almost noiseless flutter of an owl's wings over their
heads.

And then he knew what had touched his shoulder in the
darkness--Toinette's cheek pressing against it for a moment as lightly
as a feather.

He felt her trembling.  When she looked at him, her eyes rested on the
brand of the musket barrel which lay in a red stripe across his
forehead.  The stars seemed bigger and clearer when at last they came
to the half mile of abandoned road which ended in Lussan's clearing.
It was the road down which Jeems had watched Tonteur and Paul Tache and
a proud little princess ride to the sale years before.  Now the
princess walked unsteadily at his side.  She was white and fragile in
the starlight, and her strength was gone.  Her dress was torn by brush
and briars, and the thin soles of her shoes were almost worn from her
feet.  They came to the old tree where he had concealed himself while
they passed, and something made him tell her about it.  He was sorry,
for, in a moment, a sob answered him.  She caught herself and struggled
bravely as they entered the clearing, with the ruin of the house ahead
of them.  Both were so tired in soul and body that their minds seized
upon this end of their journey as a relief from longer supporting the
burdens of the flesh.  In a way, it was like coming to a home which
they had forgotten.  For this was Lussan's, a place filled with
memories of hope and triumph and bitterness out of which it built a
welcome for them even in its loneliness.  Toinette's lips almost
smiled, as if she saw Madame Lussan at the threshold of the door
calling to her above the laughing voices of men and women, above her
father's cheery greetings to friends and neighbours, above the restless
stamping of her horse's hoofs and the crying of the auctioneer.  She
might have seen and heard these things but yesterday; now there was
sleep--a dark and lifeless ghost of a house, crickets rasping their
wings in the tangled grass, a jungle growing where before there had
been a broad and level green.

Both were children now, seeing the ghosts as only children could see
them, wide-eyed and a little afraid at first, and yet comforted by the
nearness of that yesterday in their lives.  The stars and the crickets
and the rustling grass and the wind in the trees seemed to listen and
move to the cautious tread of their feet.  A rabbit ran ahead of them.
An owl flew off the roof of the house.  A bat dipped in spirals and
curves before their eyes, and thorns caught playfully at their shoes
and clothes.  And they felt safe.  A warmth crept through their blood,
and with it a relaxation of nerves and eyes and brain.  Here was
sanctuary.  Rest.  Peace.  They sensed these things without speaking as
they approached the building.  The door was open.  Starlight splashed
like the golden glow of candles on the floor.  They entered and stood
silent as if listening anxiously for the voices of sleeping ones whom
their entrance might arouse.  A cricket singing in a starbeam greeted
them cheerily.  Emptiness was here, a spectral vacancy, but with it
were neither death nor fear.

They were a little apart, and Toinette looked like a broken flower
ready to fall.

"Wait for me here," said Jeems.  "I am going for an armful of grass."

One of Tonteur's farmers had cut the hay in Lussan's abandoned meadow
where Jeems had seen a stack the previous day, and he hurried to this,
returning with all he could carry.  He made a bed in a corner of the
room, and Toinette sank upon it.  He covered her with his father's coat
which he had brought from the valley and went outside to watch and
guard with Odd.

He could hear her sobbing as tears came at last to give her comfort.
He fought back a thickening in his throat and a hot flame in his eyes
as the boy in him called out for his mother.  He, too, wanted this
easement for his grief.  But he stood--a man.  Odd watched tirelessly
and sleeplessly with his master.

After a long time, there was silence in the old house, and Jeems knew
that Toinette was asleep.  He went in quietly and replaced the coat
about her.  Her face was white and lovely, and wet lashes glistened on
her cheeks.  Timidly his fingers pressed the silken braid of her hair.
He brushed a wisp of hay from her forehead.  Unconsciously his lips
moved.  Hope and faith and prayer seemed to stir in the room as he
dared to raise the soft braid to his lips, and then he returned to his
place outside with something like a glory enshrined with his sorrow.

He sat on the ground with the house at his back and his bow and sheaf
of arrows and the English hatchet within reach of his hands.  The
stillness seemed a live thing that had barred all sound from solemn
hours of meditation, and he soon began to feel its influence.  Slowly
and irresistibly it brought the desire to close his eyes and sleep, and
he rose to his feet in a struggle to keep awake.  Odd's teeth clicked
and his eyes gleamed with undimmed vigilance.

For hours they watched together and marked every changing shadow.  They
skirted the edges of the open, advancing a step at a time and with as
little noise as the owl wings that now and then floated about them.
They scanned Lussan's meadow, and Jeems climbed a tall tree to see if
he could discover a glow of fire.  At intervals he returned to the
house and looked in at Toinette.  It was after midnight when he sat
down again, and soon the stars seemed to be laughing at him and to be
drawing nearer as if they had beaten him in a game.  They closed his
eyes.  Odd rested his heavy jaws between his forepaws and gave a deep
sigh.  Exhaustion--then sleep.  Even the bat, grown tired, went to its
retreat in the barn.  The stars receded and the world began to take on
a deeper gloom.  Out of this came an animal scream as a late-hunting
owl swooped down and killed the rabbit in the clearing.  Odd heard it
and whined, but it did not awaken Jeems.

He was at home, in the valley.  The apple trees were about him and the
sun was shining and he was with his mother.  They were seated under a
tree, resting from their labour of picking up cider apples while his
father drove a cartload of fruit down the slope.  He could hear the
creaking of the wheels.  Close to the cabin his Uncle Hepsibah was
working the cider press.  His mother's head touched his shoulder, and
he could feel the softness of her hair against his face.  Then they
were laughing at a chipmunk who came to stare at them with his cheek
pouches so full of corn that he looked as if he had the mumps.  Quite
unexpectedly, a black cloud shut out the sun and everything was
obliterated in darkness.  When this happened he seemed to be holding
his mother from some force which was trying to drag her from him.  This
darkness came and went, and the odd part of it was that his father and
Uncle Hepsibah did not move from their original positions--one was
always halfway down the slope with the ox cart and the other was
working at the capstan of the cider press.  The chipmunk continued to
stare at them with his mouth full of corn.

With an effort, Jeems roused himself from his dream.  He saw Odd at his
feet and beyond him a clump of briars, a tangle of long grass, an
overgrown clearing in which there were no apple trees, no home, no
Hepsibah at a cider press.  It was Lussan's place.  Day had come, and
the sun was rising.  He sensed these things first, in a flash of
wakefulness, and then felt a weight against him and the softness of his
mother's hair on his cheek.  Only it was Toinette and not his mother.
She must have come to him before the dawn broke.  Her head was resting
on his shoulder and his arms were about her as they had been about his
mother.  His movement had not awakened her, but now a slow tightening
of his arms brought a tremor to her lashes and a deeper breath to her
lips.  He kissed her pale face, and her eyes opened.  He kissed her
again, and the act did not seem to disturb her any more than it amazed
or shocked him.  There was a responsive greeting in her eyes.

Then she sat up straight beside him and faced the rising sun.

The air was so cold that she shivered.  Every shrub and briar and blade
of grass in the clearing glistened with frost.  The coat she had
brought from the house slipped from her shoulders, and Jeems drew it
about her again.  They stood up, and strength returned into their
cramped limbs.  For a little while they did not speak.  They heard a
boastful blue jay screaming half a mile away, and in Lussan's meadow
crows were gathering.  A woodpecker drumming at a hollow stub made the
sound of a man with a hammer.  Sounds carried far in the silvery
sun-streaked mist which lay between the earth and the sky.

That they belonged to each other was a truth which pressed itself on
them without effort or confusion.  Toinette was not ashamed that she
had come to him nor that her act had proclaimed what pride and false
prejudice had so long hidden from him in her heart.  Her eyes glowed
with a light which shone softly out of fathomless depths of pain and
grief.  She wanted him to know how completely the folly of her pride
was gone and how glad she was that it was he who stood beside her now.
They might have been years older, so calmly did the sense of surrender
and of possession hold them.  Except for the new tenderness in her
eyes, Toinette was unchanged.  But Jeems felt himself taller at her
side and something had entered him which was like the spirit of a
conqueror.  It was another world now.  A vast mystery ahead of him.
Something to fight through, to win from, to live for.  Mysterious, it
was still very real.  It set his heart throbbing with an unappalled and
challenging force.  Yesterday, black with tragedy and grievous with its
pain, was a long time ago, but, with Toinette, to-day had become a
tremendous living present.  Gently her fingertips touched his shoulder.
Then she looked with him toward the east and the Richelieu--and what
lay beyond.


From the moment they had risen to their feet, Odd had stood as rigid as
carven wood in the white-coated grass with his muzzle levelled toward
Lussan's meadow.  Something definite had come within his reach, which
made it unnecessary for him to measure the wind, and suddenly there
rose above other sound the wild and raucous crying of a blue jay, and a
cawing of alarm among the crows.  Black wings flashed over the
treetops, and Odd's gaunt body quivered as he watched them disappear.
A second and a third blue jay joined the first, and their tumult came
to an end when a piercing bird call terminated sharply in a single
screeching note.

"That was an arrow," said Jeems, beginning to string his bow.  "More
than once I have had to kill a noisy blue jay when creeping up on game."

He drew Toinette into the shelter of the house and called Odd.  A few
minutes later--swiftly moving, sombre horrors in a world of shimmering
white--they saw the Mohawks come out of the edge of Lussan's meadow.




CHAPTER XIII

The spectacle of death marching back over its trail brought no terror
to Jeems.  He had watched for it, had half expected it, and in a way it
was like the answer to an unvoiced prayer which had followed his
awakening when he had found Toinette in his arms.  To fight for her
now, to rush forth from the house with a battle cry on his lips, and to
be cut to pieces in her defence was not a prospect which dismayed him,
but which, instead, inspired in him a fearless exaltation.  It was
Toinette who saved him from whatever folly was brewing itself in his
brain as he stood with a long hunting arrow fitted to his bow.  With a
breathless cry, she drew him away from the broken door, and there, safe
for a moment from the savages who were entering the clearing, she flung
her arms about his shoulders.  For in these tragic seconds a look had
come into Jeems's face like that which had frightened her in the tower
room of the mill, a look hard and vengeful with the desire to kill.

"Jeems, dear, we must hide," she pleaded.  "_We must hide!_"

The futility of trying to conceal themselves when their footprints were
clearly left upon the frosty ground did not occur to him at once.  It
was her voice and the name it claimed for him that broke down the
resolution which soon would have betrayed them.

"I know of a place," she was saying.  "We must hurry to it!"

She ran ahead of him and he followed her into another room where a
stair was falling into ruin.  A bit of sun splashed on the floor, and
through the paneless window which admitted it they caught a glimpse of
the Mohawks.  The red killers had paused at the edge of the open.  They
stood motionless, like stone men, listening and watchful, the upper
parts of their bodies still unclothed until colder days and glistening
with grease and paint.  Toinette did not allow Jeems to pause, and the
steps made complaint as they trod upon them.  Jeems looked down from
the top and saw the marks of their feet in the dust below.  Their fate
was certain if the Mohawks came this far, but with only the narrow
stair for their enemies to ascend he was determined, in this event,
that each of his twenty arrows should find a home.

Toinette preceded him into the room above.  She went directly to a
panel-like board which held a wooden peg and in a moment they were
peering into the musty gloom of a huge black hole under the roof, which
the Lussans had used as a garret.  Mice scampered about as the first
light of years impaled the darkness.

"Madame Lussan brought me to this room after your fight with Paul," she
whispered.  "I flung my spoiled clothes far back in there!"

Even with the savages so near, pathos and memory were in the tremble of
her voice.

Jeems faced the narrow aperture in the wall which Lussan had left as a
window and a gun-hole for defence.  Yesterday--Paul Tache--Toinette,
the little princess with her riding habit and lustrous curls--and now
just they two alone in the room where she had hated him so desperately!
He went to the window, and Toinette came close to his side.  No eyes
could see them as they looked through the rectangular slit shadowed
under the eaves.  The sun had not risen high enough to direct its
warmth effectively upon a whitened earth.  The clearing was a paradise
made by sprites and nixies out of jewelled frost, with trees about it
in gold and white, and thick hazel clumps transformed into glowing
polychromes of fringy petalled yellow.  Deeper into this scene of
purity and beauty the Mohawks had not moved, and from the steadiness of
their attitude Jeems knew they had come upon the open unexpectedly.  A
dozen warriors stood revealed outside the bordering thicket, and twelve
pairs of eyes were fixed upon the abandoned house in a tense and
suspicious scrutiny.  Yet not a hand among the silent savages had moved
to hatchet, bow, or gun.

This fact drew a hopeful whisper from Jeems.

"They see the place is deserted, and unless they find some sign of us,
they won't come nearer," he said.  "Look, Toinette!  There is a white
man among them with a prisoner's collar around his neck----"

His words were cut short by a sudden movement among the watchers, as if
a command had stirred them to life again.  The man in the lead, with
three eagle feathers in his tuft, stalked alone into the clearing, a
tall and sinister figure burdened only with his weapons and a warrior's
diminutive travelling pack--a giant who was red and black and ochrish
yellow in his war paint, and at whose belt hung a bundle of scalps in
which the sun played and danced with changing lights as he moved.
These horrid objects, one of which was a woman's with hair so long that
it could not escape the eyes of those who were in the house, wrenched a
shuddering cry from Toinette, yet even then she thanked God it was as
fair in colour as the day itself and not the gleamy cloud of darkness
which might have been Catherine's.  Faintness swept over her, and she
closed her eyes that she might shut from her vision the grisly trophies
of a warrior's success.  When she opened them again, twoscore warriors
in single file were following in the footsteps of the leader and passed
within a hundred feet of what once had been Lussan's home, casting
furtive sidewise glances as they went.  In more than one belt, fresh
scalps shone in the sunshine, and two white men and a boy with their
hands tied and prisoner thongs about their throats walked in the line.
A little more to the right, and the presence of other things than
emptiness and ghosts must surely have been discovered by the Indians,
for from their window Toinette and Jeems could see the telltale
imprints of their shoes in the white frost dangerously close to the
thin straight line of their enemies.

Not until the trees on the other side of the clearing had swallowed the
last of the Mohawks did Toinette's straining eyes turn to Jeems.  There
had been no sound in the passing of the red scourge, no cautious voice,
no clatter of wood on steel, no crackle of brittle grass or weeds under
fourscore moccasined feet.  Where their tracks lay in the grass, one
might have thought that three men had travelled instead of forty.  And
the world was dead behind them.  Crows did not return to the meadow,
and the blue jays had flown into safer distance.  The woodpecker had
gone to a farther stub.  Even in the old house there was no longer the
scurrying and squeaking of mice--no sound but the tumultuous throbbing
of three hearts, two of them human and one a beast's.

It was then Jeems spoke.

"I swear there was a white man--a free white man--in that painted
crowd, and long hair was hanging from his belt," he said.

"I saw his blond head and lighter skin, but thought my eyes were lying
to me," replied Toinette.

"An Englishman," said Jeems.  "A murderer for money such as my Uncle
Hepsibah told me about."

"And yet--he might be French."

They stood looking into each other's eyes, she of the aristocracy of
Old France and he of the New World's freedom, and her hands rose slowly
to his face as his bow and arrow fell to the floor.  For the first time
she raised her mouth to his.

"Kiss me, Jeems--and pray a little with me in gratitude for the mercy
God has shown us!"

The thrill of her lips lay for a moment against his.

"I am sorry for everything in the world," she said.

Some of the softness and beauty of boyhood returned into his face as
she drew herself from his arms and he descended the creaking stair
ahead of her.

They did not go out at once, but stood near the lower door, listening
for sound and watching for something to move, while Odd kept his eyes
on the forested walls of the clearing.  The sun rose higher, and before
its devastating warmth the fragile structures of the frost builders
crumbled away, fairy cities and kingdoms giving place to the more
colourless blankets of autumn.  Not until then did the earth seem to
live again.  A cheery group of chickadees settled among the bushes, and
a red-squirrel's feet pattered across the roof of the house.  The
woodpecker was back at his old tree, hammering and digging to get at a
grub.  Odd moved and heaved a sigh as if he had begun to breathe freely
once more, and when the throaty, chuckling song of the red-squirrel
sounded over their heads, Jeems drew his gaze from the open.

"They are gone," he said.  "But there may be stragglers behind, and it
is safer not to show ourselves too soon."

It was easier for them to talk after this, speaking of death and ruin
as though they had been made less terrible by the passing of time.  So
swiftly had events come into their lives that they seemed to have been
living them through days and weeks instead of hours, and quite calmly,
as if looking back on a distant thing, Toinette told Jeems of the
tragedy of Tonteur Manor.  Her mother, he learned, had left for Quebec
two days preceding the coming of the Indians.  Toinette expressed her
thankfulness because of this, but no great gladness was in her voice.
She could not remember in vivid details all that had happened, it had
been so sudden and overwhelming, like a stream of fire engulfing a
black night.  Peter Lubeck was with Dieskau, and Hlose, his young
wife, had come to stay with her.  Both were asleep when the savages
attacked in the early morning, and she was of the opinion that most of
the killing was over before they were fairly awake--and before any guns
were fired.  Then came shots and her father's voice roaring through the
big house.  They were out of their bed when the seigneur came in and
told them to dress and keep to their room.  She did not know what had
happened until she looked out of her window, and then she saw what
seemed to be hundreds of naked savages running about.  She rushed after
her father, but he was gone.  When she returned to her room, Hlose
had disappeared and she did not see her again.  She could hear
screaming and terrible cries, and dressing hurriedly, as her father had
commanded, she disobeyed him by going downstairs, calling for him and
for Hlose.  The front part of the house was filled with flame and
smoke, and when she turned to the servants' quarters she was cut off by
fire and there was no response to her cries.  It was then she thought
of the mill which she had often heard her father say was impregnable
against both fire and guns.  She descended into the cellar and went
from it through a short underground passage to an outdoor _caveau_ made
of sod and stones, in which they kept fruit and vegetables during the
winter.  She hid herself in this earthy place, and then dared to raise
the surface door a little.  The worst must have been over, for she
could see only a few Indians about, and everything was on fire.  There
was yelling in the distance where the savages were attacking the
farmers' homes.  When she ascended from the _caveau_, she stumbled over
the body of old Babin, the miller, who had fallen with a musket in his
hands.  She took the musket and went to the mill, and after that she
did not see an Indian about the seigneurie.  Sickness overcame her, and
she was half unconscious in the tower room.  Later, looking through one
of the narrow windows, she saw four men come from the south.  She was
sure they were white men, but was afraid to reveal herself because
their appearance was so terrible.  They were like monsters, remaining
only a little while to look at the dead.  Now, since she had seen the
white warrior among the Mohawks, she was even more positive that they
belonged to the war band and that she was fortunate to have kept
herself concealed.[1]  When she found that Babin's musket was loaded,
she regretted that she had not used it to kill one of the murderers.
That was why, mistaking him for another straggler, she had fired at
Jeems.

One might have expected excitement in her narrative, but it was told
quietly as she looked from Jeems across the clearing.  It was a recital
of fact without the embellishment of pathos or drama, and Jeems
remained silent for a time when it was ended.  Then he told of his
visit to Lussan's and of his race home and what he found there.  He
spoke of Hepsibah.

"He must have discovered the Mohawks on the far side of the valley and
started the fire which he had always told me to expect.  After that, he
tried to reach us and they killed him."

"He may have escaped," suggested Toinette hopefully.

Jeems shook his head.

"He would have come to us.  He is dead."

His voice possessed the unemotional certainty with which she had
referred to her father and Hlose.  There was no possibility of his
uncle being alive.  He repeated that belief, and added that their
salvation was little short of a miracle.  But now, he thought, their
way would be clear to friends farther down the river.  The Indians
could not have gone many miles in that direction, for evidently they
were hurrying back before Baron Dieskau learned of their presence in
the French country and sent out forces to cut them off.  It did not
occur to Jeems that the baron and his men might have been defeated, as
was true in that very hour.

He produced apples and a pair of purple-topped turnips from the
provision pouch which he wore at his belt, and they ate these as they
waited.  Until the juice of the fruit was in his mouth, Jeems did not
realize how long he had gone without food.  He urged Toinette to eat,
and without apparent desire she made a breakfast of her apple.

Meanwhile, he told her what they must do.  Their trail led first
through the old garden and past the barn, and then a few miles westward
before they could safely turn to the north and east again.  They would
be forced to spend a night in the woods, but he was sure he could make
a comfortable place for her.  He was anxious about her light shoes,
which were beginning to fall apart, and sometime during the day would
reinforce them with moccasin hoods made from his leggings.  Toinette
was not disturbed by thought of physical discomfort.  With a new light
in her eyes, she listened to Jeems.  It was pleasant to have him
planning for her in this confident and masterful way.

He walked ahead instead of at her side when they began their journey.
At the end of the tangled path they came to the thicket of briars and
bushes which had grown up about the barn during the last six years, and
Jeems wondered if Toinette were thinking of another day in that same
place.  He carried an arrow fixed to the string of his bow, and
suddenly a twig caught it and it slipped from his fingers and fell to
the ground.  He was stooping to recover it when a terrified scream from
Toinette brought him erect.

Not more than eight or ten paces from them stood a painted and
half-naked savage whose intention had been to make his way toward the
abandoned house.  He was an appalling figure, and during the few
seconds in which they faced each other Jeems recognized in him the
white-skinned scalp hunter he and Toinette had seen with the Mohawks.
At this discovery there shot through him a flash of relief, but a
second glance showed him a fiend more dangerous than an Indian, one of
the merciless butchers who hunted human hair for the price his own
people had set upon it.  _A blue-eyed Indian_!  How often had he heard
his uncle curse their breed!  Beasts more cruel than tigers, demons set
loose and paid by English money until their sport as well as their
livelihood became an orgy of ambush, murder, rape, and fire!  Here was
one of them.  The man was greased and painted, but he was white.  His
warlock was light and his eyes were small and blue.  He carried a gun,
a knife, and a hatchet, and at his belt was a woman's hair, and with it
another scalp that must have been taken from the head of a child.

So quickly did Jeems see these things that the echoes of Toinette's
scream had scarcely died away before their meaning pressed itself upon
him.  The savage possessed a moment of advantage, and as Jeems made a
movement to whip an arrow from his quiver, the scalp hunter swung his
gun to fire.  Seeing the hopelessness of his position, Jeems sprang
forward and hurled his useless bow at his enemy.  This and the impact
of his body came at an instant when the other let the hammer of his
flintlock fall, and with the explosion of the gun the lead from its
barrel flew wild.  The scalp hunter had seen only a boy and a girl, and
a vision of easy victims had leapt to his mind.  Now he found upon him
an antagonist of unexpected strength and ferocity.  In the first few
seconds of the fray, neither had a chance to draw knife or tomahawk,
and with all the pent-up madness of his body and brain Jeems struck at
his enemy and clutched his slippery throat as they crashed to earth
together.  In the struggle which ensued, the bushes broke under their
bodies, and so swiftly did they change positions, choking and gouging
as each endeavoured to keep his adversary from gaining a deadly weapon,
that for a space Toinette's horror-filled eyes could scarcely tell
which was one and which the other; and Odd, snarling white-fanged at
their heels, was unable to become a partner in the conflict.  Then,
with a powerful effort, the scalp hunter freed himself and sprang to
his feet, drawing his tomahawk in the act.  As he prepared to use his
weapon, Odd vaulted for his throat, and the blunt head of the hatchet
met him in midair, striking with such force upon his head that he fell
a limp and inert mass to the ground.

A cry of triumph came from the bleeding lips of the Frankenstein, who
saw victory within his reach, for he now regarded the youth, who was on
his feet with a hatchet in his hand, as an insignificant obstacle
between himself and the pallid-faced loveliness of the girl whom chance
had so fortunately placed in his way.  This cry, disguised by guile and
habit, betrayed only a trace of the white man.  It was a guttural
exultation of one lost to all the obligations of blood and race, a cry
loosed not so much by heat and passion as by the promise of what he saw
as his eyes appraised Toinette.

Toinette had possessed herself of the empty gun and stood at Jeems's
side, prepared to fight.

Jeems was so near that his arm pressed against her and he gave a
sidewise thrust which sent her headlong among the bushes.  In this same
movement he hurled his hatchet at the scalp hunter, who was slowly
advancing.  As the other dodged to avoid the hurtling missile Jeems
snatched one of his scattered arrows from the ground and ran to his
bow.  Toinette saw what happened then.  She saw the slim, beautiful
figure of Jeems drawn as tensely as his weapon in the pathway.  She saw
the painted monster descending upon him.  She heard the musical twang
of the bowstring and saw a silvery flash--a flash which passed in at
one side of the blue-eyed Indian and went out at the other, a flash
which fell to earth a score of paces beyond, a bloody and broken arrow
that had done its righteous work.



[1] Toinette must have been mistaken.  These four men were undoubtedly
the Black Hunter, David Rock, Peter Gagnon, and Carbanac, in their epic
race against death to Grondin Manor, where their loved ones were.  See
_The Black Hunter_, published 1926.




CHAPTER XIV

That the explosion of the gun would reach the ears of the Mohawks was
in Jeems's mind as he comforted his shocked companion.  For a few
moments it was difficult for her to believe the combat was over and
that the fiend who lay like a great spider on his back was no longer a
menace to them.  To her relief and her faith in Jeems was added an
emotion of joy when she saw that Odd was alive.  The dog had dragged
himself to his feet and stood watching the slain man grimly.

Jeems picked up a number of arrows that had escaped injury in the
fight.  Then he hesitated, looking at the gun on the ground.

"My bow is better than that," he decided, answering the question in
Toinette's eyes as he flung the rifle aside.  "An arrow makes no sound
and I have more confidence in it."

The dead man stared up at them as they passed.  In their path lay the
arrow which had gone cleanly through him.  Toinette could not keep back
the hysterical sob which came in her throat, but she looked at Jeems
with such wonder and love in her face that he heard only the throbbing
tumult in his heart and brain.  He had fought for her and won!  And he
had fought on that same ground where almost six years before he had
failed to whip Paul Tache!

"The Indians have heard the shot and will return," he said.  "This
white man must have discovered some sign of us and came to do murder
and have his spoils alone.  Dear God, when I think----"

He was looking at Toinette's tresses, which had burst free from their
plaited bonds.

"We must run," he said.

They passed the barn and went through the deserted field behind it.
Odd following them.

"There is a stony ridge less than a mile from here," he encouraged.
"If we can reach it, I know of twenty places where bare rock will let
us throw them off our trail."

"We will reach it," breathed Toinette.

He pointed the way and let her go ahead of him, turning his head every
dozen steps to look behind.

Along the hardwood knoll where the Lussans had gathered their fuel,
Toinette sped like a graceful nymph, her long hair streaming about her
in the sun until at times Jeems saw nothing but its beauty; and in the
contemplation of its loveliness a shuddering horror ran through him.
In the stump field at home Hepsibah had told him how both the English
and the French had begun to make use of women's hair, and that many a
gentleman and courtly dandy wore shining curls taken by the scalping
knife in wilderness orgies of rapine and murder.  In the narrowness of
Toinette's escape, the thought oppressed him with sickening force.

Soon her lack of endurance compelled them to slacken their pace, and
when they reached the rocky ascent which led to the crest of the ridge,
Toinette's breath was breaking sobbingly from her lips and for a while
she could go no farther.  Her face did not betray the weakness of her
body.  Her cheeks were flushed.  Her eyes were filled with a liquid
flame, and her slender form seemed defiant of its frailty.  She gazed
in the direction from which they had come, unterrified, and almost with
challenge in her look, her breast wildly throbbing, her hand reaching
out to Jeems.

Each of the few minutes that passed seemed an hour to him.

Then they climbed to the crest of the ridge.  It was more than a ridge.
It was a broken and flat-topped mountain of rock upheavals with bushes
and scrub trees growing where pits of earth had gathered, a place so
wild and twisted that to advance at more than a snail-like pace was a
physically impossible thing to do.  Here Jeems picked his way, choosing
the places where their feet would not touch scattered stones or grass
or soil, until half an hour of slow and tedious progress lay between
them and the point where they had come from the valley.  The ridge had
widened, and on one side it extended in a plateau of rocky terrain
which apparently had no end.  Here was smoother and more facile travel,
while, reaching southward, like a long and slender mammilla leaving the
parent breast, was another ridge, narrower than the first and even more
rugged and forbidding in its aspect.  Jeems chose this least attractive
way of flight.

"If they come this far, they will think we have taken the wider and
easier country," he explained.  "Can you hold out a little longer?"

"It was the running that turned me faint," said Toinette.  "I am as
strong as you are now, Jeems.  But may I stop to braid my hair?  It is
cumbrous and warm, and I wish you would cut it off!"

"I would cut off my arm first," declared Jeems.  "We will be safe
farther on, and if you will wait until we have put ourselves beyond
that mass of rocks off there----"

His words remained unfinished.  From behind them came a cry.  It was
neither loud nor very near, yet the still air bore it to them so
clearly that the throat which made it might have been no more than the
distance of a rifle shot away.  The cry was not fierce nor one that
seemed to carry menace, and bore with it a strange and almost musical
softness.  Jeems had heard White Eyes and Big Cat give this cry when
they were hunting together, rolling the sound in the hollows of their
hands until it carried for half a mile.  And he knew its meaning now.
The Mohawks were on the ridge.  One of them was calling his scattered
companions to evidence of their passing which he had discovered.

Jeems hastened Toinette over the rocks.

"They have found some sign of us," he explained.  "It may be one of
Odd's claw marks on a stone, or the scratch from a nail in your shoe.
Whatever it is, they only know we have come this way and will still
believe we have taken to the plain."

Toinette saw how desperately he was trying to keep from her the real
nearness of their peril.

"I have seen Indians climb over rocks and windfalls.  They are like
cats--and I am so slow and clumsy," she said.  "You can move faster
than any Indian, Jeems.  Hide me somewhere among these rocks--and go on
alone.  I am sure they will not harm me if they should happen to
discover where I am."

Jeems did not answer.  They had come to the rocks which he had observed
a few moments before.  It was a cairnlike pile tossed up in the play of
neolithic giants, battered and worn by the ages until its sides were
pitted with crypts and fissures, and about it lay the crumbling ruin of
timeless disintegration.  Here, if anywhere, was a place for
concealment.  It was filled with dark and cavernous refuges, and where
the boulders met and crushed together were hidden pockets where their
bodies might lie unseen.  Toinette perceived these things with a heart
that lightened with relief and hope.  She looked into Jeems's face as
he paused for a moment to study the ground about them.

A dozen steps from where they stood were three boulders apart from the
others.  They were small and unimportant and seemed to shrink like
outcasts before the scowl of their mightier neighbours.  One of the
three had split itself so that one half of it was a slab that formed a
roof for the crevice between the other two.  An animal would not have
sought refuge there.  Instinct and experience would have directed it to
the larger pile.

Jeems's eyes revealed a deeper excitement as he pointed it out to
Toinette.

"We will hide--and in there!" he cried.  "Make haste, Toinette!  It is
smooth rock and will leave no sign behind us.  Go in and keep Odd with
you!"

He began to throw loose stones about the huge boulder heap.  Some he
flung over the top of it so that they fell on the opposite side, and at
last he sent a few into the edge of the valley, each farther than the
other.  He finished by shooting an arrow which descended in an open
space at the foot of the ridge.

Toinette watched him in amazement and alarm until he commanded her in a
sterner voice to crawl quickly under the stones.  She waited no longer
but pulled herself a few inches at a time beneath the boulders.  Jeems,
thrusting Odd ahead of him, had greater difficulty in performing this
same feat, and for a little while they squirmed and twisted until they
found a dark recess in which they could crowd themselves and even sit
upright.  This was a good fortune which Jeems had not expected, and
jubilantly he explained to Toinette the meaning of his strange
behaviour outside.

"First they will find the loose stones and the marks I made and search
for us in every hole and cranny of the pile," he said.  "When they
discover the arrow I hope they will believe we have fled into the
forest.  If they come this far, I doubt they will look under these
stones, and if that should happen, they cannot see us unless one of
them takes a notion to crawl in."

They waited in a silence wherein the beating of their hearts was like
the sound of tiny drums in the gloom of their hiding place.  A shaft of
light came through a narrow crevice between the rocks, but this fell
short of the pocket which concealed them.  Odd heaved a deep sigh to
relieve the tension of his body.  After this, his eyes stared at the
gleam of light, but he lay as still as death.  A shudder ran through
Toinette, but she whispered:

"I am not afraid."

She felt Jeems fumbling for his hatchet and heard him place it quietly
on the naked rock at his side.

Then the rock itself seemed to give forth a faint sound as if someone
had tapped it gently with a stick.

This sound grew into others that were soft and swift, and Jeems knew
that moccasined feet were all about them.  Low voices added themselves
to the pattering tread.  Then came a louder voice, and there followed a
sudden movement of unseen bodies and a storm of guttural, low-toned
exclamations giving vent to freshly stirred excitement.  Toinette
understood what was happening a few yards away.  The Indians had found
the signs Jeems had made and were searching in and about the upheaval
of rock.  She fixed her eyes on the crack through which came the shaft
of light, and occasionally it was darkened as a body passed it.  The
tread of feet came and went, and they heard the clatter of rocks.  But
for a time all voices died away, and it was this silence which became
almost unbearable for Toinette.  Shouts and yells were human and
implied fleshly limitations, while the movement near her, unearthly in
its repression of noise, was that of tongueless beings whom she could
imagine were _smelling_ them out like hungry wolves.  This clutch of a
danger which they could not see or cope with seized upon her until each
moment she expected to hear a ghostly creature stealing into their
hiding place or to see a pair of flaming eyes on a level with her own.
It was a feeling of horror instead of fear, and with it came a strong
desire to cry out and ease her suspense in a scream.  She heard Jeems
whispering to her, but did not sense his words as she fought with what
she believed to be her cowardice.

He, too, had almost found himself in the grip of something which he
could not control.  Not more than a quarter of an hour passed in this
suspense, but it seemed to be a lifetime.  Then there were voices again
which increased in number and excitement until, above them all, a yell
rose from the valley as one of the searchers discovered the arrow.

When Toinette raised her head, she heard no evidence of life other than
their own on the ridge.  Odd breathed deeply, as if his lungs had been
on the point of bursting.

"Thank God, they think we have gone into the valley!" said Jeems.

Toinette touched him with a cautioning hand, and in the same moment he
was aware of the sound her ears had caught!  Someone was near the rock!
More than one--there were two!  Their voices were distinct though low,
and they stood so close that their forms shut out the light from the
crevice.  To his astonishment Jeems heard a language which Hepsibah
Adams had taught him, and it was not Mohawk.  Surely none but a Mohawk
had left a track in Lussan's clearing except the white-skinned
prisoners and the dead scalp hunter, yet these were Senecas.  The
discovery thrilled him.  He hated the Mohawk hatchet wielders who were
the scourge of the southern frontier, but the Senecas, also brethren of
the Six Great Nations, he doubly feared, for while the Mohawk killers
were the wolves of the wilderness, the Senecas were its foxes and
panthers combined.  One was a creature of darkness and surprise, the
other a lightning flash that came and went with deadly swiftness.  He
might trick a Mohawk, but a Seneca was the cleverest of his kind.

He felt his blood turn cold as he listened to the two.  One was arguing
that the arrow was a ruse and that the fugitives were somewhere not far
away; the other, whose mind was still on the huge pile of stones,
discredited the thought that it had been thoroughly searched and set
off to find some proof of his suspicions.  The first of the two
speakers remained, and neither Toinette nor Jeems could hear him move.
For a space the thought possessed Toinette that the savage had placed
his ear against the rock and was listening to the beating of their
hearts, or that he was looking in through the narrow crack, piercing
the gloom of their concealment with gloating eyes.  It seemed an
infinity of time before movement came again outside the rock.  Metal
scraped it as the Seneca made a resting place of it for his gun;
footsteps went away, returned, and halted close to the narrow aperture
through which they had squeezed their bodies under the stones.  Jeems
held his breath that he might catch the slightest break in the
stillness.

The savage was looking at the entrance to their hiding place!  He
pictured the warrior, his doubt and hesitation, and was as sure in his
visioning as though no barrier lay between them.  He heard a grunt.
The Seneca was on his stomach, peering in, and the grunt was an
expression of the foolishness which had made him grovel like this.  In
a moment, he would rise and go away.  But the moment passed.
One--two--three--a dozen.  Toinette was like one dead--unbreathing.
Odd, sensing a mighty danger, knowing that it was coming, crouched like
a sphinx.  The hush held substance, a physical thing that pressed
against their flesh.  It possessed the weight of death.

At last it was broken so softly that the disturbance might have been
that of a tress of Toinette's hair falling from her shoulder across
Jeems's arm.  The Indian had thrust in his head.  He was
listening--_smelling_--then advancing slyly and cautiously like a
ferret on the trail of prey.  There could no longer be a doubt.  He
knew there was something under the rocks and, with true Seneca courage,
foreseeing glory for himself even if death paid for it, he was coming
alone.  With the same philosophy he had reasoned that if it were only
an animal he had smelled, a fox, a young bear, a fat badger, there
would be none to laugh at him for the trouble he had taken.

He must have been larger than Jeems, for he began to advance with
difficulty.  His body scraped the sides of the little tunnel.  His
hatchet made a clinking sound on the stone as he thrust it ahead of him
a few inches at a time.  His breathing became unrestrained.  Evidently
the handicaps of his procedure were convincing him that nothing more
dangerous than a creature of hair and claws had lured him in.

Every instinct reached its highest tension in Jeems as a danger
approached which he would be able to touch with his hands in another
moment or two.  He removed himself gently from Toinette's embrace and
prepared his arms and body for action.  Their eyes had grown more
accustomed to the gloom, and Toinette could see him as he crouched
forward and gathered himself for the struggle which would mean life or
death for them.  Suddenly she understood that it would not be a
struggle.  When the Seneca's head appeared Jeems's hatchet would smash
it in.  She could see the hatchet.  It was poised to strike.  There
would be no cry--no moan--only that terrible, hidden sound.  She
listened to the doomed man slowly coming.

His progress was easier now.  The cavity grew larger and he grunted his
approval.  There was something of humour in the guttural chuckling with
which he continued his invasion.  A dog and a badger smell alike.  A
warrior, painted, with three feathers in his tuft, crawling for a
badger!  That must have been his thought.

The feathers appeared first, then the long black scalp lock, the
hair-plucked head, a pair of shoulders.  Jeems put all his strength
behind the upraised hatchet.  He knew there must be but one
blow--well-placed in the middle of the skull.  That would end it.  He
almost closed his eyes and the hatchet descended a little, an
overwhelming sense of the horror of the thing holding back his stroke.
It was not simply killing: it was murder.  The Seneca turned his head
and looked up.  His eyes were trained for use at night, and he saw more
clearly than Jeems.  He saw the white face, the hatchet, the death
behind it, and he waited, transformed to stone.  No voice came to his
lips and no movement to his cramped body in this moment of shock and
stupefaction when he must have realized that all the power of his
forest gods could not help him.  The pupils of his eyes glowed darkly.
He did not breathe.  Conscious of his impending end, he was amazed but
not terrified.  His fine countenance did not shrink from the steel
about to sink into his brain.  He gave a gasp of wonderment as he
realized how surely he was caught.

For a second more the blade did not fall, and in that second Jeems's
eyes and those of the savage met steadily.  Then the hatchet clattered
to the rock floor, and with a protest of revulsion at what he had
almost done, Jeems clutched at the Seneca's throat.  The Indian was at
a disadvantage, and though his powerful body strained and fought to
loosen the choking grip, his position was so hopeless that in a short
time he was limp and unconscious.

The Seneca's adventure, and the combat--if it could be distinguished by
that name--had not terminated a moment too soon for those concealed
under the rocks.  The trail hunters were now aware that the placing of
the arrow had been a ruse to delay them and began swarming back to the
ridge.  Half a dozen warriors gathered in a fierce and animated debate
dose about the rocks.

Back in his corner, Odd had struggled to understand and obey the
discipline of his master.  Years of comradeship and training had given
to him a knowledge of silence and its value, and though he had yearned
to confront the invading savage and afterward to join in the struggle
with Jeems, he had not moved from the watchful position he had occupied
at the beginning.  If Toinette's nerves were on the point of breaking,
then Odd's were in no better condition when the Senecas returned to the
ridge.  A hundred generations of carnivorous fighting blood were at
work in the dog's body.  His eyes had grown green and red in the gloom
until they were pools of living flame; his teeth were bare; his jaws
clicked at times like castanets, his heart was breaking in its
subjection to inactivity and stillness.  Now he looked again on
victory.  His master was triumphant as the Indians returned and crowded
about the rocks.  Defiance rose in his soul in an overwhelming flood.
He hated the smell outside.  He hated the creatures who made it.
Without warning, his passion broke loose in the howling rage of a beast
gone mad.  Toinette's arms and Jeems's hands were futile in their
efforts to stop it.

The Seneca on the stone floor moved a little.

Outside there fell an awful stillness.

Then Odd realized what he had done and grew quiet.  They could feel
rather than hear a velvet-footed, voiceless cordon gathering about them
in a ring of death.

The warrior on the floor opened his eyes.  His ear was close to the
rock, and he could hear the footfalls which were scarcely louder than
the sound of leaves falling to earth from a tall tree.  So near to him
that he could have touched them he saw the woman with the long hair and
the man who had throttled him, white-faced, in each other's arms.  He
closed his eyes, feigning unconsciousness.  But his fingers crept over
the stone floor with the stealth of a serpent until they found the
hatchet which the white-faced man had dropped.




CHAPTER XV

Twenty minutes after Odd had revealed their hiding place Jeems and
Toinette were standing in the sun.  Mysterious things had happened in
this time.  Unseen hands had dragged the warrior from under the rocks.
An interval had followed in which excitement gave way to solemn and
low-voiced talk outside.  Then someone had called in guttural, broken
French commanding them to come out.  They had obeyed, Jeems first,
Toinette after him, and Odd last with the downcast air of a beast who
knew he was in disgrace.

It was an astounding and unexpected reception by enemies at whose belts
scalps were hanging.  There were between twenty and thirty of the
Senecas, splendidly built, keen-eyed, lean-faced, most of them young
men.  Even in the shock of the moment, Toinette surveyed them in
startled admiration.  They were like runners ready for a race.  They
were not painted as the Mohawks had been, and were less naked.  Staring
at the youth with his bow and at the girl with her tangled, shining
hair, the Indians returned their gaze with a look of amazement not
unmixed with approval.  They seemed scarcely able to believe these two
had fooled them so completely, capturing one of their number in the
bargain, yet conceded the fact with glances in which passion was held
subdued.

A young savage who stood before them seemed largely responsible for
this attitude.  Purplish lines were around his throat as if a rope had
choked him.  Two of the eagle feathers in his tuft were broken, and his
shoulder was bleeding where the skin had been torn by a jagged tooth of
rock.  His eyes were as piercing as those of the bird he had robbed for
his plume, and evidently he held considerable influence in the war
party of which he was a member.  Beside him was a much older man of
even more powerful figure with a face scarred and cut until it bore an
unalterable expression of ferocity.

It was he who spoke in Seneca to the younger.

"So this is the boy who made my brave nephew a captive to be saved by
the voice of a dog!"

The other scowled at the taunt in his voice.

"He could have killed me.  He spared my life."

"This is the young he-fawn to whom you owe a feather from your tuft!"

"I owe him two--one for himself and one for the maiden whose presence
must have stayed his hand."

The older man grunted.

"He looks strong and may stand to travel with us.  But the girl is like
a broken flower ready to fall in our path.  She will cumber our feet
and make our way more difficult, and great haste must be our choice.
Use your hatchet on one and we will take the other."

At this command Jeems gave a sudden cry, and the faces of the savages
again relaxed in astonishment when he began to speak in their language.
Hepsibah Adams's schooling and the comradeship of White Eyes and Big
Cat had prepared him for this hour.  His tongue stumbled, some of his
words were twisted, there were gaps which only the imagination could
fill, but he told his story.  The Indians listened with an interest
which assured Jeems they had not been a part of the force that had
massacred his and Toinette's people.  He pointed to the girl.  He
related how the Mohawks had destroyed his father and mother and all who
had belonged to Toinette; how they had fled together, how they had
hidden in the old house, and that with an arrow he had killed the white
man who had fired the gun.  He was pleading for Toinette as he had once
heard Big Cat plead with his father for the life of a dog that had gone
lame.  He bared his breast, even as the Indian boy had offered his own
with the demand that his father strike there before robbing him of the
comradeship of his four-footed friend.  Bronzed and dishevelled, the
long bow in his hand, Jeems made a vivid picture of courage and
eloquence that would remain with Toinette as long as she lived.  She
drew herself up a little proudly, sensing that he was fighting for her.
She stood straight, her chin high, gazing with unafraid eyes at the
leader of the war party.

With the courtesy which Tiaoga had already established for himself in
borderland history, the chieftain listened attentively, piecing the
story together where Jeems's verbal powers were at fault, and when the
youth had finished, he spoke words which sent two of his men running
down the ridge in the direction of Lussan's place.  Then he asked
questions which let Jeems know the Senecas had not gone as far as
Lussan's, but that they had heard the gun, and in seeking for the one
who had fired it, had stumbled upon their trail in the hardwood slope
half a mile from the abandoned house.  When he spoke of the Mohawks,
Tiaoga's ugly face grew darker, and behind this look Jeems saw the
blaze of an age-old Seneca hatred and jealousy of the Mohawk, though
both were of the same powerful confederacy.  That Jeems and Toinette
had been sufferers at the hands of these eastern rivals seemed to be a
small point in their favour.

When his brief questioning was over, Tiaoga turned his attention once
more to the young man beside him.

"I think the boy is a great liar, and I have sent back for proof of
it," he said.  "If he has not sped an arrow through this friend of the
Mohawks, as he claims, he shall die.  If he has spoken the truth in the
matter, which will be proof that he has spoken it in others, he may
travel with us, and his companion also, until her feet tire so that
death is necessary to bring her rest."  Then he spoke to Toinette in
the broken French with which he had called under the rocks.  "If you
cannot keep up with us we shall kill you," he said.

Toinette began to prepare herself for the ordeal, braiding her hair
swiftly.  Jeems came to her, and she saw the torture of doubt in his
eyes.

"I can do it, Jeems," she cried softly.  "I know what you were saying
and what they were thinking, and I can do it.  I _will_ do it!  I am
going to live--with you.  I love you so much that nothing can kill me,
Jeems--not even their tomahawks!"

The tall young warrior approached.  He at least was one friend among
the many who stood about them.

"I am Shindas," he said.  "We are going to a far town--a long way.  It
is Chenufsio.  There are many leagues of forests, of hills, of swamps
between us and it.  I am your friend because you have been a brother
and allowed me to live, and I owe you two feathers from my tuft.  I
brought your hatchet from under the rocks because I did not want you to
strike and be killed in turn.  You love the white maiden.  I, too, love
a maiden."

The Seneca's words brought to Jeems not only hope but shock.  These
savages were from Chenufsio, the Hidden Town--a place which even the
adventurous Hepsibah Adams had looked upon as in another world, a goal
which he had dreamed of reaching in some day of reckless daring.
Hidden Town!  The heart and soul and mysterious Secret Place of the
Seneca nation!  It was a vast distance away, first beyond the country
of the Oneidas, then the Onondagas, and then the Cayugas.  A land which
touched Lake Ontario on one side and Lake Erie on the other, with the
Great Falls of which he had heard roaring between the two.  His uncle
had once said, "You must be a strong man before you can travel to it.
That is why the Senecas, who range far, are the finest of all
two-legged beasts."

Shindas spoke again.

"Tiaoga, my uncle, who is a great captain, is not as bad as he looks.
A Mohawk cut him like that in a quarrel over a game of ball when he was
a boy.  But he will keep his word.  He will kill the little fawn who is
with you if her limbs fail her."

Jeems looked from his friend to Toinette.  She had approached the
fierce old warrior and was smiling into his face, her eyes aglow with
confidence as she pointed to her ragged shoes.  For a moment Tiaoga
repulsed her advance with stoical indifference.  Then his eyes shifted
to her feet.  But he revealed no evidence of an intention to better
their condition as he turned his back on her and gave a command which
quickly put a prisoner's thong of buckskin around Jeems's neck and
relieved him of his bow.

Down into the valley and through the forest the long, grim march began.

Something had been said to Shindas as they gathered for the trail, and
when the two runners overtook them from Lussan's place and Tiaoga
paused with his band to hear their story, the young Seneca gave to
Jeems a pair of moccasins which he had taken from the bundle at his
side.  Jeems knelt at Toinette's feet with these clumsily large but
more dependable travelling gear.

The two braves had returned with the white man's scalp and the broken
arrow that had killed him.  They talked excitedly, and Toinette could
understand by their actions the story they were telling.  It was the
portrayal of a desperate struggle between their prisoner and the
white-skinned Mohawk.  They measured the difference in their weight and
size.  One of them seized Toinette's discarded shoe and pointed to its
heel as another evidence of the truth of Jeems's words, and as a final
argument the broken arrow was compared with its fellows in the quiver.
Tiaoga's rocklike countenance changed slightly, and he regarded Jeems's
bow with new interest.  It was not an unusual bow, and again he
expressed his doubt that a white youth could send a shaft through the
thickness of a man with it.  He strung the weapon and fitted it, then
turned to Shindas.

"Let him show us what he can do, Broken Feather," he said, still
taunting his nephew for the disgrace which had befallen his war tuft.
"You, who are so proud of your skill, shoot with him!"

Jeems had risen from his task of binding the oversized moccasins about
Toinette's small feet and took the bow which Shindas proffered him.
Then he swung his quiver over his shoulder so that other arrows would
be ready and looked about him for a mark.  Toinette saw the colour
creeping into his cheeks, and she cried out to him with pride and
encouragement.  He was not afraid of this test, for even Captain Pipe,
who could vanquish his sons, had been slower than he in flashing arrows
from quiver to bow and sending them to their mark like a flight of
swift birds.  He pointed to a fire-blackened stub six feet high not
less than a hundred and fifty yards away and fired a shaft which fell
twenty paces short.  Thus measuring the distance and finding his point
of aim, he sent four other arrows, one after another, so swiftly that
the first gray streak had scarcely thrown a cloud of black char from
the top of the stub before his final shaft had left the bowstring.  Two
of the arrows struck the stub, a third shattered itself against a rock
at its base, and the fourth whistled past it waist-high and a foot to
the right, in which direction the wind was blowing.

It was Toinette who gave a glad cry as she looked at the unperturbed
face of the Seneca chief.  When he turned, he gazed at her and not at
the one who had done the shooting, and found her smiling at him again
in such a fearless and amiable way, as if she already counted him her
friend, that he turned to Shindas with a leer, which, under other
conditions, would have covered nothing short of murder.

"You need not shoot, Broken Feather," he exclaimed.  "You are beaten
before you start, and I would not see you more deeply disgraced.  This
youth will make a Seneca who will more than equal you.  He shall go
with us, and in turn for his brotherhood, we will take the maiden to
fill the place of Silver Heels in my tepee.  See that he is given the
scalp which is his that he may have a feather in his tuft when we
arrive."  Then he spoke to Jeems: "You hear!  Gather your arrows and
keep them for an enemy of the Senecas!"  Then to Toinette: "You are
Silver Heels.  She was my daughter.  She is dead."

No flash of emotion, no softening of his features, no sign of
friendship crossed the chieftain's countenance.  He turned and put
himself at the head of his band, huge among his men, a monster to look
at because of the ferocity of his mutilated face, yet with the dignity
of a king in his bearing.  Without a sound of voice the warriors leapt
to their positions.  Two ran ahead like hounds to make the trail safe,
two fell behind to watch the rear, and on each side an outrunner
disappeared.  Shindas sped aside to recover the arrows while one of the
braves who had gone to Lussan's fastened the white man's scalp at
Jeems's belt in spite of his protest and abhorrence.

Once more the westward march resumed its way--a single file of
soft-footed, noiseless men with a girl midway in their line--a girl
whose long dark braid gleamed in the shafts of the sun, whose cheeks
were flushed, and whose eyes held something more than the depths of
tragedy and grief as she looked ahead to the great adventure, and heard
behind her the tread of a dog and the steps of the man she loved.




CHAPTER XVI

Toinette was not astonished that her fear was gone or that her anguish
because of the loss of her father was relieved.  Her emotion was that
of one upon whom events had pressed themselves as necessary and
predestined in a struggle which had been intended for Jeems and her.
It was a fight put on her shoulders in place of a burden of grief, and
she was not afraid.  The savages no longer frightened her, though at
least half of them carried in their belts the little hoops of hickory
or alder on which were stretched the still undried trophies of their
success on the warpath.  Something in their appearance began to give
her confidence: the lithe grace of their bodies, the sinewy strength of
their shoulders, the proud and listening poise of their heads, the
animal-like smoothness with which they sped over the earth.  _And Jeems
was like these forest men_!  It was this wild beauty and freedom in him
that she had loved from the beginning, and which, because of its effect
upon her, she had tried to force herself to hate.  That she had made
this effort seemed impossible now, for she realized that she had loved
him since the day his face had gone so silently white at Paul Tache's
insult in the bottom land.

She travelled easily in her moccasins.  She was not as fragile as Jeems
had thought when she had tried to keep up with him in her high-heeled
shoes.  Her slim body was strong and supple, her eyes quick, her feet
sure.  Shindas dropped back from man to man to see that all was well,
and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction when he measured how lightly
Toinette was following those ahead of her.  He fell in close to Jeems,
and the two talked in low tones.  Even Odd seemed to have changed now
that he was a part of those whom he had mistrusted and feared all his
life.  Shindas liked the limping beast, and twice he laid a brown hand
on the dog's head.  A bit at a time Jeems heard strange things from
Shindas's lips and was anxious for an opportunity to tell Toinette of
the young warrior's confidences.

To an observer, the passing of the Senecas would have revealed no sign
of peace or mercy.  Even the quietness of their dress added to the
deadliness of their appearance.  They were not painted in black and red
and blue like most savages on the warpath, but had unadorned skins
coloured only by the sun and the weather.  They were not naked and did
not wear rings of brass wire in their ears.  Each had two bundles at
his side, in the smaller of which was food and in the larger a
beaverskin blanket.  Some carried hickory bows, and all had guns and
hatchets.  That it was a force chosen with care for a long and
dangerous mission, there could be no doubt, and that it had met with
success was equally certain.  There were twenty-six scalps among its
warriors, which was triumph in ample measure.  Eighteen of these had
been taken from men, five from women, and three from children.

At the head of the sinister line, Tiaoga stalked like a panther, and
wherever the trail turned sharply, Toinette caught a glimpse of his
face, in which unhappiness and cruelty seemed to have settled
permanently.  But the sight of his countenance did not chill her.
Twice Tiaoga's eyes rested on her during the first few miles of travel,
and twice she smiled at him and once waved her hand in cheery greeting.

She was not afraid, though she could not account for her feeling of
security.  She was not only unafraid of Tiaoga, but there was something
she liked about the man whom others would have regarded as a monster.
She was sure he would not kill her.  She spoke this conviction to Jeems
when he was at her side.  But Shindas had said to him, "I have greater
hope, for she travels lightly and well.  She must keep up.  If she
fails, Tiaoga will kill her even though he has chosen her to take the
place of Silver Heels."

The Indians had been travelling since dawn, and at noon they stopped
for their first meal of the day.  It was the simple repast of a strong
breed of men who were never heavy eaters except at occasional feast
times, and who ascribed their endurance to this fact.  "Those of my
braves who eat much will fight little," was the warning of Cornplanter
to his powerful nation, and for centuries nature had been fitting the
Indian stomach to the exacting necessities of a life where food
sobriety was the great law of existence.[1]  From his provision pouch
each warrior filled the hollow of one hand with coarsely crushed
whole-corn meal mixed with pea meal and a flavour of dried berry, which
he ate slowly until the last crumb was gone.  Toinette, whose border
home had known the luxuries of civilization since she could remember,
was moved by this scant fare of the warriors to offer Shindas one of
the two apples which Jeems had placed in her lap.  Shindas said
something to Jeems, who translated his words by saying, "Shindas thanks
you, Toinette, but he says that if he eats more he will not be able to
travel comfortably."

Toinette kept from Jeems the fact that she was growing tired and that
sharp pains had begun to shoot like needles through the overtaxed
muscles of her limbs.  She ate an apple and half of a turnip, and Jeems
brought her water in a birchbark cup from the cold stream beside which
they had stopped.

After Shindas had gone, he told her of the amazing adventure ahead of
them.  They were going to Chenufsio, which Shindas had said was three
hundred miles westward as the crow would fly.  He concealed his fear
for her as he talked.  Chenufsio, he explained, was the mystery place
of the wilderness, the Hidden Town to which the Senecas had been taking
white prisoners for generations.  One of his Uncle Hepsibah's dreams
had been to reach it, and twice he had failed.  But his uncle knew what
the place was like and they had talked about it for hours.  Many white
children must have grown up there with the savages, becoming savages
themselves.  Some day the governors of the Colonies would send an army
of soldiers to free them.  One of his own hopes had been to visit this
barbaric town, and now it seemed inconceivable that the thing was
actually happening.  He then spoke of the fortunate circumstance which
had saved them.  A white woman had come to Chenufsio as a prisoner when
Shindas was a boy.  She had carried her baby all the way through the
forests, and it was this baby, now a beautiful maiden, whom Shindas
loved.  Inspired by this love, Shindas had spoken in their favour
outside the rocks and had asked that their lives be spared by his
uncle, whose daughter, a girl of Toinette's age, had drowned while
swimming in a deep pool only six months before.  Tiaoga, whose wife was
dead and who had no other children, had worshipped Silver Heels and had
spared Toinette's life with the intention of giving her his daughter's
place in his tepee.

Jeems assured her this meant safety for them both.

He did not tell her the darker news he had learned--that there had been
a great slaughter of the French under Baron Dieskau and that the
southern frontier lay at the mercy of Sir William Johnson and his
hordes of savages.

Nor did he tell her that because of trouble with a band of Mohawks,
three of whose number had been left dead in a personal quarrel, Tiaoga
planned to reach the Seneca stronghold in six days and nights.

He was heavy with doubt when the march was resumed, for he saw the
bitter souls hidden in the breasts of the warriors.  Hepsibah Adams had
made him see the truth, and he knew these men owed nothing to the
people of his race except loss and shame.  Many times he had thought
that, if fate had placed his fortunes among them, he would have hated
with the grimness of their hatred.  The freedom and pride which were
once the heritage of their wide domains were no longer the controlling
factors in their existence.  Their wars had ceased to be wars which
gave birth to forest gods and epics of unforgettable heroism.  Their
star was setting, and with its decline the white man had transformed
them into common killers, and in this new calling it made small
difference to them whether they slew enemies or those who posed as
friends, as long as the skins were white.  So the nobility which
Toinette saw in their captors was poisoned for Jeems by what was
concealed within their hearts.  The greatest of all hates was not the
hate of a man for a man, but the hate of a race for a race, and he knew
that at a word from Tiaoga the men about him would be turned into
fiends.  Most of all he feared Tiaoga, for Shindas had told him that
Tiaoga's father had been killed by a white man and his son by an
English Mohawk.

Whatever their fate was to be, this day would bring it.  He was sure
Toinette could not keep up the pace much longer, and he strengthened
himself for the moment when the Seneca chief would find himself
compelled to give a decision.  That Tiaoga had claimed her for his
daughter gave him hope, but if in her frailty Toinette was condemned to
die, he was determined that she should not die alone.

Shindas, whose place in the line was close behind his uncle, had more
than one evidence that Tiaoga was pondering over the dilemma in which
the presence of the girl had placed him, and his mind was not more
clearly settled in the matter than Jeems's.  When it was possible for
him to speak to Tiaoga without being overheard, he referred subtly to
the prisoner's gentleness and beauty and to her resemblance to Silver
Heels.  With sly artfulness he drew a picture of his uncle's lonely
tepee again bright with laughter and happiness, and persisted until
Tiaoga commanded him to hold his tongue.  It was not long afterward
that the warriors observed Tiaoga limping slightly.  This sign of
physical difficulty increased in his walk until, furious because of his
weakness, he drove his hatchet head-deep into a tree and paused to bind
a piece of buckskin tightly about the ankle he had wrenched.  Shindas
felt something lacking in this rage of a man who had suffered every
hurt that flesh could bear, yet he was not certain and helped Tiaoga
with the offending joint.  Progress was slower after this.  It
continued to slacken as the afternoon waned, until the hand of a
spiritual guidance seemed to be working for Toinette.  It was useless
to attempt a concealment of her condition.  Her strength was gone.  Her
body was racked as if it had been beaten.  Another mile and she would
have sunk to the ground, glad to have an end to her torture.  But fate,
and Tiaoga's hurt, intervened to save her.  They came at last to a
hardwood plain in which was a pigeon roost.  It was this roost, where
thousands of birds would come at sunset, that brought the Seneca to
another pause.  His warriors did not doubt he was in pain but were
puzzled that he should reveal it.

He spoke to Shindas.

"We have been a long time without meat, Broken Feather.  In a few hours
there will be plenty here.  We will feast and then sleep and will not
travel again until morning."

Then Shindas knew the truth, but his countenance did not change.

He soon had a chance to speak to Jeems.

"For the first time I have discovered my uncle to be a great liar," he
said.  "His ankle is as sound as mine.  It is for the little fawn he
has pretended a hurt and stops here for meat.  She is safe.  He will
not kill her."

When Jeems translated this Toinette bowed her head and cried softly.
Tiaoga saw her.  Crumpled on the ground with Jeems's arm around her,
she looked like Silver Heels whose beautiful body had been brought from
the pool with her long black braid falling over her shoulder.  No one
was conscious of the strain at his heart as he came toward her.
Warriors, wide-eyed, saw that he did not limp, and in his attitude was
a tigrish defiance of what they might think.  He paused before the girl
and dropped his beaverskin blanket at her feet.  Toinette looked up
through tears and smiled again as a strange softness stole over the
savage face.  She held up a hand as though it had been Jeems or her
father who stood there.  But Tiaoga did not seem to notice it.  He
gazed at her steadily, as if he were seeing a spirit, and said:

"Shindas is right.  The soul of Soi Yan Makwun has come to abide in
you!"

Soi Yan Makwun was Silver Heels.

Tiaoga turned away, and his warriors knew that his decision had been
made.  There would be no haste after this in the direction of Hidden
Town.


On a couch made of the beaverskin and armsful of balsam boughs which
Jeems had carried from the creek-bottom, Toinette rested while the
Indians prepared for the evening feast.  She smoothed and rebraided her
hair as she watched them, and although every bone in her body seemed to
have an ache of its own, she felt a sensation of complete relaxation
stealing over her for the first time since the tragedy at Tonteur
Manor.  She had no desire to sleep, but only to rest without moving,
realizing in this way the full reaction from the strain which had been
imposed upon her.  There was something in the movements of the young
warriors which added to her peculiar serenity of mind.  They were like
housewives at work, making ready to light half a dozen small fires of
dry, smokeless wood; cutting and peeling the bark from innumerable
sticks about the size of arrows on which pigeons would be spitted and
roasted; making receptacles of bark; bringing stones to be heated for
the boiling and baking of wild artichokes and yellow pond-lily roots,
laughing and talking in low voices until the thought faded from her
mind that they were killers whose hands were red from recent slaughter.
This mental ease which came to soften her environment embraced her in
such a stealthy way that she was unconscious of the moment when her
eyes closed in complete surrender to the exhaustion which was claiming
her.

The Seneca camp was some distance from the pigeon roost because of the
unpleasant odour which rose from it, but it was within easy vision, and
Jeems could see the birds arriving before the sun was down.  At first
they came in small flocks which increased in size as evening approached
until the swarming of wings above the roost formed an undulating cloud
half a mile square.  Not until it was totally dark did a dozen of the
Indians leave for the kill, some with pitchwood torches still unlighted
and others with long poles to be employed in knocking the birds from
the lower branches of the trees.  Jeems was not commanded to accompany
the hunters, and with a feeling of relief he saw the last of their
number depart.  Later he caught the flash of moving tongues of flame in
the forest, and it seemed less than half an hour afterward that the
savages returned with their feathered meat.  The bodies of the pigeons
which had been swept from their sleeping places were piled within the
circle of the six small fires.

Odd had attached himself in no uncertain way to Toinette since their
capture, his loyalty to Jeems being not only divided but strongly in
her favour.  It would be unwise to assume that her greater frailty and
her dependence upon the enemies who so completely encompassed them were
in any way responsible for this change in his attitude, but that the
change had occurred and was marked by an extreme devotion was apparent
to them both.  He lay at her side while she slept, watching with
tireless eyes the activities of the savages about the fires.  He did
not move when the aroma of roasting flesh came to his nostrils, though
he had fasted long and his stomach was empty.  Not until Jeems returned
from one of the fires bearing a stick on which a dozen of the cooked
pigeons were spitted could the dog be induced to move a little from his
position so that he might eat.

Jeems did not awaken Toinette, but after he had finished his meal, he
broiled another dozen of the pigeons until they were as brown as
chestnuts and stored them away with a roasted lily root and a few
artichokes.

For two hours the cooking continued, and when it was finished, with the
night's kill ready for future use, Tiaoga's warriors wrapped themselves
in their blankets and lay down to sleep.  Jeems was amazed that men who
indulged in the extreme of every physical act should practise such
temperateness in the employment of their food.  It seemed to him Tiaoga
had scarcely eaten, while he--with his stomach trained by the
gormandizing habits of culture and education--had disposed of six of
the tender birds.

The camp was soon in silence, and for a long time Jeems sat meditating
upon the changes which had come into his life within the space of two
days and nights.  No spark of the fires was left burning by the
cautious Indians, but he could see his companion's face pillowed on her
arm.  He rejoiced that she slept, for these were hours in which time
seemed to shorten itself, and anguish pressed upon him.  That
everything was gone and that they were the only ones left of those who
had so recently made up their world seemed a monstrous exaggeration of
fact.  Toinette, sleeping quietly, forced the truth upon him, and from
the racking visions of his thoughts he turned to her with a yearning to
hold her closely in his arms.  Her face was of childlike loveliness in
the glow of the stars.  Her hair lay upon her pale forehead and against
her throat in a frame of jet which accentuated the exquisite fairness
of her skin.  So complete was her fatigue that dark dreams did not mar
the solace of her unconsciousness.  The spirit of the peace which had
come to her crept into Jeems, and as the stillness grew deeper a sense
of great possession filled him.  When the night was half gone, he made
a pillow of balsams, and before he fell asleep he drew Toinette's hand
to him gently and pressed his lips against it.  After that Odd watched
the shadows and the burning out of the stars.


Dawn, another day, then night again.  One after another they came and
went in Tiaoga's march through the western wilderness.  There was no
haste now.  In her first dawn in a Seneca camp Toinette had opened her
eyes to see a tall dark form standing over her.  It was Tiaoga.  He saw
her hand against the lips of the sleeping youth.  She looked up at him
starry-eyed.  Tiaoga grunted and turned away.  After this his
guardianship was that of a hawk over its young, yet he did not display
it, and seldom voiced his wishes or his thoughts except in low, terse
words to Shindas.  The journey was no longer impossible for Toinette.
When she neared exhaustion, camp was made, and when she awoke the march
was resumed.  Tiaoga called her Soi Yan Makwun, and the warriors
regarded her with kindlier eyes.  As the days continued and they
witnessed her courage, their hearts grew warm toward her, and at times
their glances revealed an admiration and friendliness which were never
in Tiaoga's.

These days served also as the bridge across which Jeems and Toinette
were passing into a future that was all their own, and the poignancy of
the loss they had suffered was mellowed by these newer aspects so vital
to themselves.  The world they had known was a fabric which had crashed
in ruin about them--a desolation out of which another existence was
building itself.  As the deeper solitudes of the wilderness claimed
them, this feeling became a bond which nothing could break.  Wherever
they went and whatever happened, they would belong to each other, for
death might separate but it could not destroy.

On the fourteenth day, Tiaoga sent a messenger ahead.  That evening he
sat on the ground near Toinette, and Jeems translated what he said.  He
smoked dry sumach leaves in a long pipe, interrupting himself to speak
in tones that were sometimes like the growls of an animal.  To-morrow
they would reach Hidden Town, and his people would be expecting them.
There would be great rejoicing because they had taken many scalps and
had not lost a man.  They would honour her--and Jeems, accepting them
as flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone.  Toinette would live as
his daughter.  Silver Heels' heart would live in her song.  She would
be of the forests--forever.  That was the word he had sent ahead to
Chenufsio.  _Tiaoga was coming with his daughter_.

He stalked into darkness, and for a time Jeems and Toinette were afraid
to speak the thought which was choking at their hearts.


"_Your children and your children's children..._"


That night Toinette lay staring at the sky with sleepless eyes.



[1] Indians were not gourmands as so many fictionists and careless
historians have led us to believe.  Careful research proves them to
have been, until degenerated by the white man, a race from whose
abstemiousness modern civilization might gain many good lessons.  It is
interesting to note that they were largely vegetarians whose
subsistence was made up exclusively for long periods of time of fruits,
nuts, roots, and the products of their own fields.




CHAPTER XVII

Chenufsio, the Hidden Town of the Senecas, was on the Little Seneca
River seventy miles from Lake Ontario.  By means of this stream its
inhabitants could drift in their canoes to the shore of the lake or
work southward almost to the Ohio River which was called the Allegany
above the location of Fort Pitt.  Four trails led from it through dense
wilderness.  These were foot-wide paths which the Indians had used many
generations, and in places were worn so deep that traces of them were
destined to be left a century after the people whose moccasined feet
had made them had ceased to exist.  One path led to the River of the
Great Falls, or Niagara, another to the country of the Ohio and the
lead mines of Pennsylvania, a third northward to Lake Ontario, and a
fourth hundreds of miles eastward to the scalp-hunting grounds of the
white men beyond the Cayugas, the Onondagas, and the Oneidas, over
which trail Tiaoga and his war party were returning.  Oddly enough,
there was no trail in the direction of Lake Erie, whose eastern shore
was scarcely farther away than the sandy beaches of Lake Ontario.
Hunters and warriors adventured through the swamps and forests to Misow
Kichekume, or the Big Sea, but for some reason they blazed no common
way.

Guarded like a precious jewel on all sides, a hidden town literally as
well as in name, Chenufsio was one of the greatest of the strange
social centres of the Indians to which prisoners with white skins were
brought to be adopted by their captors.  That such places existed was a
fact which had but recently gained credence in both the English and
French colonies.  Not until 1764 was Colonel Boquet to free the "white"
population in the first of these mystery villages, and then the
deliverance which he brought about resulted in less of happiness than
of tragedy, for the life and associations which he disrupted in the
name and claim of the Colonies had their roots as far back as the third
and fourth generations.  Hearts and homes were broken as well as
prisoners' shackles.

Chenufsio was the Rome of a wide domain in that period of its history
when Jeems and Toinette came with Tiaoga and his warriors.  In it were
three hundred people, and at full strength it numbered sixty fighting
men.  It nestled at the edge of a large meadow which the river embraced
in a horseshoe curve and its centre was a stockaded stronghold with
long-houses, storage buildings, cabins, and tepees sufficient for the
entire population in times of stress.  An arrow-shot away from the
gates of the stockade was the border of a forest of magnificent oaks,
and under these ancient trees rather than in the fortified place the
people made their homes in spring and summer and autumn, the gnarled
limbs of the wood forming a cathedral-like roof over their habitations.
Half a mile from the forest was an encircling hill, the inner rim of
the horseshoe made by the river, and between this hill and the stream
were the fields and orchards cultivated by the savages.  The Senecas
had vineyards and fine orchards of apples, cherries, and plums, and
they also grew tobacco and potatoes on a considerable scale.  The
fields were laid out neatly about Chenufsio, including about two
hundred acres in all.  Half of this space was devoted to the production
of corn of several varieties, sweet or puckered corn, Calica, Redpop,
Whitepop, Sacred or "original" corn, and Red and Purple Soft.  In the
cornfields and growing from the same hills were pumpkins and beans.
Crook-neck and Scalloped and Winter squash, and everywhere were
sunflowers of a dwarfish kind grown for the oil which was extracted
from their seeds.

When the season was good, Chenufsio lived in comfort during the long
winter months.  The granaries were full, large quantities of dried
fruits were in the storehouses, and underground cellars were stocked
with apples, pumpkins, potatoes, and squashes.  When the season was
bad, Chenufsio drew a belt tightly about its stomach for five months of
the year.  For three of these months it starved.

This was a bad season.  Spring frosts had killed the early vegetation
and had blackened the buds of apples and plums.  The corn was so poor
that, after roasting time, only enough was left for the next year's
planting, and beans and potatoes had suffered until there was less than
a third of a crop.  In the forests and marshes and on the plains as
well as in the fields it had been a "dark year."  Most of the nut trees
were barren, the wild rice had headed poorly, from strawberry time
until the ripening of the small purple plums there had been little
fruit to gather.  Because of these things the people of Chenufsio were
preparing themselves for the "break-up" as the first chill nights of
autumn came.

The "break-up" was a tragic event in the life of an Indian town.  It
meant a shortening of rations, and then, as in the case of Chenufsio, a
scattering of three hundred men, women, and children over a vast
stretch of wilderness in parties seldom larger than a single family,
every unit dependent upon itself in its struggle to hold body and soul
together until another spring.  Each family sought a separate hunting
ground, but this did not mean that all its members would be together.
If a certain family possessed the strength of two or more hunters, one
of the men would be detailed by the chief of the town to accompany a
less fortunate group made up of old people or a widow and her children,
and he was held as accountable for their welfare as though they were
his own flesh and blood.  It was a campaign against hunger.  When the
fight was over and spring came again, the town would reassemble and its
village life be continued.

Ordinarily, an atmosphere of gloom preceded the break-up.  When it
came, friends and relatives were parted for months.  Deaths always
occurred during the period of separation.  Lovers were disunited.  A
father gave up his son.  A mother saw her daughter taken as a member of
a family better able to care for her than her own.  The sick and the
infirm were left in the village with food sufficient to carry them
through.

But the people of Chenufsio wore no appearance of gloom on the day when
Tiaoga and his triumphant warriors were to arrive from the east.  They
awakened at dawn with hearts in which gladness dispelled whatever
unhappiness may have oppressed them before.  Half of their men folk
were returning, and they were coming in triumph.  Tiaoga's messenger
had brought the news that not a man had been lost in their invasion of
the territory of their enemies.  This was unusual, and it put fresh
courage into the hearts of those who had seen the year go against them.
Tiaoga's homecoming with the spoils of war was an augury which more
than discounted empty cellars and granaries.

As a part of these spoils, they knew Tiaoga was bringing a daughter to
take the place of Silver Heels.

This convinced them that fortune was bound to smile on them again.
They had loved Soi Yan Makwun.  With her death had come bad times.  Now
the spirits would give them an easy winter, and next year would see the
earth flowering with good things.

Chenufsio made ready for the feast.  There were still plenty of earthy
things and a supply of late green corn packed away in husks and kept
for this occasion.  The skin of every drum in the village was tightened
on the morning of the day Tiaoga was expected, and no one thought of
work or of a duty outside the celebration.  Fires were built under the
huge oaks and part of the fun for girls and boys was the gathering of
fuel.  Children had toy tom-toms and beat them incessantly, there were
games and races, laughter and good-natured banter and wild hallooing,
the grown-ups themselves turning children.  The quieter ones among the
adults as well as the children had white skins.  There were twenty of
these in Chenufsio.  One would scarcely have accepted them as alien to
the tribe except in their colour and a slight difference in manner of
dress.  They did not bear the appearance of captives, and while their
demeanour was one of anticipation, their emotions were more repressed
than those of the brown-skinned people about them.  Among them were
women in whose arms were children born of Indian husbands.  There were
white maidens who had lived in Chenufsio since babyhood and whose eyes
glowed softly as they watched for the young warriors who held their
hearts.  There were some whose darker skins were the heritage of a
second or a third generation, and a few with eyes that still held the
shadows of grief and yearning--those whose visions of homes and loved
ones would never die.

These were the people and this the town that waited through a
sun-filled autumn day for the coming of Tiaoga and his captives.


The last day was long for Toinette.  It had begun at dawn, and though
Tiaoga halted his men at intervals to let her rest, it had not ended
with dusk.  Darkness came before they reached a plain on the far side
of which was a hill.  Beyond this hill was Chenufsio.  They could see
the glow of a great fire lighting the sky.

Toinette forgot her exhaustion at this sign of the end of their
journey.  She observed that someone took from Jeems the scalp of the
man he had killed which he had tried to conceal from her eyes under a
flap of buckskin.  Then she saw all of the scalps taken by the Senecas
fastened like dangling fish to a slender pole which was carried on the
shoulders of two men, the hair of one of these scalps reaching almost
to the ground.  With the scalp carriers in the lead, they came to the
hill at the edge of the plain and looked down on the valley of
Chenufsio.

A mile away in the great oak forest near the river a score of red fires
were burning, but everywhere, in spite of the fires, was an engulfing
silence.  Toinette stood close to Jeems, and it was not the exertion of
hill-climbing that made her heart pound as it did.  A spirit seemed
breathing to her out of the strange and awesome stillness.  A spirit of
life, yet also of death.  It was a stillness filled with the beating of
hearts, the repression of living things, the staring scrutiny of eyes
she could not see.  Only the fires gave evidence of life that was
unleashed.  As unseen hands added fuel, they were like notes in a piece
of flaming music, pitchwood sending up crescendos of sparks and light,
hardwood and river logs giving forth steadier pools of illumination.
She could not see those who waited tensely about the rims of the fires.
It was the end of the world for Jeems and her; she had expected that,
but not the threatening quiet which was like death thrusting its head
out of a pit.

Suddenly it was broken.  A tall figure had mounted a rock from which he
sent forth a cry which began almost in a murmur but which increased in
volume until it filled the valley.  Toinette had never heard such a cry
come from a human throat, so far-reaching, so free of raucous effort, a
long note whose depth and steadiness sent it into farther and farther
distance.  The voice had in it the soul of a god.  She tried to make
out the identity of the figure in the darkness.  Then she drew her
breath sharply.  The man on the rock was Tiaoga.

When the cry ended, a bedlam of sound burst from Chenufsio.  Those who
had been chained to silence as they listened for Tiaoga's voice from
the hilltop sprang to a life that was almost madness.  Men hallooed and
yelled, children screamed, women cried out in their joy.  Pitchwood
torches were lighted, and as the population streamed out into the night
in a wave of fire, the beating of tom-toms and skin drums and wooden
gongs mingled with human voices and the barking of dogs.  At the
beginning of Tiaoga's cry the men bearing the scalp-laden pole had gone
ahead, and now Tiaoga followed with his men in single file.  Toinette
and Jeems were midway in the line.  Wide slave collars of buckskin had
been placed about their necks, and Jeems was stripped of his weapons.
The warriors did not hurry.  Their step was slow and steady, and not a
man broke the silence with a whisper or a word.  The sea of torches
advanced.  It rolled in and out of hollows like a flood, then came to a
level place and formed two streaming lines of fire.  The scalp bearers
reached these a hundred yards ahead of Tiaoga and his men.  Toinette
could see them enter the light of the torches, and in these moments the
voices of the savages rose to the heavens.  Tiaoga paused, and not
until the scalp bearers had paraded their grisly burden the entire
length of the gauntlet of flame did he proceed again.

Toinette felt stealing over her a strange faintness of body and limb.
Stories which she had forgotten, stories she had heard of the Indians
from childhood, stories that had sent shivers through the hearts of a
thousand homes along the frontiers all crowded upon her at once.  Wild
tales of appalling torture and vengeance, of stake and fire and human
suffering.  She had listened to them from her father's lips, from
passing voyageurs, had heard them in the gossip of the seigneurie.  And
she remembered by name this ordeal which awaited them.  It was Le
Chemin de Feu--the Road of Fire--through which they must pass.  Others
had died in it.  Roasted by pitch-filled torches.  Blinded.  Killed by
inches.  So she had been told.

She looked at Jeems in the first outreaching glow of the torches.  It
was for him she was afraid.  Tiaoga would not kill her, he would not
let the torches burn her--she knew that as surely as she knew the
torches were waiting for them.  Jeems turned to meet her look with a
smile of encouragement.

Tiaoga and his warriors moved slowly.  They were like bronze men
without flesh or emotions.  Their heads were high, their bodies
straight, their jaws set hard as they stalked at a death-march pace
between the columns of their people.  Jeems fell into this rhythmic
movement as the mouth of the torch monster began to swallow them.  And
then with eyes that became flame-lit pools of fear and exhaustion
Toinette saw that not a hand gave a sign of rising against them.
Silence had fallen again on the people of Chenufsio, a silence broken
only by the tread of feet, the sputter and crackle of burning
pitchwood, the breathing of a multitude.  Not a word or a cry, no
sudden reaching out of a mother's arms, no flutter of a sweetheart's
hand, no name trembling on a wife's lips broke the tenseness of
Tiaoga's triumph.  The whole was a living picture which burned itself
in Toinette's brain detail by detail.  She saw the faces staring at
her, men, women, boys, girls, little children--without hatred, without
desire to harm, but with a great curiosity which was almost friendship
in their eyes.  And then her heart stood still for a moment as she saw
a white face looking at her--a face framed in a mass of hair that
gleamed with gold in the torchlight and with lips that smiled a
half-sad, gentle welcome.  There were other pale-faced people in both
lines, and one of them, who was a young girl like herself, greeted her
with gladness, then flushed a deeper colour as Shindas passed.  Shindas
allowed his eyes to steal for a single instant to hers.

"_Opitchi!_" cried Toinette softly, and the girl seemed about to fly to
her side.  "_Opitchi--the Thrush!_"--and Toinette spoke the full name
of Shindas's white-skinned sweetheart.

The threat of death could not have kept her from giving that greeting
to the other, for it was her heart that leapt to her lips, hope,
confidence at last, the knowledge that love was here, even happiness,
where she had expected only gloom and tragedy.

The torches coughed and flared, but not a spark touched their skins in
passing.  No eyes gleamed hatred at them.  No fingers clenched, no hand
was raised.  The things she had heard in the land of her people were
lies.  The Indians killed in war but they did not torture.  They did
not pull out eyes and thrust sticks through quivering flesh.  They were
men and women and children like all other men and women and children.
These truths she thought she had discovered for herself.

But one thing she did not fully know.  She might have learned it had
she caught the low-voiced whisperings which followed the passing of the
warrior: "_She is Tiaoga's daughter--she is the spirit of Soi Yan
Makwun returned to us in the flesh--now our good fortune will
return--the sun will shine--light and laughter will come--for Soi Yan
Makwun is here, out of the pool, out of death to live with us again!_"

The wild outburst of voices after the parade, the fierce beating of
drums, the mad tossing of burning torches high into the air, the paeans
which rose from dusky throats, did not tell her how deeply Chenufsio
had loved Silver Heels.

They crossed a field of darkness toward the fires, and when they came
among them Tiaoga was marching in Jeems's place and Jeems had
disappeared.  She had not sensed his going or Tiaoga's presence, and
before she knew that Jeems was no longer among the warriors, she found
herself standing alone with the Seneca chief, the people gathering in a
circle around them.  It was like the setting of a stage with flame on
all sides of it, and for the first time she realized that something was
about to happen in which she was more important than the scalps which
had preceded Tiaoga.  But where was Jeems?  Why was he not among those
about her whom she scanned so closely?  Fear trickled through her
veins.  It turned her flesh cold, so that with the darkness of her eyes
and the pallor of her face she was like a white spirit in the
illumination.  In a moment, Tiaoga began to speak.  His voice renewed
her confidence as she searched for Jeems.  It went on quietly for a
space.  In it was the deep timbre of the voice that had reached out
over the valley from the rock.  It began to stir with emotion.  He was
describing the pool where Soi Yan Makwun had died, the wickedness of
the evil spirits there and the success of their gods in restoring
Silver Heels to her people.  It did not take long for Tiaoga to tell
his story.  His voice rose.  His scarred and bitter face assumed a
strange gentleness, and Toinette knew that Jeems was safe though she
could not see him.  She waited, trembling, and at last Tiaoga was
finished and stood for a moment with upraised hand amid a great
hush--then spoke a single name, _Opitchi_.  The Thrush sprang forward,
and as she came Tiaoga took the slave collar from Toinette's throat and
crushed it into the earth with his moccasined foot.  A murmur ran
through the circle.  Tiaoga stood with his arms folded across his
breast, and Toinette felt the hands of the Thrush drawing her away.

They paused at the edge of the circle, and for a little while no one
moved or spoke.  Then there was a break in the ring behind the Seneca
chief, and through it came Jeems, escorted between Shindas and another
warrior.  Toinette gasped and almost cried out.  There was an amazing
change in Jeems.  He was stripped to the waist and painted in stripes
of red and yellow and black.  His face appeared to be cut in crimson
gashes.  His thick blond hair was tied in a warlock from which streamed
a feather showing he had killed a man.  At Tiaoga's command there
advanced from the circle an old man with a wizened face and white hair
and a younger man whose form was bent almost double because of a
deformity.  Behind these two came a little girl.  The old man was
Wuskoo, the Cloud.  The younger was his son, Tokana, or Gray Fox, a
name of which he had been proud in the days before a tree fell on his
tepee and crooked his back, when he was the fastest runner in the
tribe.  Tiaoga spoke again.  He told of the days when the aged Wuskoo
had been a great warrior and had slain many enemies; he described the
increasing of years and the coming of adversity, the valiancy of his
son, the stroke of evil that had made him what he was, and then exulted
in the fortune which had sent another son to Wuskoo, a son with a white
skin and a strong body who would care for him and who would be a
brother to Gray Fox.  With his thin and quivering hands, Wuskoo took
the slave collar from Jeems's neck and stamped it joyously into the
ground while the broken Gray Fox raised a hand in brotherhood and
friendship.  There was something so wistfully sweet in the big dark
eyes of the little Indian maiden that Jeems drew her to him and put an
arm protectingly about her.  It was then Toinette left the Thrush and
ran to him, so that all saw her held in his painted arms, with Wanonat,
the Wood Pigeon, a happy partner in the moment when Toinette proudly
and a bit defiantly told Chenufsio and through it the whole Seneca
nation that this was the man to whom she belonged.

Like a flood burst loose from a dam, the night of feasting and
rejoicing began.  It was preceded by a combat among the dogs in which
Odd established his right to a place among the four-footed citizens of
Chenufsio.  After a time he found a scent on the beaten ground that led
him to the tepee which had been prepared for Toinette.  It was a small
tepee near Tiaoga's, furnished with freshly gathered cedar and garlands
of bittersweet, and with the soft skins and pretty raiment which had
belonged to Silver Heels.  Here he found Toinette and the Thrush, whose
name--a long time ago--had been Mary Daghlen.


It seemed to Jeems that from the beginning his freedom among the
Senecas was as great as if he had been born of their blood.  Gray Fox
took him to the tepee of his father, which was to be his home, and food
and drink were brought to him.  Then he was left alone, for even the
delighted old man whom Tiaoga had honoured by the gift of a son could
not be kept away from the celebration which was in progress.  The
thought came to Jeems that no impediment had been placed in his way if
he chose to steal off into the night and disappear.  The ease with
which he might have set out on this adventure was proof of his
helplessness.  Like the others, he was a captive forever.  There was no
escape from Chenufsio unless one accepted death as the route.  A false
move, an hour of desperation and attempt, and Seneca trailers would be
like hounds at his heels.

He did not think of escape because its desire possessed him.  He was
measuring his world and adjusting himself to its limitations with
emotions which were far from unhappy.  With Toinette, he could find
here all that he wanted in life.  Tiaoga and Shindas knew that she
belonged to him, and the people of Chenufsio were now aware of it.  His
heart exulted and his spirit rose with the chanting of the savages.
What difference did it make that they were buried in the heart of the
forests for all time?  He had Toinette.  She loved him.  Chenufsio
would not be a sepulchre.  Their love would transform it into a
paradise.

He was eager to see Toinette again, and began to seek for a place where
he could clean himself of the coloured clay plastered on his face and
body.  With his clothes, he went to the river, and after a thorough
scrubbing returned fully dressed with the eagle feather still in his
hair.  His weapons had been given to him, and these he carried boldly
when he joined the Indians.  The triumphal fire was blazing, and as
soon as the hungry town had fed itself, the scalp dances would begin.
The scalps were already suspended on the victory pole in its light.
Children were playing about them.  The fine dark hair of one was so
long that they could reach the tresses with their fingers, and when
they did this they shrieked with ecstasy.  Among them was a
white-skinned boy of seven or eight who laughed and shouted with the
others.

Jeems found an opportunity to have a word with Shindas and learned that
Toinette and Opitchi were together.  Shindas could not tear himself
from the martial dignity which was expected of him until the warriors
had told of their exploits in the scalp dance, so Jeems went alone and
found Tiaoga's tepee and the smaller one near it in which were Toinette
and the Thrush.  It was lighted by a torch, and he drew back among the
dark boles of the trees and waited.  The night was clear and the full
moon had begun to rise so that, outside the circle of fires, the gloom
gave way to a soft and silvery radiance among the oaks.  At the end of
half an hour, Toinette and Opitchi came out into the illumined forest.
For a little while they stood under the gnarled limbs of the trees
which cast shadows from over their heads.  He did not reveal himself
until Opitchi's form disappeared among the pools of light and darkness
as she went toward the fires.  Then he advanced, calling Toinette's
name softly.

Her appearance surprised him.  His first thought was that he had made a
mistake and that she was not Toinette but some princess of the tribe.
She was not the ragged and dishevelled young woman who had arrived with
Tiaoga's men.  Mary, the Thrush, had dressed her in the prettiest
raiment left by Silver Heels.  Her fawnskin jacket and short skirt of
doeskin had the glow of golden velvet in the moonlight.  Her parted
hair was brushed smooth as a bird's wing and fell in two gleamy braids
over her shoulders.  A filet of scarlet cloth was around her forehead,
and in it was a single feather of vivid yellow.  There was something
about the long yellow feather, the filet of scarlet cloth, and the
boyish closeness of her dress which made Jeems give a wondering cry.
It was as if they had come to her from an obscure and distant past and
had always belonged to her.  He had dreamed of this lovely wilderness
princess; through years of boyhood hopes and plannings he had built up
worlds about her, and in those worlds he had fought for her and had
adventured with her where he alone was her champion and her hero.  He
had carried gifts of feathers to her--feathers and fawnskin _and a
piece of cloth like that which she now wore in a crimson band about her
forehead_!

To him it was the precious red velvet, there in the glow of the moon.

He opened his arms, and Toinette came into them.




CHAPTER XVIII

For half an hour Jeems was alone with Toinette.  Then Mary Daghlen
returned, and with her came a messenger who took him back to the dances
which were beginning about the scalp-fire.[1]  He was not embarrassed
by the critical eyes upon him.  The wildness of the night entered his
blood, a heat set blazing by the joy of his possession, and as he
chanted the Seneca victory songs with the others, Toinette was in his
heart, and words she had whispered to him under the oaks repeated
themselves until they dulled his senses and blinded his eyes to
everything but their import.  As soon as God would let them bring it
about _she would be his wife_.  She had said that!  So he danced.  He
shouted at Tiaoga's side.  The curious and the suspicious became his
friends.  Eyes that had followed him sombrely grew warm with approval.
He vindicated Tiaoga for allowing him to live, and Wuskoo swelled with
pride and boasted that he had another son as great as Gray Fox had
been.  Toinette, horrified at first, saw him in his madness.  Then she
began to understand.  But not until he took his turn among the warriors
and danced alone in the light of the fire, chanting his story in the
language of his adopted people, did Opitchi--translating what he
said--let her know fully the daring of her lover.  Jeems's story began
with his earliest thoughts and memories of her.  He told of their homes
in the country of the Richelieu, of his dreams and hopes, of his
yearnings and prayers, and of Paul Tache.  He told how he had fought
and lost, described the passing of moons and the growing of his love
and how death had come with the Mohawks from the south.  Then he came
to the finding of Toinette, their flight, the triumph of his love, his
fight with the scalp hunter at Lussan's place, and their capture by
Tiaoga and his warriors.  He praised these warriors.  They were not
like the Mohawks, who were sneaks in the night.  The Senecas were clean
and swift and brave.  He was proud to be a brother and a son among
them.  His dog, who hated the Mohawks, had accepted them as friends.
He wanted this people to respect him, and he wanted them to love
Toinette whom Tiaoga had honoured by taking as his daughter.  _For
Toinette belonged to him.  She wanted to be his wife.  She wanted to
bear his children among the Senecas._

He stopped at last and thanked God that Hepsibah Adams had made it
possible for him to do this thing in the light of the fire at
Chenufsio.  A murmur of approbation stirred the people.  It rippled and
died out as another warrior took his place.

Jeems had seen Toinette's white face and her eyes radiant in their
message to him, but she was gone when he sought for her, and later the
torch was burning in her tepee again.  Wuskoo and Gray Fox and Wood
Pigeon remained near him.  They were proud of him, but there was
something besides pride in the way Wood Pigeon slipped her small brown
hand in his.  He observed more closely her too fragile loveliness.  She
was like a flower hungry for something which meant life to it, and when
he made inquiry, Tokana said the child was eight years old and that
with each winter her frailty had become more noticeable.  The tree
which had broken him had killed her mother.  Others had been good to
her, but Wood Pigeon missed something which seemed to be eating her
life away.  He told Jeems he thought it was the spirit of the mother
calling to her, and that Wood Pigeon was trying to free herself from
the flesh to go to her.  Of course, the child did not know, but it was
happening in spite of them all.  Jeems felt the little Indian maid
creeping into his heart.  Whenever she looked at him, she revealed the
beginning of a timid worship, and when at last she grew tired and went
to her lonely bed, he knelt at her side for a few moments and talked to
her, then kissed her.  It was startlingly new and strange for Wood
Pigeon.  Something sent her arms up through the darkness around his
neck.  That, too, was a new thing for Jeems.  Almost baby arms claiming
him.

Long after midnight the revels ended, and Chenufsio grew quiet.  For a
time, he looked at the stars and the changing shadows of the moon
through the open door of Wuskoo's tepee.  He entered sleep as if going
into a long avenue of golden colours.  Only happiness rising like a
flower from the ashes of a torture that was gone could have made it
like that.  His mother seemed a part of it, her voice a glad melody
somewhere in the radiance which embraced him.  In the avenue of gold,
he saw Wood Pigeon smiling happily between his mother and Toinette.
Then he sank into deeper sleep.

This was the beginning of the strange life of Jeems and Toinette in
Chenufsio which Colonel Boquet, afterward Major General and Commander
in Chief of His Majesty's forces in the Southern Department of America,
described as "an episode of fact which is difficult of belief and
astounding in the new viewpoint which it and others of a similar kind
give us of savage life."

To Jeems and Toinette there was nothing spectacular in their first day
or in the many that followed.  After the triumphal night, the Indian
town fell once more into the routine of its existence.  Men hunted,
women worked, children played.  Warriors met in solemn councils and
smoked incessantly as they discussed the affairs of their commonwealth
and planned for the future.  The "Dark Year" was upon them.  Winter
threatened.  But there were other matters to be settled.  Tiaoga had
brought unusual news.  The English, under a general named Braddock, had
been defeated and massacred.  The French had been destroyed on Lake
George.  Sir William Johnson, the White Father of the Sioux Nations,
was victorious, and the Mohawks were profiting greatly.  This brought
sombre looks into the faces of the Senecas.  The eastern wilderness was
bound to run red with war.  Tiaoga was sure.  His warriors were sure.
The long-expected struggle between the English and the French was at
hand, and there would be no rest for the tomahawk until the land was
free of one or the other.  During the latter part of October, many
runners visited Chenufsio from distant villages and towns; from
Karaqhiyadirha at the headwaters of the Little Seneca; from
Tyanagarante down on the Allegany; from Kanestio in the direction of
Pennsylvania; from Canadaragey and Canadasegy at the western gates of
the Cayuga country--from all over the broad domain of the Senecas came
the accumulating evidence of fierce and bloody war impending.  It
brought a problem for Tiaoga and his councillors in Chenufsio.  They
faced war--and famine.  If their fighting men went into the east, who
would keep the people from starvation?  It was decided that Tiaoga
should take the warpath again with thirty men chosen by lot, while
thirty of his braves should remain to fight hunger and death during the
winter months.  The drawing came, but Jeems was not included.  Shindas
was doomed to leave his sweetheart again.

These were days when misgivings assailed Jeems and Toinette in spite of
their hopes and plans, yet no cloud more than temporarily darkened
their visions.  In the heart of each was the prayer that a wandering
priest might come their way, so that the ceremony could be performed
which would make them husband and wife.  In the town were a number of
white women who had accepted Indian husbands in the Indian way, but
against this practice Toinette revolted.  She prayed and Mary Daghlen
prayed with her, for through the years since her mother had died the
Thrush had kept her faith unbroken.  The Seneca, worshipping her,
honoured it.

Two years before three Jesuits had come to Chenufsio, one after
another, since then there had been none.

Jeems was sure Tiaoga would permit Toinette to go with him when the
break-up came.  Wood Pigeon had found a sister and a mother in
Toinette, and her love was divided between her two white friends.
Tiaoga no longer assumed an attitude of indifference when Toinette was
in his presence, and his affection for her came also to tolerate, if
not actually to include, little Wood Pigeon.  This fact gave Jeems his
greatest confidence when, as the day for the town's dissolution grew
near, he approached Tiaoga on the subject of making Toinette a fifth
member of Wuskoo's family.  Neither had anticipated an objection, and
his unrelenting disapproval filled them with despair.  Shindas was not
surprised, and it was he who explained Tiaoga's attitude.  Toinette was
not only Tiaoga's daughter by adoption; the chief had accepted her
wholly, blood and spirit, and it was inconceivable in the moral and
social ethics of the Senecas that a maiden, and particularly a
chieftain's daughter, should abide with the family of the man to whom
she was betrothed.  That Tiaoga conceded their betrothal was the one
consolation they had in their disappointment; that his objection might
be overcome by an acceptance of the Indian custom of marriage was a
thought which Toinette rejected when Shindas suggested it to her and to
Jeems.  In the young Seneca's mind was the hope that Toinette would
accept this easy way to the possession of a husband and that she might
also persuade the Thrush to do the same.  But the companionship of
Toinette and Mary Daghlen served to strengthen them in their resolution
to wait for one who could bless their unions with the holy bonds of the
Church.

Early in November groups began to leave, each with the small amount of
food which remained as its share.  Mary was to accompany two families
of eight people under the protection of Thunder Shield, a valiant
warrior and a splendid hunter.  They were going toward Lake Ontario.
Toinette was given to Ah De Bah, the Tall Man, a relative of Tiaoga's.
He was a thin and sinister-eyed man who might have been named the
Serpent, for he moved with the sinuous stealth of that creature and
possessed other characteristics which made him almost as unpleasant.
But like the snake he was an unexcelled hunter, the best in Chenufsio,
and for this reason Tiaoga entrusted to him the one he treasured most.
Ah De Bah's family was a large one.  In it were eleven, including his
old mother and father and two boys who were large enough to be of
assistance.  Chenufsio knew that no matter how long the winter might
be, hunger would have to fight to reach the Tall Man's camp.  He was
going into the country near Lake Erie.

Hiding their disappointment, Jeems and Toinette encouraged themselves
with visions of a future which they tried to paint in bright colours.
The months would pass quickly.  With the earliest days of spring, they
would return to Chenufsio.  Every hour they would live in each other's
thoughts, and at night their prayers would cross in the wilderness.
Next year there would surely be a way.  Fate would not separate them
again.  In their final moments together, Toinette's eyes glowed with a
depth of faith and love which it was impossible for Jeems to measure
fully.

In this way they parted.

He went north and west with Wuskoo toward the Tyanagarunte River which
emptied into Lake Ontario.  Odd struggled between his devotion for
Jeems and for Toinette.  He followed his master a distance, then
hesitated and turned back.  A lump rose in Jeems's throat, and he could
not see clearly as his comrade sat in the trail and watched until he
disappeared.

This was on the fifth of November.  By the twentieth, they had reached
the headwaters of the Little Selus eighty miles from Chenufsio.  Jeems
now realized the seriousness of the task which had been imposed upon
him by Tiaoga.  Wuskoo, infirm as he was, could travel farther and
faster than his broken son.  Five or six miles a day was all that
Tokana could stand, and in this distance he was sometimes put to great
extremity.  The courage with which he faced his unhappy life won Jeems.
He was distressed that he could carry no burden and that Jeems was
often compelled to help him over rough and uneven places.  Sometimes he
laughed as if it were a joke, yet Jeems knew that his heart was aching
and that he was filled with shame.  It was not difficult to see what a
magnificent savage he had been, though now he walked with his head
almost on a level with his waist.  Jeems wondered at the fidelity which
kept him with his aged father and little girl when he might have lived
in comparative comfort at Chenufsio.  Until Wuskoo told him, he did not
know that all of them would have remained in the town that winter had
Tiaoga not made him their son and brother.  "And now Chenufsio will
have three less mouths to feed," chuckled Wuskoo.

The old man's faith and the younger man's spirit were an inspiration to
Jeems, but it was Wood Pigeon who became his real strength.  The child
worshipped him, and her presence eased the burden of his separation
from Toinette.  He began to teach her French, and they exchanged
confidences which were all their own.  He explained to her that
Toinette, who was Soi Yan Makwun, belonged to him, and tried to make
her understand why she was not with them.  Next year she would be.  One
day Wood Pigeon asked if she might go with him and Toinette--wherever
they went.  After this the bond between them seemed to hold her closer
than ever to Jeems.

Wuskoo had led the way to a hardwood country in which he was sure there
would be hunting that would last through the winter.  There were plenty
of raccoons, and the mergansers, or fish ducks, would come to the
swift-running headwaters to feed as soon as ice closed the lakes and
the mouths of the streams.  Here they made their lodge of saplings.  It
was a new kind of home for Wood Pigeon.  Jeems built it with a cooking
hearth and a chimney and a tiny room set apart for Wood Pigeon herself.
The child's eyes glowed with delight at this possession.  Each day
Jeems told her more about Toinette--how Soi Yan Makwun cared for her
beautiful hair, how it was part of her religion to keep herself clean,
how and why she did this thing and that, until thoughts and desires
grew in Wanonat's head, and she employed the comb and the brush which
Jeems made for her until her sleek black hair was never untidy.

Heavy snow and extreme cold came early in the season.  By the middle of
December, Jeems was compelled to hunt on snowshoes, and so bitter were
the nights that the first of January found even the headwaters freezing
out the mergansers.

This was the memorable winter of 1755 and 1756, the story of which the
Senecas handed down from father to son for many generations--a winter
in which all game seemed to have gone from the face of the earth, and
when hardship and starvation killed a tenth of the three westernmost of
the Six Great Nations, the Senecas, the Cayugas, and the Onondagas.

The deer seemed to have migrated east and south.  Bears went into their
winter sleep in November.  Raccoons, the staff of Indian life when
crops were a failure, hid themselves away in long and unbroken slumber.
The fish ducks disappeared in a flight for open waters.  It was the
"seventh year" for rabbits, when extinction seemed to have overtaken
them.  Elk and buffalo remained below the Alleghany.  The flesh of
beaver and otter became more precious than their fur.  Wildcats and
foxes and other carnivorous creatures were driven to faraway hunting
fields by the scarcity of small game.  Hunger rode stark and merciless
over the land of the three nations.

At first Jeems was partly prepared, because he had killed a buck, and
with Wuskoo's shrewd assistance had marked a number of trees in which
raccoons were sure to hibernate.  But late in January famine drew
closer about the cabin on the Little Selus, and Jeems travelled farther
in his hunts, until he was gone two days at a time.  In February, he
made four of these hunts and found no game.  The cold was terrific.
Trees cracked like rifles in the woods.  Bitter winds continued night
and day.  Wood Pigeon's eyes grew larger and her body more fragile as
the weeks passed.  Each time Jeems came in from his hunts she blazed up
like a fire in her happiness, but he could mark the steady fading of
her strength.  He hunted with almost insane energy.  Everything was for
her when famine clutched at them hardest--a pair of snowbirds which he
shot with arrows, a red-squirrel's flesh, acorns which he found in a
stub, the fleshy root of a pond lily secured by hacking through two
feet of ice.  Then--a hollow tree--a raccoon asleep--and for a few
hours food enough for all.  Thus one week dragged at the heels of
another with death held off by the length of an arm.

Torturing fears assailed Jeems.  Toinette was never out of his mind,
for even in his sleep he dreamed of her.  She, too, was a part of this
fight to hold life together.  _And Ah De Bah had eleven mouths to feed
instead of four_.

At night, when the wind howled and trees wailed in their distress, he
sweated in fear, and more than once the thought came to him to abandon
his family and go in search of Toinette.  His visions of the fate which
might be overtaking her became almost unbearable.  Wuskoo added to his
burden, for the old man's courage broke under slow starvation, and his
dismal forebodings drove Jeems nearly mad.  Gray Fox kept his cheer,
though he became so emaciated that his cheekbones were ready to break
through the skin.  Wood Pigeon's eyes stabbed Jeems deepest.  They grew
so big and dark in her little thin face and were filled with such
hungry depths that he expected the gentle spirit to leave her body at
any time.  Yet she made no complaint, and the pathos of her smile
always greeted him.  His hunts were not long now, and seldom took him
more than three or four miles from the cabin, for his own strength was
ebbing.  His only hope was to kill an occasional bird, and it was in
the darkest hour that an answer came to his prayers.  In a blizzard
against which he was working his way in half-blindness, he stumbled
upon a doe as weak as himself and killed her.  Without this stroke of
fortune, Wood Pigeon and Wuskoo must have died.  When the thaws came,
they were alive.  Raccoons began to appear and fleshy roots could be
gathered out of the opening streams.  Early March brought a warm break
in which Jeems and his companions started for Chenufsio.  Food was
plentiful on the way, and each night they gathered strengthening sap
from the maples.

They arrived at Chenufsio.  The people there had lived frugally on
their supplies, and from the first running of the maple sap had been
making sugar.  Only four families had preceded Jeems to the village,
and of their number, which was twenty-eight, five had died.  No word
had been received from Tiaoga and his warriors.

The maple sap ran steadily.  A few iron kettles and many birchbark
cauldrons steamed night and day in the making of the biggest run of
sugar that had been known in years.  In spite of this opening grace of
spring, there hung over Chenufsio a grim spectre whose shadow grew
darker with each day that passed.

This spectre was death.  Scarcely a family returned which did not bring
grief with it.  And Ah De Bah, the mightiest hunter of them all, did
not come.  No one had heard of him.  No one knew where he was.
Fifty--seventy--a hundred--and then a hundred and fifty of those who
had gone in the break-up were accounted for by the end of March.  Among
them was Mary Daghlen.  Of their number, thirty had died.  Still Ah De
Bah, the Tall Man, did not come.

Then he appeared one day.  He was a grotesque rack of fleshless bones
whom Tiaoga would not have recognized.  Behind him trailed his people.
Jeems counted them before he could tell one from another.  Eleven!  He
ran toward them, and Toinette swayed from the line at the head of which
the Tall Man marched.  He might not have known her at first if she had
not met him in this way, for those who were behind Ah De Bah walked
with bowed heads and dragging steps like death figures in a weird
parade.  Her eyes stared at him from a face so strange and thin that it
choked his joy.  Her body was not heavier than a child's when he
clasped her.  Then she began to cry softly with her face against his
breast.

He carried her to the tepee.  Her clothes were in tatters, her
moccasins worn to shreds.  She was so small a burden that her lightness
sent horror through him and his eyes were blinded by a hot fire when
she raised a cold hand to touch his face.  He placed her on the soft
skins in the tepee, then he was conscious of Wood Pigeon near him, and
in a moment Mary Daghlen came in.  Jeems made way for them.  He went
outside, and in his path was a creature who leapt weakly against him.
It was Odd, a skeleton with red and watery eyes and jaws falling apart.
Jeems waited until the Thrush came out and told him she was going for
warm water and food and that Wood Pigeon was undressing Toinette.  Then
he sought the others.  All but Ah De Bah had disappeared and were being
cared for.  The Tall Man could scarcely stand as he told his story.  He
had brought his eleven people back alive--_the dog and he_.  Like the
truly great, he gave credit to his inferior.  Without the dog, he would
have failed in his struggle to feed eleven mouths--and Jeems knew why
Odd had not been eaten.

After a time, Mary Daghlen let him see Toinette again.  She was in her
bed of skins.  The look which had frightened him was gone from her
eyes, and they were bright with the joy of his presence.  Her hair was
brushed and replaited in two gleamy braids.  She held out her arms to
him, and he knelt beside her.  Wood Pigeon looked at the two with
shining eyes, and a soft mist gathered in Mary Daghlen's.  After this,
Jeems did not see Toinette again for an afternoon and a night.  During
this time she slept, and the Thrush and Wood Pigeon were never far from
her side.  The next day she walked with him about the town.

What was in Toinette's heart was also in Mary Daghlen's.  The young
girl who had known no other life than that of her adopted people since
babyhood, but whose mother had kept God and Church alive in her soul,
watched with increasing anxiety for the return of Shindas, and she told
Toinette that at last she was prepared to yield to her environment, and
if no priest came that spring or summer she would marry Shindas in the
Indian way.  This thought now held less of horror for Toinette.  She
had seen the fidelity and courage of an Indian family in its struggle
against death; she had seen the Tall Man gnaw at bitter bark that his
women and children might have scraps of skin and flesh; she had seen a
mother hide her portion of food day after day that she might save it
for her children; she had witnessed a faith and devotion which could
have been inspired by nothing less than the strength of God in their
souls.  Her prejudices melted away in spite of their background of
unforgettable tragedy, and she began to experience emotions which had
not come to her before.  She loved Wood Pigeon with the passion of a
mother, and no sister could have found a warmer place in her breast
than Mary Daghlen.  Friendships grew up quickly about her, children
were happy when she was with them, men and women accepted her with
quiet devotion.  And though she said nothing of it to Jeems, the
conviction was growing in her heart that she would not allow another
winter to separate them, even if a priest did not come to Chenufsio.

But he came, following closely the months of starvation.  He was a
gaunt, death-faced man, on his way to take the place of a brother who
had died among the Indians of the Ohio.  That was what he said.
History was to relate otherwise, for a year later he was the force
behind the Abenakis in their slaughter of the English at Fort William
Henry.  His name was Father Pierre Roubaud.  He was a cold, terrible
man of God.  He did not smile in Chenufsio, he did not bring solace, he
was like a sombre cloud that drove on with the _threat_ of God and not
with Divine promise and cheer.  Yet he was the Church.  He would have
died a thousand deaths for the Cause of which he was the spiritual if
not the moral representative.  He would have eaten human flesh in
defence of it.  He did see such flesh eaten by his savage disciples at
Fort William Henry.  He remained in Chenufsio two days.  On the second
of these days he married Jeems and Toinette according to the ritual of
the Catholic Church.[2]

The gloom he brought with him was dissipated by this event.  Chenufsio
gave itself up to a few hours of rejoicing in honour of Tiaoga's
daughter and the son of Wuskoo.

But this happier spirit could not endure long with the people.  Death
had settled on them heavily.  No word had come from Tiaoga and his
warriors.  There were whisperings that they had been annihilated in
battle and would never return.  Anxiety grew into fear, fear into
certainty.  The grimness of a tragedy darker than the sable robes of
the priest hovered over Chenufsio.


In their happiness, Jeems and Toinette did not feel the undercurrent of
change about them.  Their abiding place became a home whose roots
spread so securely that death could not have torn them up.  Where there
had been the restlessness of doubt and uncertainty was now the mental
absoluteness of two lives transformed into one.  The cloud of the
tragedy through which they had passed was a curtain vaguely soft and
distant behind them; they thought of it, they talked of it, and dreams
sometimes awakened Toinette to find comfort in Jeems's arms.  But its
memories did not wound so deeply.  The spirits of Tonteur and of
Jeems's mother drew nearer to them each day, strengthening with
invisible chains the love which bound them.  Like all the pure loves of
youth, theirs was widely encompassing.  It embraced the whole world and
made a paradise of their small and savage part of it.  It was the
Thrush who first made them see what was happening about them.  At heart
Mary was Indian.  Her babyhood, her childhood, her budding womanhood
had been spent among her adopted people, and love had come to make more
complete the allegiance which had grown through the years.  As days and
weeks passed without word from Tiaoga, the fear that Shindas was dead
clutched her with an evil hand.  She began to avoid Toinette and kept
to herself.  Toinette had never seen an Indian woman cry; she had
comforted a mother who held a dead child in her arms, yet a grief as
old as the world had failed to bring tears into that mother's eyes.
The Thrush did not weep in her sorrow.  The hardness which had settled
in the faces about her came into her own.  She was a changed Mary
Daghlen.  She was Opitchi the Seneca.

It was this change in the one she had come to regard as a sister which
startled Toinette into a realization of the situation which was
gathering about her and Jeems, and she was now destined to witness in
all of its savagery that streak in Indian character which arouses hate
and the desire for vengeance in the face of adversity at the hands of
human enemies.  Jeems marked its rising symptoms.  He was no longer
greeted with friendliness.  Men were sullen and aloof, and women toiled
without their usual chatter.  Hunters went into the forests without
enthusiasm and returned in stoical gloom.  The old men met in endless
councils, while the younger ones sharpened their hatchets and waited
with increasing restlessness.  Death and misfortune had ridden too
hard, and human nerves were at the breaking point.  Chenufsio was like
a handful of powder ready for the touch of fire.

Then came the lightning flash.

It was an afternoon late in May when Shindas appeared in Chenufsio, and
with a white woman's abandon Mary Daghlen ran into his arms.  Shindas
held her for a moment before warrior ethics made him thrust her away.
He was alone.  His arms and shoulders were hacked and cut and some of
the wounds were scarcely healed.  A scar lay across his cheek.  His
moccasins were in tatters, and his eyes held the ferocious light of a
wolf that had been hunted.  He made no effort to soften the news of
which he was the bearer.  He had come from the border of the Cayuga
country as a messenger from Tiaoga and was many hours ahead of his
comrades.  _Tiaoga was returning with nine of his thirty warriors_.
_The others were dead_.

This tragedy was a cataclysmic one even for a tribe of the most warlike
of the Six Nations.  Nothing had equalled it in Seneca history for
generations.  Twenty were dead out of thirty--the flower of
Chenufsio--the very sinew of Tiaoga's people!

Shindas waited until his words had sunk like barbs of iron into the
hearts of the men and women about him.  He waited until there seemed no
relief from the despair which settled over them, and then slowly gave
the names of those who had been slain by their enemies.  He was like an
inquisitor revelling in the torture he inflicted, and at the end his
voice rose until it carried far back among the oaks.  A white man had
killed three of the twenty warriors.  He was a prisoner now--with
Tiaoga.  They had put out his eyes so that he could not see.  They had
built a fire around him in which it had been their intention to see him
die.  But in the last moment when the flames were scorching him Tiaoga
had pulled the blazing fuel away with his own hands in order that the
people of Chenufsio could witness his writhings at the fire stake.

After this one might have thought that mad men and women and not a
grief-stricken people filled Chenufsio.  For hours the lament of the
women did not die out.  Still Toinette saw no tears.  Her horror
increased as she observed the preparations for vengeance; the digging
of a hole and the setting in it of a tall stake, all by women's hands;
the gathering of pitchy fuel by little children and their mothers; the
transformation of friends she had known into fiends whose eyes filled
with hatred when they looked at her.  She tried to hide from these
things In their home and to keep Jeems with her.  Shindas came to them.
He had a command from Tiaoga for Jeems.  It was that Jeems should go to
the village of Kanestio seventy miles distant and bear news of a war
party from that town.  Shindas gave him this message and saw that he
departed with it.  He was no longer a brother.  He disclosed no sign of
pleasure when he learned that Toinette was Jeems's wife.  Mary Daghlen
found him so grimly changed that he frightened her.

Toinette remained alone.  No one came to see her except Wood Pigeon,
and the afternoon following the day of Shindas's arrival the child ran
in with wide eyes to tell her that Tiaoga was approaching.  Toinette
knew she must see this white man and be one of the first to greet
Tiaoga.  She bound the red filet of cloth around her forehead and
fastened the long yellow feather in it.  She wore the most treasured of
the things which had belonged to Silver Heels.  The populace had
gathered in the edge of the plain, and when she joined it a murmur of
disapproval swept about her.  Women's voices made this sound while men
looked away from her sullenly.  Wherever she moved, people drew back as
if her touch held the blight of plague.  Wood Pigeon innocently
repeated words which brought the truth to her.  Chenufsio no longer
believed in her.  She was not the spirit of Silver Heels.  Tiaoga had
made a mistake, and bad fortune instead of good had come with
her--famine, death, this defeat at the hands of their enemies.  Wood
Pigeon heard a woman hiss between thin lips that the interloper who had
taken Silver Heels's place should die at the stake with the white man.
The child did not repeat this.  Her hand trembled in Toinette's.

They were standing at the head of the waiting lines when Tiaoga and the
remnant of his band came over the hill and across the fields.  Shindas
had said there was to be no physical demonstration against the
prisoner, who was to be kept strong for torture at the stake.  Toinette
shivered.  It was a different homecoming this time.  The people were
like tigers holding their passions in leash.  There was something
demoniac in the faces of the children.  Even the eyes of those whose
loved ones had escaped death held only the deep-seated fire of hatred.
Tiaoga came.  His face was like a mask of rock as he passed so near
that Toinette might have touched him.  The prisoner followed.  His
clothes were torn from the upper part of his body.  He was a powerfully
built man with great hands and wide shoulders.  On each side of him
walked a warrior, for he was blind and needed guidance.  His empty eye
sockets, hidden by drooping lids, gave to his round red face the
appearance of one walking in a ghastly sleep.  Yet he was not overcome
by the enormity of the catastrophe which had befallen him, nor did he
betray fear of what lay ahead.  He sensed the presence of the people
and held his head high as if trying to see them.  It was a bald head.

Toinette swayed backward and struggled in a moment of darkness to keep
herself from falling.

The prisoner was Hepsibah Adams.



[1] Mary Daghlen's people moved westward from the valley of the Juniata
in 1738.  A year later William Daghlen was slain by the Senecas and his
wife and infant daughter were taken prisoners.  The mother died in
Chenufsio when Mary was ten years old.  When the Seneca villages were
made to surrender their white prisoners, Mary Daghlen refused to give
up the life of her Indian husband and his people.

[2] Daniel James Bulain and Marie Antoinette Tonteur were married by
Father Pierre Roubaud on the twenty-seventh day of April, 1756, as
recorded later by Father Roubaud, after the massacre at Fort William
Henry.




CHAPTER XIX

No one but Wood Pigeon observed the faintness which came over Toinette.
Some force had drawn a smothering curtain about her making it difficult
to see or breathe.  When the shock passed, they were standing alone
with the mob closing in behind Tiaoga and his single captive.  Its
pent-up emotion burst loose in a pandemonium, and amid the excitement
Toinette went back to the cabin which Jeems had built near Tiaoga's
tepee.

She sent Wood Pigeon in quest of Shindas, and when the young Seneca
appeared, she pleaded with him to save the prisoner from death, urging
him with all her strength to put aside his bitterness and help her in
this hour.  She told him the white man was Jeems's uncle and her
father's old friend, a man who had always been a brother to the Indians
until the Mohawks murdered the sister whom he had loved with an even
greater love than that which Shindas had for Mary Daghlen.  But Shindas
was unmoved.  Her words fell upon a heart of flint, and no sign of
sympathy crossed his countenance as he listened.  He left without
betraying a gesture of hope.

Her failure to interest Tiaoga's nephew added to the difficulty of the
situation.  At first she had regretted the absence of Jeems, but now
she was glad he was gone, for the increasing tumult in the village, the
chanting of death songs by the women, the screaming of children, and
the yelling of savages who were working themselves into a frenzy of
rage about the fire pole which would soon receive its victim terrified
her with the growing conviction that nothing could save his uncle.  If
Jeems had been there, she knew he would not have seen Hepsibah Adams
put to death without a struggle fatal to himself.  This thought,
together with the reflection that it was a fortunate chance which had
sent him away, strengthened her determination to help Hepsibah, and she
watched with Wood Pigeon until she saw the chief enter his tepee.  Then
she hurried to him with Wood Pigeon and Odd following her.

Tiaoga's greeting held no promise.  She fancied he made a movement to
extend his hands and that he relaxed in his harshness.  The impression
was dispelled as the Seneca folded his arms across his breast and
regarded her calmly, revealing no gentle aspect as he spoke a few words
in acknowledgment of her visit.  The tragedy which had befallen his
people seemed to have given him a nobler bearing.  A defeated chief
returning to a home racked and torn by death, he retained the majesty
of a king, but this character of the man seemed to project itself from
a thing of stone rather than a substance of flesh and blood.  That his
prisoner bore the same relationship to Jeems which he bore to Shindas
and that the man about to die was loved by Silver Heels brought no
surprise or hesitation to his face.  He waited patiently for her to
finish, then shook his head and pointed through the door to the shadows
gathering in the path of the setting sun.  He stated coldly that the
prisoner must die.  His people demanded that the spirit of the white
man who had slain three of his warriors be destroyed in flames.  They
would wait until it was dark, which was the tribal custom.  Then the
prisoner would be brought from the tepee in which he was lying bound,
and the fire would be lighted.

If it were her desire, she might talk with Jeems's uncle, Tiaoga said.
He was looking into the twilight when he made this concession.  The
Indian women at the farther end of the village were chanting more
loudly as darkness came on.

Tiaoga spoke again.

_She must hurry.  It was growing late.  The captive was in Ah De Bah's
tepee, near the river, and the Tall Man and Shindas were guarding him._

He watched her depart with Wood Pigeon and Odd.  Then she might have
seen a change in him, a change which came when he knew he was alone.

Women and children were wailing behind her--women who had lost their
husbands, others who grieved for their sons, children who were
fatherless.  A ring of fires were burning with the torture stake in the
centre.  When the stage was ready for its victim, it would be an
amphitheatre of flame.

Toinette caught a glimpse of the preparation and trembled at its
clamour.  She was breathless when she came to Ah De Bah's home, which
the hunter had set apart from the others.  The Tall Man stood
motionless before the door with a rifle held in the crook of his arm,
and Shindas sat on the ground near him.  Both saw her coming.  She
paused a few paces from them with her mind struggling against a chaos
of uncertainty and dread.  What could she say to Hepsibah Adams?  How
could she help him when Tiaoga and Shindas and Ah De Bah were eager for
his death?  A moment of cowardice assailed her, a moment in which she
knew it would be easier to turn back than to make herself known to
Hepsibah.  She looked toward the river shimmering in the dusk and saw
the shadows of canoes where their owners had left them on the shore.
It would not be difficult for Wood Pigeon and her to take one of these
canoes and place themselves beyond the sound of what was about to
happen.

Shindas had risen to his feet by the time she recovered her courage.
He spoke a word to the Tall Man and advanced toward her.  He seemed to
have expected her, and pointed to the tepee.  Ah De Bah did not look at
her as she entered.  Neither appeared to notice Wood Pigeon or the dog.

She found Hepsibah stretched out like a dead man, and knelt on the
earth at his side.  He was scarcely conscious of her presence until she
touched him.  She felt the buckskin cords at his wrists; then her hand
found his sightless face.

Bending low over the doomed man she whispered:

"_Hepsibah--Hepsibah Adams--I am Toinette Tonteur._"


Shindas waited with Ah De Bah as the gloom thickened about them.  After
a time, they saw Wood Pigeon going toward the circle of fires.  Shindas
stopped her, and in answer to his question she told him Toinette was
weeping beside the white man and that the dog was with her.

The fires beyond the oaks grew larger and stars began to show
themselves in the sky.  Tiaoga was talking to the people in the blazing
amphitheatre, and Shindas and the Tall Man knew what it meant.  Soon
the order for the prisoner would come.  Ah De Bah watched the fires,
but Shindas paced back and forth as if the nearness of torture made him
restless.  In his face, hidden by the darkness, was the tenseness of
one who listened as he waited.  It was the Tall Man who broke the
silence, wondering why Tiaoga did not send for the prisoner.

A fresh outcry told them that at last the time had come, and Ah De Bah
went to the tepee and held back the flap.  He spoke to Toinette,
calling her Soi Yan Makwun.  There was no answer.  He spoke again and
entered.  After a brief Interval, his voice rose in a demand for
Shindas, and the young Seneca answered it.  Ah De Bah was hunting like
an animal in the blackness.  The tepee was empty.  Toinette and
Hepsibah Adams were gone.

Shindas did not speak.  There was no light to reveal his face as he
went to the edge of the river and saw that a canoe was gone.  He
grunted his wonder when the Tall Man joined him.  The canoe had been
launched within fifty paces of them, and they had not heard a sound.
Words of self-abasement fell from Ah De Bah's lips.  He and Shindas
were like two children, and every man and woman in Chenufsio would
taunt them because of the ease with which the escape had been made.
But the missing canoe could not be far distant.  They would overtake it
quickly, and setting his thought to action he thrust a second canoe
toward the water.  Shindas interposed by calling to Ah De Bah's
distressed mind the fact that Soi Yan Makwun was Tiaoga's daughter, and
since she had brought upon herself the tribal penalty of death, it was
Tiaoga who should command their action.  The fugitives, one of them
blind, could not possibly succeed in their flight.  The night would see
the white man given to the stake, and now that Silver Heels had proved
herself a serpent in the tribe and a traitor to Tiaoga, she would
probably die with him.

Ah De Bah made queer sounds in his chest as they ran to Tiaoga and the
expectant people.  He was not as calm as Shindas when they arrived.  It
was Shindas who announced the deception of the stranger whom they had
accepted as the true spirit of Soi Yan Makwun.  He spoke clearly so all
could hear him.  For a few moments the desire for vengeance was quieted
by the knowledge that this was the greatest blow which could befall
Tiaoga, who had given to the white girl the most sacred of his
possessions--the soul of his lost daughter.  He was coldly and terribly
still.  His face changed before their eyes.  The furrows in it grew
deeper, and it became as hard as the stones in the fields.  They waited
for him to speak, giving him time to fight what was in his breast.
Then words came weighted with the decision of death, rising until they
swelled in a passion that was like a fire consuming everything in its
path.  He declared that his honour and the honour of his people lay in
his hands.  He called on Shindas and Ah De Bah to go with him to
recapture the fugitives, for this was a duty imposed on him first of
all.  Before the night was much older, the fire stake should have its
triumph.  He had forgotten the blind man, for a man without eyes was
already dead.  _He would give to the flames the white girl who had
betrayed them_.

A new sensation possessed Chenufsio after the three had gone.  The
white girl was to be burned!  The thought travelled in whispers from
cautious lips, for this which was about to happen was not a vengeance
of the flesh: it was the spirit of Soi Yan Makwun calling for justice,
a command from the dead before which Tiaoga had not dared to hesitate.
The Silver Heels whose body had died in the pool was watching them.
She was moving among them, listening to their words, filling their
souls with a presence that dulled grief and chastened the frenzy of
hatred.  Even Wood Pigeon, who loved Toinette, could not cry.  Those
who were white drew away in horror.  The fires burned down until they
were eyes in the night.  Hours passed, and the Senecas listened in the
stillness as if oppressed by fear.

At last they heard the chanting of a voice coming nearer as fast as a
canoe could travel.  It was the death song with which Tiaoga had
grieved for his daughter, and the savages were moved by it as leaves
are moved by a wind.  The suspense was broken, for in the song of grief
was also a note of triumph which brought the message that Tiaoga had
been successful in his pursuit.  Fresh fuel was piled on the fires, and
the flames leapt high.  When Tiaoga and his companions came from the
river, they brought no prisoner with them.  Yet a fierce light shone in
their countenances as they entered the illumination, and beginning his
death song again Tiaoga snatched a burning brand and flung it into the
midst of the pitchy material about the torture stake.  In a moment a
winding sheet of flame licked its way up the pole, and around this
Tiaoga danced, finishing his song to the crackling of the pitch.  He
flung himself into a greater passion as he told his people what had
happened.  He described how they had overtaken the fleeing ones at the
edge of the Great Rocks beyond which the water thundered in a
maelstrom.  The blind man had fought with a hatchet he had stolen from
Ah De Bah's tepee until another blade was sunk in his brain to quiet
him.  He was a devil in his blindness, and Tiaoga pointed to Shindas,
who held back his buckskin shirt to show a long and bleeding gash.  The
white man was dead, and his body, weighted by the darkness of his soul,
was gone forever in the deep waters beyond the rocks.

But the unclean one who had tricked them, the girl whose evil spirit
had come to bring dishonour upon them and to desecrate the soul of Soi
Yan Makwun, _they had taken alive_.  Tiaoga's face grew livid.  His
eyes were a madman's as he shrieked his anathema against her.  Had he
not taken her to his bosom?  Had she not worn Soi Yan Makwun's
treasures?  Had they not given her a place in their hearts?  And she
had become a snake!  His own soul had gone so black when they caught
her that he could see only death, for he heard his daughter's voice
crying to him for vengeance.  _So he had killed the treacherous one_.
He had killed her at the command of Silver Heels, whose spirit was
singing to him.  Shindas had heard that song.  Ah De Bah had heard it.
It was like the sweet music of water rippling over white stones in the
springtime.  He had killed the white girl with his own hands and had
flung her body to disappear with that of the blind man.

Suddenly Tiaoga drew from its hiding place next his breast a thing
which brought a gasp to the lips of those about him.  All recognized it
as Toinette's beautiful braid of hair streaming from the bleeding scalp
the savage held above his head.  Wood Pigeon gave a piercing cry.  A
score of times her little brown fingers had plaited those lustrous
tresses for the one she had worshipped.

Tiaoga became more than ever a fiend in the flesh as he danced about
the stake.  Flecks of blood from the red scalp struck his face.  At the
height of his madness he flung it into the heart of the pitchwood fire.

Soi Yan Makwun was avenged and the demand of his people answered.




CHAPTER XX

At noon of the second day of his journey Jeems came to the village of
Kanestio, whose chief was Matozee, or Yellow Bear.  He had travelled
the seventy miles in thirty hours, and was determined to return as
quickly, for he was troubled deeply by the thought that Toinette was
alone at a time when the sentiment of the Indians was turning against
them.  Why he and not a tribal runner had been sent to Yellow Bear
puzzled him, and the fact that he bore a message of small importance
increased his uneasiness.  That Tiaoga, returning at the ebb of his
fortunes, should trouble himself to forward by Shindas a command
intended only for him added another doubt to those in his mind.  These
doubts would have assailed him more heavily had he known that a runner
had preceded him, a young man called Na Swa Ga, or Feathered Arrow, who
carried a more significant message from Tiaoga to Yellow Bear.

He had scarcely reached Kanestio when his weapons, a knife and a
hatchet, were taken from him and he was brought to Matozee.  This
individual, who was killed at Lake George the following year and who
was a boy in appearance though the French held him among the bravest
fighters of the Six Nations, informed Jeems that he was a prisoner.  He
said Tiaoga had defaulted in a payment of corn that was due, and Jeems
was to cover part of the obligation.  Matozee tersely explained the
agreement between the chiefs.  If Jeems attempted to escape and was
caught by his warriors, he would be killed; if by any chance he
succeeded in getting back to Chenufsio, then he would answer to Tiaoga
with his life.  A dead line was drawn encircling the tepee in which he
was to live, and he found himself under a surveillance little less
strict than that accorded to a prisoner whose fate was to be torture or
death.

Dismayed by the change in his fortunes, Jeems could conceive of no
reason for Tiaoga's perfidy except that it must vitally concern
Toinette.  He accepted Matozee's explanation as a falsehood, and
thought Shindas and not Tiaoga was at the bottom of the plot which had
been made to prey upon his freedom, though he had believed Shindas his
best friend among the Senecas.  His alarm increased until, on the
second day, he made up his mind to escape and return to Chenufsio even
if his life were the price of the act.  His uneasiness must have
betrayed his purpose, for the third day found him more closely watched
than before, and at night half a dozen young warriors slept about his
tepee in such positions that he could not move from his shelter without
disturbing at least one of them.

The fourth afternoon he perceived an excited gathering of women and
children some distance from him but paid no attention to it.  Depressed
by fears which had become unbearable, he was determined to gain his
freedom before another dawn.  Increasing cloudiness during the
afternoon and a promise of storm with the beginning of evening added to
his hopes for success.  Thunder and rain came with darkness, and he
feigned sleep at an early hour.  It was almost midnight when he sat up
and listened to the downpour.  He was about to rise to his feet,
certain that no Senecas would be lying in the deluge, when he heard the
sodden rustle of the skin flap to the tepee as it was drawn back and
someone entered.

In a moment a small voice whispered his name.  Cold hands found him as
he held out his arms.  He felt a child's drenched form.

Then came choking words half smothered in the heat of the storm: "_I am
Wood Pigeon.  I ran away from Chenufsio three days ago.  I have come to
tell you Silver Heels is dead._"[1]

Lightning flashes which accompanied the storm that night revealed a
solitary figure hurrying through the wilderness toward Chenufsio, a
figure which sped until it was winded and then continued at a slower
pace with a persistence no beat of rain or blast of wind could halt.

The traveller was Jeems.  Had another come to him with the tale of
horror Wood Pigeon had borne, he would have disbelieved, but truth in
its simplest form had fallen from her lips.  What one might partly have
concealed, she had told with childish candour, and every lightning
flash became a pillar of flame in the glare of which he saw Tiaoga
dancing with Toinette's streaming hair.

Wood Pigeon had repeated the message Toinette entrusted to her a few
minutes preceding her flight with Hepsibah Adams, and no blackness was
so thick that it hid from Jeems the tortured faces of his wife and his
blind uncle as they beckoned him to vengeance.

That he did not lose the narrow trail in his haste was one of the
inexplicable phenomena of chance which are frequently a part of a
somnambulist's adventures.  Instinct more than the guiding marks he
could feel and see kept his feet in the path, and not until the
thickness of the rain-filled night gave way to a gloomy dawn was he
conscious of the obstacles which he had overcome.

Light, though accompanied by sombre clouds and steady rain, served to
bring his soul out of the chaos into which it had fallen.  Toinette was
dead, and the depressive horizons became walls of a prison which held
but that one thought.  She was murdered as his mother had been
murdered.  She was gone, with her father, with his own people, leaving
him alone at last.

Even vengeance seemed futile and inadequate.  Hope did not rise in his
breast.  He had hoped when he knew his mother was dead, he had hoped as
he sought for life among the ruins of Tonteur Manor, he had never quite
given up hope that his uncle was alive.  But now it was impossible for
him to find that saving grace within his mental reach.  As he went on,
he was slowly dispossessed of the power to hate, though every sinew in
his body was bent with implacable resolution in its mission of death.
He would kill Tiaoga.  He would kill Shindas.  There would be only
justice and no gratification of the flesh or the spirit in his act.  A
greater and more encompassing thing than the impulse which had sent him
from Matozee's village began to choke him with a force that was
sickening.  It was his aloneness.  The vastness of the world.  The
sudden going of the one who had remained to make it habitable for him.
Without Toinette there was no reason for its existence, no reason why
it should continue to give him the warmth of life.  Toinette was dead.
It was a fate predestined from the beginning, something he had always
feared vaguely.  Nothing counted now; to kill Tiaoga and Shindas would
not cause a rift in the hopelessness which lay ahead of him.

He advanced with a speed which would have exhausted him at any other
time.  As the hours passed, an explanation for this haste gathered in
his consciousness.  _He was going home_.  That in all of its
significance was the cabin in which Toinette and he had lived.  _Their
home_.  A thing that had not gone with her body and yet was a part of
her which he would find as he had left it when he came to the end of
the trail, unless Tiaoga had destroyed that, too.

The rain fell all through the day.  It was still raining with the dusk
of evening.  The earth was drenched, his footprints were wiped out.
The sky cleared toward midnight, and the full moon came up.  A little
later he reached Chenufsio.  The place gleamed with pools of water.
Suspicious dogs appeared to identify him, but the people were asleep.

He found his cabin with the door closed as it would have been if
Toinette were asleep inside.  He could feel her presence when he
entered.  But she was not there.  He made a light cautiously and
screened it so that eyes outside could not see.  The floor, the walls,
the room were illumined faintly.  He began to put his hands on things,
to gather them here and there, making a bundle of his treasures on the
table--_her things_.  When he had prepared the bundle he armed himself
with a knife and a hatchet and his bow, then extinguished the light and
went out, closing the door behind him.

He sought Shindas, for his plan was to kill him first.  Then he would
kill Tiaoga.  Shindas was not in his tepee.  The place was empty and
his weapons were gone, evidence that he was away on a journey.  For a
few moments after this discovery, Jeems stood in the shadow of an oak
looking at Tiaoga's dwelling place.  The urge to destroy was not strong
in him.  The gentle whispering among the trees and the drip of water
from their foliage combined in a melody of peace which struggled to
turn him from the thought of death.  It might have won if a tall figure
had not come out of the tepee he was watching.  Jeems knew it was
Tiaoga.  The chieftain advanced toward him as if an invisible fate were
leading him to his execution.  Then he paused.  The moon was bright.
It lit up his features thirty yards away as he gazed into a mystery of
distance which his eyes could not penetrate.  What had brought him,
what he was thinking, what the night held for him, Jeems did not ask
himself.  He strung his bow and fitted an arrow.  Then he called
Tiaoga's name in a low voice to let him know that retribution had come.
The bow twanged and a slender shaft sped through the moonlight with the
winged sound of a humming bird.  He heard the arrow strike.  Tiaoga did
not cry out.  His hands clutched at his breast as he sank to the earth
and lay there a motionless blot.

Jeems went down the river.  For many days he hid along its shores
seeking for Toinette's body.  He saw Senecas pass and repass, but as he
travelled almost entirely in the water he was successful in evading
them.

When he reached Lake Ontario, he turned eastward, still carrying his
bundle.  At night he slept with it close to his face, breathing the
precious incense of Toinette's things.  Sometimes he held to his lips
the piece of red cloth she had worn around her hair.

As weeks followed his escape, he grew stupidly dull in some ways.  He
lost desire.  He found himself without a motive in everything he did.
For periods of time he remained in hiding places.  Concealment became a
habit rather than an intelligent act.  No spring of action encouraged
him to return to Forbidden Valley or the Richelieu, and it was chance
and not a definite purpose which brought him to the place on Lake
Champlain called Ticonderoga by the Indians.  This was late in the
summer of 1756.  The French had occupied a point of land and were
building Fort Vaudreuil and Fort Carillon.  Jeems seized upon these
activities with the avidity of one who at last had found something to
assuage a killing hunger.  He joined Montcalm's forces and was given a
musket and a spade in place of his bow and arrows.

He entered now an apprenticeship of digging and building in the earth
where the forts were going up.  The work and its environment, the
excitement of war, and the ever-increasing news of French victories
were a relief to his broken spirits, but they did not thrill him.  He
fought against this apathy.  He tried to hate once more.  He repeated
to himself many times that the English and their Indians were
responsible for the tragedies which had befallen his loved ones.  But
he could not rise to the passion for vengeance.  He wanted to fight, he
wanted to see the English and their allies overwhelmed, but his
emotions were as dull as they were implacable.  They burned with a
fatalistic evenness which neither triumph nor defeat could raise to
great heights or lower to the depths they had plumbed.  Death could
never stir him again as it had already stirred him, no shambles could
sicken him and no victory bring to him the remotest gladness of the
song he had chanted in the firelight at Chenufsio.  When the English
stronghold of Oswego was laid in ashes and every church in New France
sang Te Deum in gratitude and joy, he was not deeply moved.  But the
same day, when a newly arrived militiaman from Quebec spoke a familiar
name, his heart leapt as if it had been roused from sleep with a blow,
and after that the comradeship of the Lower Town man whose sister's
name was Toinette meant more to him than the victory at Oswego or the
concentration of French forces at Ticonderoga which followed it.

He made no confidants, and no one knew his story.  An officer found he
was acquainted with the country, and he was made a Lake George Scout in
time to be captured by Rogers and his rangers on Christmas Eve of 1756.
He escaped in January and was back at Fort Carillon early in February,
when he learned that Paul Tache had been one of the French officers at
Oswego, and that he had been killed.  Jeems felt a pang of regret.
Lately he had been thinking of Paul Tache and of Toinette's mother,
wondering what their attitude would be when some day he told them what
had happened after the massacre at Tonteur Manor.

There is no letter or information which covers the lapse in Jeems's
military history between February and August of 1757, at which time he
was present at the capture of Fort William Henry, or Fort George, and
witnessed the massacre of its English garrison by uncontrollable French
Indians led by the Abenakis.  Here Jeems must have experienced an
unusual shock, for soon after the killing, when in their madness some
of the Indians were cooking English flesh on spits and in kettles, he
came upon the black-frocked priest who had accompanied the Abenakis and
found him to be the Jesuit, Pierre Roubaud, who had made Toinette his
wife at Chenufsio.  Father Roubaud was even then preparing that
eyewitness document which was destined to become a valuable part of
Jesuit and French-English history, and whose hundred or more
age-yellowed pages, written mostly by torchlight amid scenes of horror,
one may read in the Jesuit archives at Quebec.  The priest saw Jeems,
but so intent was he upon his task and so great were the changes
wrought by sixteen months that he did not recognize him, and Jeems left
his presence without making himself known.[2]

After Fort William Henry and the brilliant French successes which
preceded it, Jeems began to feel the inevitable pressure which is bound
to crush the life from a country that is enormously outweighed by its
antagonist.  The English colonies had put an end to quarrels among
themselves, and a million and a half people were set in motion against
the eighty thousand in New France, and behind this inundating force
were powerful English armies and a still more powerful English navy
already inspired by Pitt and Wolfe.  As Te Deums were sung because of
his victories, Montcalm knew that New France was hovering at the brink
of ruin, but at no time did the outcome of his heroic contest press
with greater certainty upon himself than upon Jeems.  While one fought
on with the inspiration of God and mother and wife in his soul,
struggling to shield the nation from its death blow, the other fought
doggedly in the ranks but saw the end with equal if not clearer vision.
For with Jeems there were no moments in which he placed such faith in
God that hope rose above the darkness of environment as was the case
with Montcalm even in his blackest hours.  Through the lives of his
wife, his mother and his father and his Uncle Hepsibah, Jeems could see
and feel the impending catastrophe more than one who measured it in the
counting of ships and guns and soldiers.

As the captured cannon were rushed from Fort William Henry to
Ticonderoga, Jeems surrendered himself, as Montcalm was doing in
another way, to the last chapter in his fate.  There was no goal at
which he could aim, nothing for which he could pray; winning for
Canada, should the miracle of ultimate victory come, could hold no more
of solace and happiness for him than defeat at the hands of the
English.  There were times when his French and English body was divided
against itself, when his mother and Hepsibah Adams and all they stood
for looked upon him questioningly from out of the past as if he had
turned traitor to some precious part of them, yet in such a way that
they could not condemn him.  In hours like these, the spirit of
Toinette came to his side and placed her hand in his, and he knew it
was for her he was fighting, for the home which would have been theirs,
for the country she would have made a paradise for him.  She grew
nearer as the sureness of an approaching end crept upon him, and he
felt the beginning of a comfort he had not known before.  It was the
consolation of something about to happen.  Something that was
tremendous and final.  Something that would have to do with her and
with him.  He knew what it was and waited patiently for it as another
year passed.

Then came Ticonderoga, that July 8, 1758, when over a space of a
hundred acres one could not walk without staining the soles of his
shoes with French or English blood--that red day in history and heroism
when three thousand toil-worn, harassed soldiers of New France faced
six thousand British regulars and nine thousand American militiamen;
the day on which Jeems and his comrades drove back the waves of scarlet
and gold and a thousand kilted Highlanders of the Black Watch led by
Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, until, as Montcalm wrote to his wife, even
the bullet-scarred trees seemed to be dripping blood.  Through hours of
tumult and death, Jeems loaded and fired, and stabbed with his bayonet,
and the thing for which he was waiting did not come.  Men fell around
him, tens and scores and hundreds of them, as the day wore on.  He saw
whole ranks shiver and crumble before blasts of fire.  But when it was
ended and the English dropped back in a last smashing defeat, he was
unscathed except for bruises and powder burns on his flesh.

The day after the victory, when Abercrombie and his English and
Colonials were in flight, Montcalm caused to be planted on the
battlefield a cross inscribed with these lines:

  Soldier and chief and rampart's strength are nought;
  Behold the conquering Cross!  'Tis God the triumph wrought.


Jeems helped erect this cross.  His feet stamped the earth about it,
and its words burned themselves as deeply in his mind as they were
carven in the timber.  God!  Yes, God must have hurled back the enemy
which had outnumbered them almost five to one.  But what had God
against him?  And why had this God destroyed Toinette?  He heard
Montcalm pray.  He listened as he told the bleeding remnants of his
troops that New France was saved in spite of the tragic fall of
Louisbourg.  But Montcalm retreated, and this puzzled Jeems.  The army
began to learn the truth as, weary and footsore, it turned toward
Quebec.  Rapacity, folly, intrigue, and falsehood had fed at the heart
of New France until it was honeycombed by the rottenness of
dissolution.  Montcalm was its one star of hope, and as autumn came,
then winter, it seemed to Jeems that Montcalm's God had deserted him.
The St. Lawrence was filled with British ships.  The harvest was
meagre, and a barrel of flour cost two hundred francs.  Even Montcalm
ate horseflesh.  Still he did not lose faith in God.  A thousand
scoundrels headed by Vaudreuil had fattened on the nation's downfall,
and he prayed for them.  "What a country!" he exclaimed.  "Here all the
knaves grow rich and the honest men are ruined."  A fighting man, a man
of sword and death, he kept his faith to the end.  "If we are driven
from the St. Lawrence," he wrote to his wife, "we will descend the
Mississippi and make a final stand for France among the swamps of
Louisiana."

Thus planned and prayed the man whose bleached skull is now shown to
visitors in the Ursuline Convent at Quebec.  Through the spring and
summer of 1759, Jeems watched the spiders as they wove their web ever
closer about Quebec, the last French stronghold in America.  It was in
May of 1756 that Toinette had been killed, and it was in May of 1759
that he first saw from the Montmorenci shore the mighty rock which so
long had been the mistress of the New World.

Four months later, on the most eventful September 13th of written
history--that "To-morrow Morning" which will never be forgotten--he
stood on the Plains of Abraham.

Montcalm's God was about to complete an immaculate elegy which hung in
the air like a mighty chorus waiting for a whispered command to begin.
To Jeems Bulain, facing the sun and the thin red line of the British
across the meadows where Abraham Martin had grazed his cattle, fate was
bringing an end to uncertainty and chaos.  It had missed him at Fort
William Henry, at Ticonderoga, at Montmorenci, but here he could feel
its presence--an escape--a release from bondage--something greater than
iron or flesh--as the crimson lines drew nearer.  He felt the spirit of
what Montcalm had said to his doomed heroes a few minutes before, "_God
is surely watching over the Plains of Abraham to-day._"



[1] Wanonat, then in her ninth year, made this seventy-mile journey
from Chenufsio to Kanestio late in May, 1756.  Ten years later, the
heroic little Seneca maid married a Frenchman named De Poncy and lived
in the valley of the Richelieu.

[2] It is recorded that Jeems Bulain was one of the few who dug the two
long trenches in which the massacred English were buried.  Signs of
these trenches with almost the spade marks left by Jeems's hands are
clearly visible to-day in the hollow below the ruins of the old fort.




CHAPTER XXI

It was ten o'clock, the hour of the crisis.  At dawn it had been foggy;
at six showers had fallen; now it was hot.  It might have been July
instead of September.  In darkness twenty-four British volunteers had
climbed the steep height from the river, hanging to bushes, digging
their fingers into crevices of rock, crawling with their faces against
the earth, making their way foot by foot.  "I am afraid you cannot do
it," Wolfe had said, looking at the pitlike blackness above.  But they
did.  Nameless in history, they destroyed the old map of the world and
put another in its place.  In that hour twenty-four men ruined France,
gave rise to a greater England, created a new nation.

At the top, Vergor, the French officer, slept soundly with his guards.
To him fate might have given the glory of keeping the old map intact.
But he was killed before he could wipe the daze of slumber from his
eyes.  Wolfe's Path was made, and like a thin stream of red ants the
British continued to ascend the trail which had been blazed for them.

Vaudreuil, the governor, the arch-villain who lost half a continent for
France, lay in his cozy nest of iniquity a short distance away dreaming
of sensual days with the faithless Madame de Paean and planning a
future with the King's own mistress, La Pompadour.  Across the St.
Charles, expecting the British in a different direction, sleepless,
worn, robbed of every chance to win by the weakness and imbecility of
this favourite of a king's mistress, was Montcalm.

Jeems was with the battalion of Guienne which had come up from its camp
on the St. Charles at six o'clock in the morning, its white uniforms
thronging the ridge of Buttes--Neveu, from which it beheld the British
molehill growing into a mountain.

About him Jeems saw the Plains of Abraham, and a strange song was in
his heart as he thought that Toinette had been of this soil and that
her great-great-grandfather had given name to the earth soon to run red
with blood.  The Plains were wide and level in most parts, with bushes
and trees and cornfields dotting them here and there.  They were the
front yard to Quebec, a field of destiny lying between the precipitous
descents to the St. Lawrence on one side and the snakelike, lazy St.
Charles on the other, with a world of splendid terrain spreading in a
panorama under the eyes.

As he lay watching with the men of Guienne, Jeems could scarcely have
guessed that this scene of pastoral beauty was the stage upon which one
of the epic tragedies of all time was about to be enacted.  A feeling
of rest possessed him, as if a period had come to mark the end of the
confusion and unhappiness which had held him a victim for three years,
and he felt mysteriously near the presence of influences he could not
see.  He was a product of times when faith in the spiritual guidance of
the affairs of men was strong, and it was not difficult for him to
conceive that Toinette was close at his side, whispering in words which
only his soul could hear _that he had come home_.

Six o'clock grew into seven, seven into eight, and eight into nine.  In
front of him England was forming.  Behind him, tricked and
outgeneralled, Montcalm was rushing in mad haste across the St. Charles
bridge and under the northern rampart of Quebec to enter the city
through the Palace Gate.  At the edge of the Plains of Abraham the
boyish Wolfe, poet and philosopher, was preparing for glory or doom.
In the quaint, narrow streets of the town were gathering hordes of
Indians in scalp locks and war paint, troops of starved and cheated
Canadians ready to make a last stand for their homes, battalions of Old
France in white uniforms and with gleaming bayonets, battle-scarred
veterans of Sarre and Languedoc and Roussillon and Barn, fed on meagre
rations for weeks but eager to fight for Montcalm.  Ahead, where Jeems
was looking, were quiet and order and the stoic sureness of England's
morale.  Behind were courage and chivalry and the iron sinews of heroes
in the throes of excitement and undisciplined rush.

Jeems saw none of this and nothing beyond the distant red lines.  The
Plains lay in sunshine, with bird wings flashing, crows feeding in the
cornfields.  The earth was a great Oriental rug warm with autumn
tintings, the woods yellow and gold in a frame about it.  The guns of
Samos, of Sillery, of the boats in the river made sleepy detonations,
and on the rise of Buttes--Neveu Jeems might have slept, lulled by
that never-ending monotony of sound, the warmth of the sun, the blue of
the sky, the stillness of the Plains.  He closed his eyes, and the
silver and gold mists of sunsets rose about him, the ends of days in
which he saw the Plains peopled again, first by Abraham Martin and his
cows a hundred and thirty-four years before, then by Toinette, his
father and mother, Hepsibah Adams--and himself.  Here was a place he
had known, a place his feet had trod, his soul had lived.  He heard the
earth whispering these things, the earth which he held between his
fingers as if it were Toinette's hands.

In the town, priests and nuns were praying, and a bell sent forth its
melody, a cheer to man, another appeal to God.  New France was on her
knees, and Montcalm was on the Plains, some of his men coming through
the gate of St. Louis and some through that of St. John, breathless and
eager, to where the banners of Guienne fluttered on the ridge.

Tartans waved and bagpipes screamed defiance as Montcalm waited for
reinforcements which never came, and the bushes and knolls and
cornfields were taken by fifteen hundred Canadians and Indians whose
guns answered with a roar.  Back and forth the battle raged, and France
began to crumble.

Then came ten o'clock.

Something must have broken in Montcalm's heart.  His judgment wavered,
and he gave the fatal command which raised England to the supremacy of
the world.

The French had formed with bayonets fixed in five short, thick lines,
four white and one blue; the English stood with double-shotted guns in
a long, six-jointed, thin red line.  Level ground lay between.  Had
England advanced, history might have written itself differently.  But
England waited.  France advanced.

Jeems went with her.  He was already hit.  A shot had caught him in the
shoulder, and blood ran down his arm and dripped from his fingers.  He
felt no pain, but a slumberous feeling was creeping over him as he
staggered on with the lines.  He saw Montcalm ride along the front of
his men, cheering them on to victory; he noted the gold-embroidered
green coat he wore, the polished cuirass at his breast, the white linen
of his wristband, and he heard his voice as he asked, "Don't you want a
little rest before you begin?"  The answer, "_We're never tired before
a battle!_" rose about him.  Jeems's lips framed the words which were
repeated like increasing blasts in a storm.  But the sun was growing
less bright to his eyes.

An advance of forty or fifty paces, then a pause, another advance,
another pause, in the way regulars fought at that time on flat and open
battlefields, and Jeems measured the distance between himself and the
red line of the British.  At each halt he fired with his comrades, then
loaded and advanced.  The red line had broken precedent.  It made no
move to play its part in the prescribed routine of war, and continued
to stand like a wall.  Openings came in it where crimson blotches sank
to the ground, but those who remained were unmoved and steadfast as
they waited with their double-shotted guns.  A tremor ran through the
French, a thickening of men's breaths, a quickening of their
heartbeats, a crumbling under strain, while the melody of the bell
stole softly over the Plains of Abraham.

They halted again less than a hundred paces away, and still England's
thinning line did not fire.  A man close to Jeems laughed as if nerves
had cracked inside his head.  Another gasped as if he had been struck.
Jeems tried to hold himself erect.  The weird sensation came over him
that the armies were not going to fight, after all.

Then he heard his name.  It was his mother calling him.  He answered
with a cry and would have swayed toward her if hands had not dragged
him back.  "_Mad!_" he heard a voice say.  He dropped his gun as he
tried to wipe the blindness from his eyes.  Things cleared.  There were
the red line, the open space, sunlight--something passing.  Those who
lived did not forget what they saw.  England took the story home with
her, France gave it a little place in her history.  For a few seconds
men were not looking at death but at a dog.  An old, decrepit dog who
limped as he walked, _a dog with one foot missing_.

Jeems made an effort to call.

"_Odd--Odd----_"

Then came Montcalm's command--"_Forward!_"

He marched with the others into the jaws of death, blind, groping,
straining to make the dog hear words which never passed his lips.
There was no longer a day.  No sun.  No red wall before him.  But his
ears still caught the tramp of feet and the melody of the bell.  These
died in a roar, the roar of double-shotted guns.  England fired at
forty paces, and France went down in a shapeless mass of dead.

With the front line fell Jeems.




CHAPTER XXII

It was a long time before Jeems again heard the melody of the bell.
When he broke through the blackness which had overtaken him on the
Plains of Abraham, he found himself in the General Hospital under the
care of the nuns of that institution.  It seemed as if only a few
minutes had passed since the crash of the English guns.  But it was the
middle of October.  Montcalm and Wolfe were dead, Quebec lay in a mass
of ruins, and England was supreme in the New World, although the battle
of Sainte Foy had not been fought.  From then until late in November,
when he was strong enough to take advantage of the freedom of movement
the British gave to French soldiers who had been wounded, he thought
frequently of the three-legged dog that had passed between the French
and English lines.  He said nothing of the incident, not even to Mre
de Sainte-Claude, the Superior, who took a special interest in him, nor
to any of her virgin sisters who cared for him so tenderly in the dark
hours of his struggle for life and the more hopeful ones of his
convalescence.  Each day of increasing strength added to his suspicion
that what he had seen and heard were the illusions of senses crumbling
under the effects of hurt and shock, and he kept to himself whatever
faith he had in them.

When at last he was able to mingle with the disarmed populace and the
crowds of soldiers in the streets, he was strangely unlike the old
Jeems.  He had been badly wounded and realized that nothing less than a
miraculous intervention which the nuns ascribed to the mercy of God
could have kept him beyond the reach of death.  A ball had passed
through his shoulder when three others struck him at the discharge of
the English guns.  That they had failed to kill him he did not accept
as a blessing.  The impression grew in him that he had been very close
to his mother and Toinette and that a fate not satisfied with his
unhappiness had drawn him back from them.  This thought established his
belief that Odd's appearance as well as his mother's voice and the
nearness of Toinette had been purely spiritual.

But whenever he saw a dog in the streets of Quebec he looked to see if
one foot were missing.

His excursions were short and he wandered alone.  He saw a number of
his comrades, but they did not recognize him and he did not feel the
impulse to let them know who he was.  Flesh had dropped from his bones
until he resembled one approaching death instead of escaping it.  He
walked with stooped shoulders.  His eyes were sunken, and his hands, in
one of which he carried a staff, were emaciated to the thinness of
extreme age.  The small interest life had held for him seemed to have
shrivelled with the strength of his body.  The English rekindled the
spark, his mother's English, the half of himself which he had tried to
hate.  They were not acting the part of conquerors.  They
were--unbelievably--friends.  From the gallant Brigadier Murray to the
commonest soldier, they were courteous, humane, generous, dividing
their rations with the starved citizens, sharing their tobacco with
them, helping without pay to build up ruined homes, each day working
themselves deeper into the good will of those who had been cheated and
despoiled by Governor Vaudreuil and his degenerate crowd and by the
weakness of the King of France.  Even the nuns and the priests welcomed
them, men and women of God who for two hundred years had fought
indefatigably for New France.  Honour and chivalry had come to conquer
Quebec and had brought such friendship for its people that a British
soldier was hanged in the public square for stealing from a resident of
the town.

Jeems felt this comradeship of his enemies.  At first he was taciturn
and aloof and talked only when courtesy required the effort of him.  He
observed that many eyes regarded him with a pity which added shame to
the burden of his distress, and at times when he was struggling to hold
his stooped shoulders erect, sympathetic hands came to help him in
spite of himself.  His health returned slowly, but in the second week
of his freedom an incident occurred which sent a warmer glow through
his veins.  He heard two soldiers talking on the street.  They were
talking about a dog--_a three-legged dog that passed in front of their
line as they had stood ready to fire upon the French_.

When he returned to the little room which he still occupied in the
General Hospital Mre de Sainte-Claude thought fever had set itself
upon him again.  The next day, he went out looking for the dog and
found others who had beheld what his own eyes had seen.  But he asked
no questions except in a casual way, and did not reveal the reason for
his interest.  He knew the dog could not be Odd, yet it was Odd for
whom he was seeking.  This paradoxical state of mind bothered him, and
he wondered if his illness had left him entirely sane.  To think Odd
had escaped Tiaoga's vengeance and had wandered through hundreds of
miles of wilderness to Quebec would surely be an indication that it had
not.  He continued to seek, trying to believe he was making the quest a
diversion which was healthful for his body, and that curiosity, not
hope or faith, was encouraging him to find the three-legged dog.  As
Lower Town was the home of most of the dogs, he spent much of his time
among its ruins, but without success.

His search came to an unexpected end in St. Louis Street where many
aristocratic families of the city lived.  Nancy Gagnon, who had been
Nancy Lotbinire before her marriage to Peter Gagnon, and a dearly
loved belle of the town, described the incident soon afterward in a
letter to Anne St. Denis-Rock, and this letter, partly unintelligible
because of its age, is a cherished possession of that family.


I had come out of the house [she wrote] in time to see a strange figure
pause near the iron gate which shut him out from the plot of ground
where the dog was watching little Jeems at play with some blocks and
sticks.  He was a soldier in a faded uniform of France, with a hospital
badge on his arm, and had apparently just risen from a terrible
sickness.  As he staggered against the gate with a strange cry, I
thought he was about to faint and hurried toward him.  Then a most
amazing thing happened.  The dog sprang straight at him, and so
frightened was I by the unexpectedness of his attack that I screamed at
the top of my voice and snatched up one of the baby's sticks with which
I was about to beat the animal from his victim when, to my still
greater astonishment, I saw that both man and beast were overcome by
what appeared to be a paroxysm of recognition and joy.  The action of
the dog together with my scream set little Jeems to crying lustily and
my terrified voice brought Toinette and my father to the door.  Shall I
ever forget what happened then?  Toinette started first toward her
baby, then saw the man at the gate, and the cry which came from her
lips will remain with me until my dying day.  In a moment she was in
that poor wreck of a soldier's arms, kissing him and sobbing, until,
with the antics of the dog and the fiercer shrieking of the child, to
say nothing of my own wild appearance with the stick, we were beginning
to attract the attention of the public....[1]


In this way Jeems found his wife and boy.  Their story was destined to
be remembered because it was a marked incident in a transition of land,
people, and customs which history could not regard too lightly.
Manuscripts and letters were to bear it on, until, almost forgotten, it
was to remain only a whisper among a thousand others of days and years
whose echoes grow fainter as time passes.  The walls of the old
Lotbinire home in St. Louis Street, close to the residence of the
beautiful but infamous Madame de Paean, witnessed the piecing together
of the story and might repeat it to-day if they could talk.  For Jeems
the few minutes after his entry into the Lotbinire house, where he and
Toinette were guided by Nancy and her father while a black servant
brought up the rear with the baby, were nearly as unreal as the last
moments of his consciousness on the Plains of Abraham.  Inside the
door, Nancy placed the child in his arms, which had not relinquished
their hold of Toinette, and the discovery that he possessed a son leapt
upon him.  He was so overwhelmed by the emotion which followed that he
did not see Hepsibah Adams as he felt his way through the wide hall to
find what the excitement and crying were about.  It was Hepsibah with
his round, sightless face and his voice breaking with joy when he found
Jeems alive under his great, fumbling hands which added--as Nancy wrote
in her letter to Anne St. Denis-Rock--"a final proof that God does
answer prayer."

That this God who had seen New France sink into ruin had guided their
own destinies with a beneficent hand Jeems devoutly believed when
Toinette told him what had befallen her after the flight from
Chenufsio.  They were alone in her room.  It was the eleventh of
December, and the afternoon sun shone from a sky filled with the
smiling warmth of autumn rather than the chill of winter.  A few
hundred yards away, General Murray was holding a review of the
regiments which were soon to face Levis in his attempt to retake the
city.  The sound of martial music came to them faintly, and with it the
distinct but softer tolling of a bell which marked an hour of prayer,
and to this appeal Toinette bowed her head and murmured words of
adoration taught her by the white-robed Sisterhood of Christ.  Three
years had changed her.  Not time alone, but motherhood and the grief of
hopeless waiting had made her more a woman and less a girl.  At last
she had believed Jeems was dead, and now that she had him again, an
indescribable beauty suffused her face and eyes with its radiance as
the mystery of the years was unveiled.

She told of Hepsibah's capture by the Mohawks in Forbidden Valley, of
his escape, his recapture later by the Senecas, and of her appeals to
Shindas and Tiaoga and of her failure to inspire their mercy when,
blinded, he was brought to Chenufsio.

"Only God could have directed me after that," she said, "for I was so
desperate that I scarcely know how events shaped themselves as they
did.  I feared what your action might be when you returned and found
your uncle had been blinded and killed, and not until I entered Ah De
Bah's tepee did it strike me as an answer to my prayers that a hunting
knife should be dangling by its cord in the opening.  With this knife I
freed Hepsibah and cut a hole in the skin tent through which we crept
to the canoes, after I had given Wood Pigeon my message to you.  When
we were pursued and overtaken my hope died, but the depth of my despair
was no greater than the joyous shock which overcame me when I heard
Tiaoga's voice telling us not to be afraid but to go ashore quietly and
that no harm would befall us.  Shindas explained what they were about
to do, for as soon as we were ashore, Tiaoga went off alone into the
darkness.  He told us that three days before reaching Chenufsio they
had learned, through facts which Hepsibah related, that their prisoner,
already blinded, was your uncle and my own dear friend.  It was too
late for them to save him, for the warriors were in bad humour and
demanded the sacrifice at the stake of the one who had killed several
of their number.  Shindas came ahead so you would not be in the village
when the prisoner arrived.  As Shindas talked to us I learned that
hearts as kind as any in this world beat in savage breasts, for these
three men had turned traitors to the Senecas that we might live.  In
the light of a torch, Shindas disclosed a long braid of hair which
looked horridly like my own, and drenched its scalp in fresh blood
which he drew from his breast.  It was a scalp Tiaoga had taken from a
French Indian he had killed, and I turned faint when I saw it gleaming
in the flare of the pitch pine.  Then Hepsibah and I went on in the
canoe.  Hours later, Shindas rejoined us and said that Tiaoga had
danced with the scalp before his people and that they believed we were
dead.  Shindas stayed with us until we came upon French soldiers near
Fort Frontenac, and each day I dressed the wound in his breast."

She paused, as if revisioning what had passed, then said:

"There were a few moments with Tiaoga--alone--that night we stood on
the shore, while Shindas took the blood from his wound.  God must have
made Tiaoga love me, Jeems, almost as he had loved the one whose place
I had taken.  When I found him, he was so cold and still in the
darkness that he might have been stone instead of flesh.  But he
promised to make it possible for you to come to me as soon as he could
do so without arousing the suspicions of his people.  And then he
touched me for the first time as he must have caressed Silver Heels.
He held my braid in his hand and spoke her name in a way I had never
heard him speak it before.  I kissed him.  I put my arms around his
neck and kissed him, and it seemed that even my lips touched stone.
Yet he loved me, and because of that I have wondered--through all these
years--why he did not send you to me."

Jeems could not tell her it was because he had killed Tiaoga.


As the melody of the bell had fallen like a benediction over the Plains
of Abraham, so peace and happiness followed in the footsteps of the
conquerors of New France.  At the stroke of a pen, half a continent
changed hands, and from the pulpits of the Canadas as well as from
those of the English Colonies voices were raised in gratitude to God
that the conflict was ended.  Even the beaten rejoiced, for during the
months of its final agony the heart of the nation had been sapped by
corruption and dishonesty until faith had crumbled in men's souls and
British presence came to be regarded as a guarantee of liberty and not
as the calamity of defeat.  "At last there is an end to war on this
continent," preached Thomas Foxcroft, pastor of the Old Church in
Boston, for like a million others of his countrymen he did not foresee
the still greater conflict for American independence less than fifteen
years ahead.  And the echo was repeated--"At last there is an end to
war."  Again the sun was golden in its promise.  Men called the days
their own, the frontiers slumbered, the most vengeful of the savages
retreated to their fastnesses, women sang and children played with new
visions in their eyes.  These were the days of a nation's birth, when
the Briton mingled with those whom he had defeated, and transformed New
France into Canada.

In the spring of 1761 Jeems returned to the Richelieu.  Madame Tonteur,
her spirit subdued and her malice chastened, placed into his hands and
those of her daughter the broad domain of Tonteur Manor which it was
her desire never to see again.  That the home of their future was to be
built amid the scenes of a tragedy which had brought them together, and
where they would feel the presence of loved ones who had found
happiness there as well as death, brought to Toinette and Jeems a joy
which only they could understand.  For the charred ruins of Tonteur
Manor and of Forbidden Valley were home, even to Hepsibah Adams; and
when Jeems reached the hallowed ground he had left five years before,
he wrote Toinette, who waited in Quebec, telling her how the hills
smiled their welcome, how green the abandoned meadows were, and that
everywhere flowers had come to bless the solitude and the resting
places of their dead.  Then he set to work with the men who had come
with him, and in the golden flush of September he went for Toinette and
his boy.  A haze of smoke drifted once more from the chimneys of
cottages in the valley lands, and with another summer the lowing of
cattle and the bleating of sheep rose at evening time, and the old mill
wheel turned again, and often Toinette rode beside Jeems toward
Forbidden Valley, sometimes with her hair in curls, with a ribbon
streaming from them.

It was in this second year, when the chestnut burrs were green on the
ridges, that strangers came down the trail from Tonteur Hill one
evening, two men and a woman and a girl.  The men were Senecas, and the
miller, who met them first, eyed them with suspicion as well as wonder,
for while the girl was pretty and the woman white, the men who
accompanied them were fierce and tall and marked by battle.  They were
also extremely proud, and passed the miller without heeding his command
to make themselves known, stalking to the front of the big house,
followed by the woman and the girl, where Toinette saw them and gave
such a cry that the miller ran back for his gun.  In this way Tiaoga
came to Tonteur Manor to show Jeems the scar his arrow had made, and
with him were Wood Pigeon and Shindas and Mary Daghlen.  For many years
after this, until he was killed in the frontier fighting which preceded
the American war for independence, Tiaoga returned often to the valley
of the Richelieu, and as time went on, the pack of soft skins and
bright feathers he brought with him grew larger, for another boy was
given to Toinette, and then a girl, so that, with three children always
watching and hoping for his arrival, the warrior was kept busy
accumulating treasures for them.  Once each year Mary and Shindas
visited Tonteur Manor, and with them came their children when they grew
old enough to travel through the wilderness.  Wood Pigeon did not
return to Chenufsio.  Tokana, her crippled father, had given up his
valiant struggle the preceding winter and had died.  She lived with
Toinette and Jeems until she was nineteen, when she married a young
French landowner named De Poncy, whose descendants are still to be
found in the valley of the Richelieu.

From one of a sheaf of yellow letters may be read these lines, dated
June 14, 1767, written to Nancy Lotbinire-Gagnon by Marie Antoinette
Bulain.


MY OWN DEAR NANCY:

Sadness has fallen over us here at Tonteur Manor.  Odd is dead.  I no
longer have a doubt that God has given souls to the beasts, for
wherever we look we miss him, and a fortnight has passed since we
buried him close to the chapel yard.  It is like missing a child who
loved us, or, more than that, one who guarded us as he loved.  Even
last night little Marie Antoinette sobbed herself to sleep because he
cannot come when she calls him.  I cannot keep tears from my own eyes
when I think of him, and even Jeems, strong as he is, turns from me
when we pass the chapel yard, ashamed of what I might see in his face.
Odd was all we had left to us of other days--he and Hepsibah.  And it
is Hepsibah for whom my heart aches most.  For years dear old Odd has
guided him in his blindness, with a cord attached to his neck, and I
believe they knew how to talk to each other.

Hepsibah now sits alone so much, keeping away from others, and every
evening we see him groping about the gate to the chapel yard as if
hoping to find someone there.  Oh, what a terrible thing is death,
which rends us all with its grief in time!  But I must not moralize or
unburden my gloom or you will wish I had remained silent another month.

It is a glorious June here.  The roses...


One wonders if the misty spots on the yellow page are tears.




THE END



[1] The letter from which the above lines were taken bears the date of
December 12, 1759, and was addressed to Anne St. Denis-Rock at Three
Rivers, which destination it did not reach until March, 1760, according
to a note on the letter.






  BOOKS BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

  THE COURAGE OF CAPTAIN PLUM
  THE HONOR OF THE BIG SNOWS
  THE GOLD HUNTERS
  THE WOLF HUNTERS
  THE DANGER TRAIL
  PHILIP STEELE
  THE GREAT LAKES
  FLOWER OF THE NORTH
  ISOBEL
  KAZAN
  GOD'S COUNTRY--AND THE WOMAN
  THE HUNTED WOMAN
  THE GRIZZLY KING
  BAREE, SON OF KAZAN
  THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE
  NOMADS OF THE NORTH
  BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
  GOD'S COUNTRY--THE TRAIL TO HAPPINESS
  THE RIVER'S END
  THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN
  THE FLAMING FOREST
  THE COUNTRY BEYOND
  THE ALASKAN
  A GENTLEMAN OF COURAGE
  THE ANCIENT HIGHWAY
  THE BLACK HUNTER
  SWIFT LIGHTNING
  THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM




[Illustration: Back endpaper]




[End of _The Plains of Abraham_ by James Oliver Curwood]
