автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу Mackinac and Lake Stories
“THAT WAS THE MOMENT OF LIFE”
MACKINAC AND LAKE STORIES
By
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright, 1899, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
TO
My Dear Daughter
HAZEL
THE COMPANION OF ALL MY JOURNEYS
CONTENTS.
Page
Marianson1
The Black Feather20
The Cobbler in the Devil's Kitchen34
The Skeleton on Round Island54
The Penitent of Cross Village69
The King of Beaver89
Beaver Lights118
A British Islander137
The Cursed Patois151
The Mothers of Honoré170
The Blue Man187
The Indian on the Trail202
ILLUSTRATIONS
“THAT WAS THE MOMENT OF LIFE”Frontispiece
“SHE LAY BREATHING LIKE AN INFANT”4
THE TRAIN-AU-GALISE56
“'I THINK THE CAMP GO AROUND AND AROUND ME'”67
“'I HAVE ALWAYS PRAYED THIS PRAYER ALONE'”101
“IT'S BROTHER STRANG SERENADING”103
“'YOU WILL GIVE YOURSELF TO ME NOW?'”111
“'LET ME LOOSE!' STRUGGLED EMELINE”115
I WAS STARTLED TO SEE HER RUSH AT THE CAPTAIN140
THE QUARTERS144
“HE APPEARED AT THE DOOR, AND IT WAS HONORÉ”185
MARIANSON
WHEN the British landed on the west side of Mackinac Island at three o'clock in the morning of July 17, 1812, Canadians were ordered to transport the cannon. They had only a pair of six-pounders, but these had to be dragged across the long alluvial stretch to heights which would command the fortress, and sand, rock, bushes, trees, and fallen logs made it a dreadful portage. Voyageurs, however, were men to accomplish what regulars and Indians shirked.
All but one of the hundred and sixty Canadians hauled with a good will on the cannon ropes. The dawn was glimmering. Paradise hid in the untamed island, breathing dew and spice. The spell worked instantly upon that one young voyageur whose mind was set against the secret attack. All night his rage had been swelling. He despised the British regulars—forty-two lords of them only being in this expedition—as they in turn despised his class. They were his conquerors. He had no desire to be used as means of pushing their conquest further. These islanders he knew to be of his own race, perhaps crossed with Chippewa blood.
Seven hundred Indians, painted and horned for war, skulked along as allies in the dim morning twilight. He thought of sleeping children roused by tomahawk and scalping-knife in case the surprised fort did not immediately surrender. Even then, how were a few hundred white men to restrain nearly a thousand savages?
The young Canadian, as a rush was made with the ropes, stumbled over a log and dropped behind a bush. His nearest companions scarcely noticed the desertion in their strain, but the officer instantly detailed an Indian.
“One of you Sioux bring that fellow back or bring his scalp.”
A Sioux stretched forward and leaped eagerly into the woods. All the boy's years of wilderness training were concentrated on an escape. The English officer meant to make him a lesson to the other voyageurs. And he smiled as he thought of the race he could give the Sioux. All his arms except his knife were left behind the bush; for fleetness was to count in this venture. The game of life or death was a pretty one, to be enjoyed as he shot from tree to tree, or like a noiseless-hoofed deer made a long stretch of covert. He was alive through every blood drop. The dewy glory of dawn had never seemed so great. Cool as the Sioux whom he dodged, his woodsman's eye gathered all aspects of the strange forest. A detached rock, tall as a tree, raised its colossal altar, surprising the eye like a single remaining temple pillar. Old logs, scaled as in a coat of mail, testified to the humidity of this lush place. The boy trod on sweet white violets smelling of incense.
The wooded deeps unfolded in thinning dusk and revealed a line of high verdant cliffs walling his course. He dashed through hollows where millions of ferns bathed him to the knees. As daylight grew—though it never was quite daylight there—so did his danger. He expected to hear the humming of an arrow, and perhaps to feel a shock and sting and cleaving of the bolt, and turned in recklessly to climb for the uplands, where after miles of jutting spurs the ridge stooped and pushed out in front of itself a round-topped rock. As the Canadian passed this rock a yellow flare like candle-light came through a crack at its base.
He dropped on all-fours. The Indian was not in sight. He squirmed within a low battlement of serrated stone guarding the crack, and let himself down into what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. The opening was so low as to be invisible just outside the serrated breastwork. He found himself in a room of rock, irregularly hollow above, with a candle burning on the stone floor. As he sat upright and stretched forth a hand to pinch off the flame, the image of a sleeping woman was printed on his eyeballs so that he saw every careless ring of fair hair around her head and every curve of her body for hours afterwards in the dusk.
His first thought was to place himself where his person would intercept any attack at the mouth of the cave. Knife in hand, he waited for a horned, glittering-eyed face to stoop or an arrow or hatchet to glance under that low rim, the horizon of his darkness. His chagrin at having taken to a trap and drawn danger on a woman was poignant; the candle had caught him like a moth, and a Sioux would keenly follow. Still, no lightest step betrayed the Sioux's knowledge of his whereabouts. A long time passed before he relaxed to an easy posture and turned to the interior of the cave.
The drip of a veiled water-vein at the rear made him conscious of thirst, but the sleeping woman was in the way of his creeping to take a drink. Wrapped in a fur robe, she lay breathing like an infant, white-skinned, full-throated, and vigorous, a woman older than himself. The consequences of her waking did not threaten him as perilous. Without reasoning, he was convinced that a woman who lay down to sleep beside a burning candle in this wild place would make no outcry when she awoke and found the light had drawn instead of kept away possible cave-inhabitants. Day grew beyond the low sill and thinned obscurity around him; showing the swerve of the roof to a sloping shelf. Perspiration cooled upon him and he shivered. A fire and a breakfast would have been good things, which he had often enjoyed in danger. Rowing all night, and landing cannon at the end of it, and running a league or more for life, exhausted a man.
“SHE LAY BREATHING LIKE AN INFANT”
The woman stirred, and the young voyageur thought of dropping his knife back into its sheath. At the slight click she sat up, drawing in her breath.
He whispered: “Do not be afraid. I have not come in here to hurt you.”
She was staring at him, probably taking him for some monster of the dark.
“Have you anything here to eat?”
The woman resumed her suspended breath, and answered in the same guarded way, and in French like his: “Yes. I come to this part of the island so often that I have put bread and meat and candles in the cave. How did you find it? No one but myself knew about it.”
“I saw the candle-light.”
“The candle was to keep off evil spirits. It has been blown out. Where did you come from?”
“From St. Joseph Island last night with the English. They have taken the island by surprise.”
She unexpectedly laughed in a repressed gurgle, as a faun or other woods creature might have laughed at the predicaments of men.
“I am thinking of the stupid American soldiers—to lie asleep and let the British creep in upon them. But have you seen my cow? I searched everywhere, until the moon went down and I was tired to death, for my cow.”
“No, I saw no cow. I had the Sioux to watch.”
“What Sioux?”
“The Indian our commandant sent after me. Speak low. He may be listening outside.”
They themselves listened.
“If Indians have come on the island they will kill all the cattle.”
“There are the women and children and men—even poor voyageurs—for them to kill first.”
She gasped, “Is it war?”
“Yes, it is war.”
“I never have seen war. Why did you come here?”
“I did not want to, mademoiselle, and I deserted. That is why the Indian was sent after me.”
“Do not call me mademoiselle. I am Marianson Bruelle, the widow of André Chenier. Our houses will be burned, and our gardens trampled, and our boats stolen.”
“Not if the fort surrenders.”
Again they harkened to the outside world in suspense. The deserter had expected to hear cannon before sunlight so slowly crept under the cave's lip. It was as if they sat within a colossal skull, broad between the ears but narrowing towards the top, with light coming through the parted mouth. Accustomed to the soft twilight, the two could see each other, and the woman covertly put her dress in order while she talked.
More than fearlessness, even a kind of maternal passion, moved her. She searched in the back of the cave and handed her strange guest food, and gathered him a birch cup of water from the dripping rock. The touch of his fingers sent a new vital thrill through her. Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. She did not know this young voyageur, yet she began to claim him.
He was so tired that the tan of his cheek turned leaden in the cave gloom. She rose from her bear-skin and spread it for him, when he finished eating.
“You cannot go out now,” he whispered, when he saw her intention. “The Sioux is somewhere in the woods watching for me. The Indians came on this island for scalps. You will not be safe, even in the fort, until the fight is over, or until night comes again.”
Marianson, standing convinced by what he said, was unable to take her eyes off him. Mass seemed always irksome to her in spite of the frequent changes of posture and her conviction that it was good for her soul. She was at her happiest plunging through woods or panting up cliffs which squaws dared not scale. Yet enforced hiding with a stranger all day in the cave was assented to by this active sylvan creature. She had not a word to say against it, and the danger of going out was her last thought. The cavern's mouth was a very awkward opening to crawl through, especially if an Indian should catch one in the act. There was nothing to do but to sit down and wait.
A sigh of pleasure, as at inhaling the spirit of a flower, escaped her lips. This lad, whose presence she knew she would feel without seeing if he came into church behind her, innocent of the spell he was casting, still sat guarding the entrance, though the droop of utter weariness relaxed every posture. Marianson bade him lie down on the fur robe, and imperiously arranged her lap to hold his head.
“I am maman to you. I say to you sleep, and you shall sleep.”
The appealing and thankful eyes of the boy were closed almost as soon as he crept upon the robe and his head sunk in its comfortable pillow. Marianson braced her back against the wall and dropped her hands at her sides. Occasionally she glanced at the low rim of light. No Indian could enter without lying flat. She had little dread of the Sioux.
Every globule which fell in darkness from the rock recorded, like the sand grain of an hour-glass, some change in Marianson.
“I not care for anybody, me,” had been her boast when she tantalized soldiers on the village street. Her gurgle of laughter, and the hair blowing on her temples from under the blanket she drew around her face, worked havoc in Mackinac. To her men were merely useful objects, like cows, or houses, or gardens, or boats. She hugged the social liberty of a woman who had safely passed through matrimony and widowhood. Married to old André Chenier by her parents, that he might guard her after their death, she loathed the thought of another wearisome tie, and called it veneration of his departed spirit. He left her a house, a cow, and a boat. Accustomed to work for him, she found it much easier to work for herself when he was gone, and resented having young men hang around desiring to settle in her house. She laughed at every proposal a father or mother made her. No family on the island could get her, and all united in pointing her out as a bad pattern for young women.
A bloom like the rose flushing of early maidenhood came over Marianson with her freedom. Isolated and daring and passionless, she had no conception of the scandal she caused in the minds of those who carried the burdens of the community, but lived like a bird of the air. Wives who bore children and kept the pot boiling found it hard to see her tiptoeing over cares which swallowed them. She did not realize that maids desired to marry and she took their lovers from them.
But knowledge grew in her as she sat holding the stranger's head in her lap, though it was not a day on which to trouble one's self with knowledge. There was only the forest's voice outside, that ceaseless majestic hymn of the trees, accompanied by the shore ripple, which was such a little way off. Languors like the sweet languors of spring came over her. She was happier than she had ever been before in her life.
“It is delicious,” she thought. “I have been in the cave many times, but it will never be like this again.”
And it was a strange joy to find the touch of a human being something to delight in. There was sweet wickedness in it; penance might have to follow. What would the curé say if he saw her? To amuse one's self with soldiers and islanders was one thing; to sit tranced all day in a cave with a stranger must be another.
There was a rough innocence in his relaxed body—beautiful as the virgin softness of a girl. Under the spell of his unconscious domination, she did not care about his past. Her own past was nothing. She had arrived in the present. Time stood still. His face was turned towards her, and she studied all its curves, yet knew if he had other features he would still be the one person in the world who could so draw her. What was the power? Had women elsewhere felt it? At that thought she had a pang of anguish and rage altogether new to her. Marianson was tender even in her amusements; her benevolence extended to dumb cattle; but in the hidden darkness of her consciousness she found herself choosing the Sioux for him, rather than a woman.
Once he half raised his head, but again let it sink to its rest. Marianson grew faint; and as the light waned at the cave mouth she remembered she had not eaten anything that day. The fast made her seem fit to say prayers, and she said all she knew over his head, like a mother brooding.
He startled her by sitting up, without warning, fully roused and alert.
“What time is it?” inquired the boy.
“Look at the door. The sun has long been behind the trees.”
“Have I slept all day?”
“Perhaps.”
“And have you heard no sound of battle?”
“It has been still as the village street during mass.”
“What, then, have they done, those English? They must have taken the fort without firing a gun. And the Sioux—you have not seen him?”
“Nothing has passed the cave door, not even a chipmunk.”
He stretched his arms upward into the hollow, standing tall and well made, his buckskin shirt turned back from his neck.
“I am again hungry.”
“I also,” said Marianson. “I have not eaten anything to-day.”
Her companion dropped on his knees before her and took out of her hands the food she had ready. His face expressed shame and compunction as he fed her himself, offering bites to her mouth with gentle persistence. She laughed the laugh peculiar to herself, and pushed his hand back to his own lips. So they ate together, and afterwards drank from the same cup. Marianson showed him where the drops came down, and he gathered them, smiling at her from the depths of the cave. They heard the evening cawing of crows, and the waters rushing with a wilder wash on the beach.
“I will bring more bread and meat when I come back,” promised Marianson—“unless the English have burned the house.”
“No. When it is dark I will leave the cave myself,” said the voyageur. “Is there any boat near by that I can take to escape in from the island?”
“There is my boat. But it is at the post.”
“How far are we from the post?”
“It is not so far if one might cross the island; but to go by the west shore, which would be safest, perhaps, in time of war, that is the greater part of the island's girth.”
They drew near together as they murmured, and at intervals he held the cup to her lips, making up for his forgetfulness when benumbed with sleep.
“One has but to follow the shore, however,” said the boy. “And where can I find the boat?”
“You cannot find it at all.”
“But,” he added, with sudden recollection, “I could never return it again.”
Marianson saw on the cave's rough wall a vision of her boat carrying him away. Her own little craft, the sail of which she knew how to trim—her bird, her flier, her food-winner—was to become her robber.
“When the war is over,” she ventured, “then you might come back.”
He began to explain difficulties like an honest lad, and she stopped him. “I do not want to know anything. I want you to take my boat.”
He put the cup down and seized her hands and kissed them. She crouched against the cave's side, her eyes closed. If he was only grateful to her for bread and shelter and means of escape, it was little enough she received, but his warm touch and his lips on her palms—for he kissed her palms—made her none the less dizzy.
“Listen to me,” said Marianson. “If I give you my boat, you must do exactly as I bid you.”
“I promise.”
“You must stay here until I bring it to you. I am going at once.”
“But you cannot go alone in the dark. You are a woman—you will be afraid.”
“Never in my life have I been afraid.”
“But there are Indians on the war-path now.”
“They will be in camp or drunk at the post. Your Sioux has left this part of the island. He may come back by morning, but he would not camp away from so much plunder. Sioux cannot be unlike our Chippewas. Do you think,” demanded Marianson, “that you will be quite, quite safe in the cave?”
Her companion laughed.
“If I find the cave unsafe I can leave it; but you in the dark alone—you must let me go with you.”
“No; the risk is too great. It is better for me to go alone. I know every rock, every bend of the shore. The pull back around the island will be hardest, if there is not enough wind.”
“I go with you,” decided the boy.
“But you gave me your promise to do exactly as I bade you. I am older than you,” said Marianson. “I know what is best, and that is that you remain here until I come. Swear to me that you will.”
He was silent, beseeching her with his eyes to relent. Then, owning her right to dominate, he pledged her by the name of his saint to do as she required.
Their forced companionship, begun at daylight, was ending as darkness crept through the cavern's mouth. They waited, and those last moments of silence, while they leaned to look closely at each other with the night growing between them, were a benediction on the day.
Marianson stooped to creep through the cavern's mouth, but once more she turned and looked at him, and it was she herself who stretched appealing arms. The boy's shyness and the woman's aversion to men vanished as in fire. They stood together in the hollow of the cave in one long embrace. He sought her mouth and kissed her, and, suffocating with joy, she escaped through the low door.
Indifferent to the Indian who might be dogging her, she drew her strip of homespun around her face and ran, moccasined and deft-footed, over the stones, warm, palpitating, and laughing, full of physical hardihood. In the woods, on her left, she knew there were rocks splashed with stain black as ink and crusted with old lichens. On her right white-caps were running before the west wind and diving like ducks on the strait. She crossed the threads of a brook ravelling themselves from density. For the forest was a mask. But Marianson knew well the tricks of that brook—its pellucid shining on pebbles, its cascades, its hidings underground of all but a voice and a crystal pool. Wet to her knees, she had more than once followed it to its source amid such greenery of moss and logs as seemed a conflagration of verdure.
The many points and bays of the island sped behind her, and cliffs crowded her to the water's edge or left her a dim moving object on a lonesome beach. Sometimes she heard sounds in the woods and listened; on the other hand, she had the companionship of stars and moving water. On that glorified journey Marianson's natural fearlessness carried her past the Devil's Kitchen and quite near the post before she began to consider how it was best to approach a place which might be in the hands of an enemy. Her boat was tied at the dock. She had the half-ruined distillery yet to pass. It had stood under the cliff her lifetime. As she drew nearer, cracks of light and a hum like the droning of a beehive magically turned the old distillery into a caravansary of spirits.
Nothing in her long tramp had startled her like this. It was a relief to hear the click of metal and a strange-spoken word, and to find herself face to face with an English soldier. He made no parley, but marched her before him; and the grateful noise of squalling babies and maternal protests and Maman Pelott's night lullaby also met her as they proceeded towards the distillery.
The long dark shed had a chimney-stack and its many-coiled still in one end. Beside that great bottle-shaped thing, at the base of the chimney, was an open fireplace piled with flaming sticks, and this had made the luminous crevices. All Mackinac village was gathered within the walls, and Marianson beheld a camp supping, putting children to bed on blankets in corners, sitting and shaking fingers at one another in wrathful council, or running about in search of lost articles. The curé was there, keeping a restraint on his people. Clothes hung on spikes like rows of suicides in the weird light. Even fiddlers and jollity were not lacking. A heavier race would have come to blows in that strait enclosure, but these French and half-breeds, in danger of scalping if the Indians proved turbulent, dried their eyes after losses, and shook their legs ready for a dance at the scraping of a violin.
Little Ignace Pelott was directly pulling at Marianson's petticoat to get attention.
“De Ingins kill our 'effer,” he lamented, in the mongrel speech of the quarter-breed. “Dey didn't need him; dey have plenty to eat. But dey kill our 'effer and laugh.”
“My cow, is it also killed, Ignace?”
Marianson's neighbors closed around her, unsurprised at her late arrival, filled only with the general calamity. Old men's pipe smoke mingled with odors of food; and when the English soldier had satisfied himself that she belonged to this caldron of humanity, he lifted the corners of his nose and returned to open air and guard duty.
The fort had been surrendered without a shot, to save the lives of the villagers, and they were all hurried to the distillery and put under guard. They would be obliged to take the oath of allegiance to England, or leave the island. Michael Dousman, yet held in the enemy's camp, was fiercely accused of bringing the English upon them. No, Marianson could not go to the village, or even to the dock.
Everybody offered her food. A boat she did not ask for. The high cobwebby openings of the distillery looked on a blank night sky. Marianson felt her happiness jarred as the wonderful day came to such limits. The English had the island. It might be searched for that young deserter waiting for her help, and if she failed to get a boat, what must be his fate?
She had entered the west door of the distillery. She found opportunity to slip out on the east side, for it was necessary to reach the dock and get a boat. She might risk being scalped, but a boat at any cost she would have, and one was sent her—as to the fearless and determined all their desires are sent. She heard the thump of oars in rowlocks, bringing the relief guard, and with a swish, out of the void of the lake a keel ran upon pebbles.
So easy had been the conquest of the island, the British regular found his amusement in his duty, and a boat was taken from the dock to save half a mile of easy marching. It stood empty and waiting during a lax minute, while the responsibility of guarding was shifted; but perhaps being carelessly beached, though there was no tide on the strait, it drifted away.
Marianson, who had helped it drift, lay flat on the bottom and heard the rueful oaths of her enemies, forced to march back to the post. There was no sail. She steered by a trailing oar until lighted distillery and black cliff receded and it was safe for her to fix her sculls and row with all her might.
She was so tired her heart physically ached when she slipped through dawn to a landing opposite the cave. There would be no more yesterdays, and there would be no time for farewells. The wash which drove her roughly to mooring drove with her the fact that she did not know even the name of the man she was about to give up.
Marianson turned and looked at the water he must venture upon, without a sail to help him. It was not all uncovered from the night, but a long purple current ran out, as if God had made a sudden amethyst bridge across the blue strait.
Reluctant as she was to call him from the cave, she dared not delay. The breath of the virgin woods was overpoweringly sweet. Her hair clung to her forehead in moist rings, and her cheeks were pallid and wet with mist which rose and rose on all sides like clouds in a holy picture.
He was asleep.
She crouched down on cold hands and saw that. He had waited in the cave as he promised, and had fallen asleep. His back was towards her. Instead of lying at ease, his body was flexed. Her enlarging pupils caught a stain of red on the bear-skin, then the scarlet tonsure on his crown. He was asleep, but the Sioux had been there.
The low song of wind along that wooded ridge, and the roar of dashing lake water, repeated their monotone hour after hour. It proved as fair a day as the island had ever seen, and when it was nearly spent, Marianson Bruelle still sat on the cave floor holding the dead boy in her arms. Heart-uprooting was a numbness, like rapture. At least he could not leave her. She had his kiss, his love. She had his body, to hide in a grave as secret as a flower's. The curé could some time bless it, but the English who had slain him should never know it. As she held him to her breast, so the sweet processes of the woods should hold him, and make him part of the island.
THE BLACK FEATHER
OVER a hundred voyageurs were sorting furs in the American Fur Company's yard, under the supervision of the clerks. And though it was hard labor, lasting from five in the morning until sunset, they thought lightly of it as fatigue duty after their eleven months of toil and privation in the wilderness. Fort Mackinac was glittering white on the heights above them, and half-way up a paved ascent leading to the sally-port sauntered 'Tite Laboise. All the voyageurs saw her; and strict as was the discipline of the yard, they directly expected trouble.
The packing, however, went on with vigor. Every beaver, marten, mink, musk-rat, raccoon, lynx, wild-cat, fox, wolverine, otter, badger, or other skin had to be beaten, graded, counted, tallied in the company's book, put into press, and marked for shipment to John Jacob Astor in New York. As there were twelve grades of sable, and eight even of deer, the grading, which fell to the clerks, was no light task. Heads of brigades that had brought these furs from the wilderness stood by to challenge any mistake in the count. It was the height of the fur season, and Mackinac Island was the front of the world to the two or three thousand men gathered in for its brief summer.
Axe strokes reverberated from Bois Blanc, on the opposite side of the strait, and passed echoes from island to island to the shutting down of the horizon. Choppers detailed to cut wood were getting boat-loads ready for the leachers, who had hulled corn to prepare for winter rations. One pint of lyed corn with from two to four ounces of tallow was the daily allowance of a voyageur, and the endurance which this food gave him passes belief.
Étienne St. Martin grumbled at it when he came fresh from Canada and pork eating. “Mange'-du-lard,” his companions called him, especially Charle' Charette, who was the giant and the wearer of the black feather in his brigade of a dozen boats. Huge and innocent primitive man was Charle' Charette. He could sleep under snow-drifts like a baby, carry double packs of furs, pull oars all day without tiring, and dance all night after hardships which caused some men to desire to lie down and die. The summer before, at nineteen years of age, this light-haired, light-hearted voyageur had been married to 'Tite Laboise. Their wedding festivities lasted the whole month of the Mackinac season. His was the Wabash and Illinois River outfit, almost the last to leave the island; for the Lake Superior, Upper and Lower Mississippi, Lake of the Woods, and other outfits were obliged to seek Indian hunting-grounds at the earliest breath of autumn.
When the Illinois brigade returned, his wife, who had stood weeping in the cheering crowd while his companions made islands ring with the boat-song at departure, refused to see him. He went to the house of her aunt Laboise, where she lived. Mademoiselle Laboise, her half-breed cousin, met him. This educated young lady, daughter of a French father and Chippewa mother, was dignified as a nun in her dress of blue broadcloth embroidered with porcupine quills. She was always called Mademoiselle Laboise, while the French girl was called merely 'Tite. Because 'Tite was married, no one considered her name changed to Madame Charette. To her husband himself she was 'Tite Laboise, the most aggravating, delicious, unaccountable creature in the Northwest.
“She says she will not see you, Charle',” said Mademoiselle Laboise, color like sunset vermilion showing in the delicate aboriginal face.
“What have I done?” gasped the voyageur.
Mademoiselle lifted French shoulders with her father's gesture. She did not know.
“Did I expect to be treated this way?” shouted the injured husband.
“Who can ever tell what 'Tite will do next?”
That was the truth. No one could tell. Yet her flightiest moods were her most alluring moods. If she had not been so pretty and so adroit at dodging whippings when a child, 'Tite Laboise might not have set Mackinac by the ears as often as she did. But her husband could not comfort himself with this thought as he turned to the shop of madame her aunt, who was also a trader.
It had surprised the Indian widow, who betrothed her own daughter to the commandant of the fort, that her husband's niece would have nobody but that big voyageur Charle' Charette. Though in those days of the young century a man might become anything; for the West was before him, an empire, and woodcraft was better than learning. Madame Laboise accepted her niece's husband with kindness. Her house was among the most hospitable in Mackinac, and she was chagrined at the reception the young man had met.
He sat down on her counter, whirling his cap and caressing the black feather in it. The gentle Chippewa woman could see that his childish pride in this trophy was almost as great as his trouble. What had 'Tite lacked? he wanted to know. Had he not good credit at the stores? Tonnerre!—if madame would pardon him—was not his entire year's wage at the girl's service? Had he spent money on himself, except for tobacco and necessary buckskins? Madame knew a voyageur was allowed to carry scarce twenty pounds of baggage in the boats.
Did 'Tite want a better man? Let madame look at the black feather in his cap. The crow did not fly that could furnish a quill he could not take from any man in his brigade. Charle' threw out the arch of his beautiful torso. And he loved her. Madame knew what tears he had shed, what serenades he had played on his fiddle under 'Tite's window, and how he had outdanced her other partners. He dropped his head on his breast and picked at the crow's feather.
The widow Laboise pitied him. But who could account for 'Tite's whims? “When she heard the boats were in sight she was frantic with joy. I myself,” asserted madame, “saw her clapping her hands when we could catch the song of the returning voyageurs. It was then 'Oh, my Charle'! my Charle'!' But scarce have the men leaped on the dock when off she goes and locks the door of her bedroom. It is 'Tite. I can say no more.”
“What offended her?”
“I know of nothing. You have been as good a husband as a voyageur could be. And Mackinac is so dull in winter she can amuse herself but little. It was hard for her to wait your return. Now she will not look at you. It is very silly.”
What would Madame Laboise advise him to do?
Madame would advise him to wait as if nothing had occurred. The curé would admonish 'Tite if she continued her sulking. In the mean time he must content himself with tenting or lodging among his fellow-voyageurs.
Of the two or three thousand voyageurs and clerks, one hundred lived in the agency house, five hundred were accommodated in barracks, but the majority found shelter in tents and in the houses of the villagers. Every night of the fur-trading month there was a ball in Mackinac, given either by the householders or their guests; and it often happened that a man spent in one month all he had earned by his year of tremendous and far-reaching toil. But he had society, and what was to him the cream of existence, while it lasted. He fitted himself out with new shirts and buckskins, sashes, caps, neips, and moccasins, and when he was not on duty showed himself like a hero, knife in sheath, a weather-browned and sinewy figure. To dance, sing, drink, and play the violin, and have the scant dozen white women, the half-breeds, and squaws of Mackinac admire him, was a voyageur's heaven—its brief duration being its charm. For he was a born woodsman and loved his life.
Charle' Charette did not care where he lodged. Neither had he any heart to dance, until he looked through the door of the house where festivities began that season and saw 'Tite Laboise footing it with Étienne St. Martin. Parbleu! With Étienne St. Martin, the squab little lard-eater whose brother, Alexis St. Martin, had been put into doctors' books on account of having his stomach partly shot away, and a valve forming over the rent so that his digestion could be watched. It was disgusting. 'Tite would not speak to her own husband, but she would come out before all Mackinac and dance with any other voyageurs who crowded about her. Charle' sprang into the house himself, and without looking at his wife, hilariously led other women to the best places, and danced with every sinuous and graceful curve of his body. 'Tite did not look at him. From the corner of his eye he noted how perfect she was, the fiend! and how well she had dressed herself on his money. All the brigades knew his trouble by that time, and an easy breath was drawn by his entertainers when he left the house with knife still sheathed. In the wilderness the will of a brigade commander was law; but when the voyageur was out of the Fur Company's yard in Mackinac his own will was law.
One of the cautious clerks suggested that Charle and Étienne be separated in their work, since it was likely the husband might quarrel with 'Tite Laboise's dancing partner.
“Turn 'em in together, man,” chuckled the Scotch agent, Robert Stuart, who had charge of the outside work. “Let 'em fight. Man Gurdon, I havena had any sport with these wild lads since the boats came in.”
But the combatants he hoped to see worked steadily until afternoon without coming to the grip. They had no brute Anglo-Saxon antagonism, and being occupied with different bales, did not face each other.
The triple row of Indian lodges basked on the incurved beach, where a thousand Indians had gathered to celebrate that vivid month. Night and day the thump of their drums and the monotonous chant of their dances could be heard above the rush and whisper of blue water breaking on pebbles.
Lake Michigan was a deep sapphire color, and from where she stood below the sally-port 'Tite Laboise could see the mainland's rim of beach and slopes of forest near and distinct in transparent light. And she could hear the farthest shaking of echoes from island to island like a throb of some sublime wind instrument. The whitewashed block-house at the west angle of the fort shone a marble turret. There was a low meadow between the Fur Company's yard and pine heights. Though no salt tang came in the wind, it blew sweet, refreshing the men at their dog-day labor. And all the spell of that island, which since it rose from the water it has held, lay around them.
Étienne St. Martin picked up a beaver-skin, and in the sight of 'Tite Laboise her husband laid hold of it.
“Release that, Mange'-du-lard,” he said.
“Eh bien!” responded Étienne, knowing that he was challenged and the eyes of the whole yard were on him. “This fine crow he claims all Mackinac because he carries a black feather in his cap. There are black feathers in other brigades.”
“But you never wore one in any brigade.”
They dropped the skin and faced each other, feeling the fastenings of their belts. Old Robert Stuart slipped up a window in the office and grinned slyly out at the men surging towards that side of the yard. He would not usually permit a breach of discipline. But the winter had been so long!
“Myself I have no need of black feathers.” Étienne gave an insolent cast of the eye to the height where 'Tite Laboise stood.
Charle', magnificent of inches, scorned his less-developed antagonist.
“Eh, man Gurdon,” softly called old Robert Stuart from his window, “set them to it, will ye? The lads will be jawing till the morn's morn.”
This equivocal order had little effect on the ordained course of a voyageur's quarrel.
“These St. Martins without stomachs, how is a man to hit them?—pouf!” said Charle', and Étienne felt on his tender spot the cruel allusion to his brother Alexis, whose stomach had been made public property. He began to shed tears of wrath.
“I will take your scalp for that! As for the black feather, I trample it under my foot!”
“Let me see you trample it. And my head is not so easily scalped as your brother's stomach.”
All the time they were dancing around each other in graceful and menacing feints. But now they clinched, and Charle' Charette, when the struggle had lasted two or three minutes, took his antagonist like a puppy and flung him revolving to the ground. He hitched his belt and glanced up towards the sally-port as he stood back laughing.
Étienne was on foot with a tiger's bound. He had no chance with the wearer of the black feather, as everybody in the yard knew, and usually a beaten antagonist was ready to shake hands after a few trials of strength. But he seized one of the knives used in opening packs and struck at the victor's side. As soon as he had struck and the bloody knife came back in his hand he crouched and rolled his eyes around in apology. No man was afraid of shedding blood in those days, but he felt he had gone too far—that his quarrel was not sufficiently grounded. He heard a woman's scream, and the sharp checking exclamation of his master, and felt himself seized on each side. There was much confusion in his mind and in the yard, but he knew 'Tite Laboise flew through the gate and past him, and he tried to propitiate her by a look.
“Pig!” she projected at him like a missile, and he sat down on the ground between the guards who were trying to hold him up and wept copiously.
“I didn't want to have trouble with that Charle' Charette and that 'Tite Laboise,” explained Étienne. “And I don't want any black feather. It was my brother's stomach. On account of my brother's stomach I have to fight. If they do not let my brother's stomach alone, I will have to kill the whole brigade.”
But Charle' Charette walked into the Fur Company's building feeling nothing but disdain for the puny stock of St. Martin, as he held out his arm and let the blood drip from a little wound that stained his calico shirt-sleeve. The very neips around his ankles seemed to tingle with desire to kick poor Étienne.
It was not necessary to send for the surgeon of the fort. Robert Stuart dressed the wound, salving it with the rebukes which he knew discipline demanded, and making them as strong as his own enjoyment had been. He promised to break the head of every voyageur in the yard with a board if another quarrel occurred. And he pretended not to see the culprit's trembling wife, that little besom whose caprices had set the men by the ears ever since she was old enough to know the figures of a dance, yet for whom he and Mrs. Stuart had a warm corner in their hearts. She had caused the first fracas of the season, moreover. He went out and slammed the office door, ordering the men away from it.
“Bring me yon Étienne St. Martin,” commanded Mr. Stuart, preparing his arsenal of strong language. “I'll have a word with yon carl for this.”
The noise of the one-sided conflict could be heard in the office, but 'Tite remained as if she heard nothing, with her head and arms on the desk. Her husband took up the cap with the black feather, which he had thrown off in the presence of his superior. He rested it against his side, his elbow pointing a triangle, and waited aggressively for her to speak. The back of her pretty neck and fine tendrils of curly hair ruffled above it were very moving; but his heart swelled indignantly.
“'Tite Laboise, why did you shut the door in my face when I came back to you after a year's absence?”
She answered faintly, “Me, I don't know.”
“And dance with Étienne St. Martin until I am obliged to whip him?”
“Me, I don't know.”
“Yes, you do know. You have concealments,” he accused, and she made no defence. “This is the case: you run to the dock to see the boats come in; you are joyful until you watch me step ashore; I look for 'Tite; her back is disappearing at the corner of the street. Eh bien! I say, she would rather meet me in the house. I fly to the house. My wife refuses to see me.”
'Tite made no answer.
“What have I done?” Charle' spread his hands. “My commandant has no complaint to make of me. It is Charle' Charette who leads on the trail or breaks a road where there is none, and carries the heaviest pack of furs, and pulls men out of the water when they are drowning; it is Charle' Charette who can best endure fasting when the rations run low, and can hunt and bring in meat when other voyageurs lie exhausted about the camp-fire. I am no little lard-eater from Canada, brother to a man with a stomach having no lid. Look at that.” Charle' shook the decorated cap at her. “I wear the black feather of my brigade. That means that I am the best man in it.”
His wife reared her head. She was like the wild sweet-brier roses which crowded alluvial strips of the island, fragrant and pink and bristling. “Yes, monsieur, that black feather—regard it. Me, I am sick of that black feather. You say I have concealments. I have. All winter I go lonely. The ice is massed on the lake; the snow is so deep, the wind is keener than a knife; I weep for my husband away in the wilderness, believing he thinks of me. Eh bien! he comes back to Mackinac. It is as you say: I fly to meet him, my breath chokes me. But my husband, what does he do?” She looked him up and down with wrathful eyes. “He does not see 'Tite. He sees nothing but that black feather in his cap that he must take off and show to Monsieur Ramsay Crooks and Monsieur Stuart—while his wife suffocates.”
Charle' shrunk from his height, and his mouth opened like a fish's. “But I thought you would be proud of it.”
“Me, what do I care how many men you have thrown down? You do not like me any better because you have thrown down all the men in your brigade.”
“She is jealous—jealous of a feather!”
Humbled as he was by her tongue, the young voyageur felt delighted at giving his wife so trivial a rival.
He settled his belt and approached her and bowed. “Madame, permit me to offer you this black quill, which I have won for your sake, and which I boasted of to my masters that they might know you have not thrown yourself away on the poorest creature in Mackinac. Destroy it, madame. It was only the poor token of my love for you.”
Graceful and polite as all the voyageurs were, Charle' Charette was the prince of them with his big sweet presence as he bent. 'Tite flew at him and flung her arms around his neck. After the manner of Latin peoples, they instantly shed tears upon each other, and the black feather was crushed between their breasts.
THE COBBLER IN THE DEVIL'S KITCHEN
EARLY in the Mackinac summer Owen Cunning took his shoemaker's bench and all his belongings to that open cavern on the beach called the Devil's Kitchen, which was said to derive its name from former practices of the Indians. They roasted prisoners there. The inner rock retained old smoke-stains.
Though appearing a mere hole in the cliff to passing canoe-men, the Devil's Kitchen was really as large as a small cabin, rising at least seven feet from a floor which sloped down towards the water. Overhead, through an opening which admitted his body, Owen could reach a natural attic, just large enough for his bed if he contented himself with blankets. And an Irishman prided himself on being tough as any French voyageur who slept blanketed on snow in the winter wilderness.
The rock was full of pockets, enclosing pebbles and fragments. By knocking out the contents of these, Owen made cupboards for his food. As for clothes, what Mackinac-Islander of the working-class, in those days of the Fur Company's prosperity, needed more than he had on? When his clothes wore out, Owen could go to the traders and buy more. He washed his other shirt in the lake at his feet, and hung it on the cedars to dry by his door. Warm evenings, when the sun had soaked itself in limpid ripples until its crimson spread through them afar, Owen stripped himself and went bathing, with strong snorts of enjoyment as he rose from his plunge. The narrow lake rim was littered with fragments which had once filled the cavern. Two large pieces afforded him a table and a seat for his visitors.
Owen had a choice of water for his drinking. Not thirty feet away on his right a spring burst from the cliff and gushed through its little pool down the beach. It was cold and delicious.
In the east side of the Kitchen was a natural tiny fireplace a couple of feet high, screened by cedar foliage from the lake wind. Here Owen cooked his meals, and the smoke was generally carried out from his flueless hearth. The straits were then full of fish, and he had not far to throw his lines to reach deep water.
Dependent on the patronage of Mackinac village, the Irishman had chosen the very shop which would draw notice upon himself. His customers tramped out to him along a rough beach under the heights, which helped to wear away the foot-gear Owen mended. They stood grinning amiably at his snug quarters. It was told as far as Drummond Island and the Sault that a cobbler lived in the Devil's Kitchen on Mackinac.
He was a happy fellow, his clean Irish skin growing rosier in air pure as the air of mid-ocean. The lake spread in variegated copper lights almost at his feet. He did not like Mackinac village in summer, when the engagés were all back, and Indians camped tribes strong on the beach, to receive their money from the government. French and savages shouldered one another, the multitude of them making a great hubbub and a gay show of clothes like a fair. Every voyageur was sparring with every other voyageur. A challenge by the poke of a fist, and lo! a ring is formed and two are fighting. The whipped one gets up, shakes hands with his conqueror, and off they go to drink together. Owen despised such fighting. His way was to take a club and break heads, and see some blood run on the ground. It was better for him to dwell alone than to be stirred up and left unsatisfied.
It was late in the afternoon, and the fresh smell of the water cheered him as he sat stitching on a pair of deer-hide shoes for one Léon Baudette, an engagé, who was homesick for Montreal. The lowering sun smote an hour-glass of light across the strait which separated him from St. Ignace on the north shore, the old Jesuit station. Mother-of-pearl clouds hung over the southern mainland, and the wash of the lake, which was as pleasant as silence itself, diverted his mind from a distant thump of Indian drums. He knew how lazy, naked warriors lay in their lodges, bumping a mallet on stretched deer-hide and droning barbarous monotones while they kicked their heels in air. If he despised anything more than the way the French diverted themselves, it was the way the Indians diverted themselves.
Without a sound there came into Owen's view on the right an Indian girl. He was at first taken by surprise at her coming over the moss of the spring. The shaggy cliff, clothed, like the top of his cave, with cedars, white birch, and pine, afforded no path to the beach in that direction. All his clients approached by the lake margin at the left.
Then he noticed it was Blackbird, a Sac girl, who had been pointed out to his critical eye the previous summer as a beauty. Owen admitted she was not bad-looking for a squaw. Her burnished hair, which had got her the name, was drawn down to cheeks where copper and vermilion infused the skin with a wonderful sunset tint. She was neatly and precisely dressed in the woman's skirt and jacket of her tribe, even her moccasins showing no trace of the scramble she must have had down some secret cliff descent in order to approach the cobbler unseen.
He greeted her with the contemptuous affability which an Irishman bestows upon a heathen. Blackbird was probably a good communicant of some wilderness mission, but this brought her no nearer to a son of Ireland.
“Good-day to the quane! And what may she be wanting the day?”
Blackbird's eyes, without the snake-restlessness of her race, dwelt unmoving upon him. Owen surmised she could not understand his or any other kind of English, being accustomed to no tongue but her own, except the French which the engagés talked in their winter camps. She stood upright as a pine without answering.
It flashed through him that there might be trouble in the village; and Blackbird, having regard for him, as we think it possible any human being may have for us, was there to bid him escape. With coldness around the roots of his hair, he remembered the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac—a spot almost in sight across the strait, where south shore approaches north shore at the mouth of Lake Michigan. He laid down his boot. His lips dropped apart, and with a hush of the sound—if such a sound can be hushed—he imitated the Indian war-whoop.
Blackbird did not smile at the uncanny screech, but she relaxed her face in stoic amusement, relieving Owen's tense breathing. There was no plot. The tribes merely intended to draw their money, get as drunk as possible, and depart in peace at the end of the month with various outfits to winter posts.
“Begorra, but that was a narrow escape!” sighed Owen, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. He was able to detect the deference that Blackbird paid him by this visit. He sat on his bench in the Kitchen, a sunny idol in a shrine, indifferent to the effect his background gave him.
His mouth puckered. He put up his leather stained hand coyly, and motioned her unmoving figure back.
“Ah, go 'way! Wasn't it to escape you and the likes of you that I made me retrate to the shore? Nayther white, full haythen, half, nor quarther nade apply. To come makin' the big eyes at me, and the post swarmin' wid thim that do be ready to marry on any woman at the droppin' of the hat!”
Mobile blue water with ripple and wash made a background for the Indian girl's dense repose. She could by lifting her eyes see the pock-marked front of Owen's Kitchen, and gnarled roots like exposed ribs in the shaggy heights above. But she kept her eyes lowered; and Owen stuck his feet under his bench, sensitive to defects in his foot-wear, which an artist skilled in making and mending moccasins could detect.
Blackbird moved forward and laid a shining dot on the stone he used as his table; then, without a word, she turned and disappeared the way she came, over the moss of the spring rivulet.
Owen left his bench and craned after her. He did not hear a pebble roll on the stony beach or a twig snap among foliage.
“Begorra, it's the wings of a say-gull!” said Owen, and he took up her offering. It was a tiny gold coin. Mackinac was full of gold the month the Indians were paid. It came in kegs from Washington, under the escort of soldiers, to the United States Agency, and was weighed out to each red heir despoiled of land by white conquest, in his due proportion, and immediately grasped from the improvident by merchants, for a little pork, a little whiskey, a little calico. But this was an old coin with a hole in it; a jewel worn suspended from neck or ear; the precious trinket of a girl. On one side was rudely scratched the outline of a bird.
“Begorra!” said Owen. He hid it in one of the rock pockets, a trust in a savings-bank, and sat down again to work, trying to discover Blackbird's object in offering tribute to him.
About sunset he lighted a fire in his low grate to cook his supper, and put the finished boots in a remote corner of the cave until he should get his pay. As he expected, Léon Baudette appeared, picking a barefooted way along the beach, with many complimentary greetings. The wary cobbler stood between the boots and his client, and responded with open cordiality. A voyageur who gave flesh and bone and sometimes life itself for a hundred dollars a year, and drank that hundred dollars up during his month of semi-civilization on Mackinac, seldom had much about him with which to pay for his necessary mending.
Léon Baudette swore at the price, being a discontented engagé. But the foot-wear he was obliged to have, being secretly determined to desert to Canada before the boats went out. You may see his name marked as a deserter in the Fur Company's books at Mackinac Island. So, reluctantly counting out the money, he put on his shoes and crossed his legs to smoke and chat, occupying the visitor's seat. Owen put his kettle to boil, and sat down also to enjoy society; for why should man be hurried?
He learned how many fights had been fought that day; how many bales of furs were packed in the Company's yard; that Étienne St. Martin was trying to ship with the Northern instead of the Illinois Brigade, on account of a grudge against Charle' Charette. He learned that the Indians were having snake and medicine dances to cure a consumptive chief. And, to his surprise, he learned that he was considered a medicine-man among the tribes, on account of his living unmolested in the Devil's Kitchen.
“O oui,” declared Léon. “You de wizard. You only play you mend de shoe; but, by gar, you make de poor voyageur pay de same like it was work! I hear dey call you Big Medicine of de Cuisine Diable.”
Owen was compelled to smile with pleasure at his importance, his long upper lip lifting its unshaven bristles in a white curd.
“Do ye moind, Leen me boy, a haythen Injun lady by the name of Blackbird?”
“Me, I know Blackbird,” responded Léon Baudette.
“Is the consoompted chafe that they're makin' the snake shindy for married on her?”
“No, no. Blackbird she wife of Jean Magliss in de winter camps.”
“John McGillis? Is it for marryin' on a haythen wife he is?”
“O oui. Two wives. One good Cat'olique. Jean Magliss, he dance every night now with Amable Morin's girl. The more weddings, the more dancing. Me,” Léon shrugged, “I no want a woman eating my wages in Mackinac. A squaw in the winter camps—'t assez.”
“Two wives, the bog-trotter!” gulped Owen. “John McGillis is a blayguard!”
“Oui, what you call Irish,” assented Léon; and he dodged, but the cobbler threw nothing at him. Owen marked with the awl on his own leather apron.
“First a haythen and then a quarther-brade,” he tallied against his countryman. “He will be takin' his quarther-brade to the praste before the boats go out?”
Léon raised fat eyebrows. “Amable Morin, he no fool. It is six daughters he has. O oui; the marriage is soon made.”
“And the poor haythen, what does she do now?”
“Blackbird? She watch Jean Magliss dance. Then she leave her lodge and take to de pine wood. Blackbird ver fond of what you call de Irish.”
Owen was little richer in the gift of expression than the Indian woman, but he could feel the tragedy of her unconfirmed marriage. A squaw was taken to her lord's wigwam, and remained as long as she pleased him. He could divorce her with a gift, proportioned to his means and her worth.
When Léon Baudette departed, Owen prepared and ate his supper, brewing himself some herb tea and seasoning it with a drop of whiskey.
The evening beauty of the lake, of coasts melting in general dimness, and that iridescent stony hook stretched out from Round Island to grapple passing craft, was lost on Owen. Humid air did not soften the glower which grew and hardened on his visage as he made his preparations for night. These were very simple. The coals of drift-wood soon died to white ashes in his grate. To close the shop was to stand upon the shoemaker's bench and reach for the ladder in his attic—a short ladder that just performed its office and could be hidden aloft.
Drawing his stairway after him when he had ascended, Owen spread and arranged his blankets. The ghosts that rose from tortured bodies in the Kitchen below never worked any terror in his imagination when he went to bed. Rather, he lay stretched in his hard cradle gloating over the stars, his wild security, the thousand night aspects of nature which he could make part of himself without expressing. For him the moon cast gorgeous bridges on the water; the breathing of the woods was the breathing of a colossal brother; and when that awful chill which precedes the resurrection of day rose from the earth and started from the rock, he turned comfortably in his thick bedding and taxed sleepy eyes to catch the wanness coming over the lake.
But instead of lying down in his usual peace when the nest was made to suit him, Owen wheeled and hung undecided legs over the edge of his loft. Then he again put down the ladder and descended. He had trod the three-quarters of a mile of beach to the village but once since the boats came in. Now that his mind was fixed he took to it again with a loping step, bending his body forward and grasping his cap to butt through trailing foliage.
As he passed the point and neared the post, its blare and hubbub burst on him, and its torch-light and many twinkling candles. He proceeded beside the triple row of Indian lodges which occupied the entire water-front. At intervals, on the very verge, evening fires were built, throwing streamers of crimson flicker on the lake. Naked pappooses gathered around these at play. But on an open flat betwixt encampment and village rose a lighted tabernacle of blankets stretched on poles and uprights; and within this the adult Indians were crowded, celebrating the orgy of the medicine-dance. Their noise kept a continuous roll of echoes moving across the islands.
Owen made haste to pass this carnival of invocation and plunge into the swarming main street of Mackinac, where a thousand voyageurs roved, ready to embrace any man and call him brother and press him to drink with them. Broad low houses with huge chimney-stacks and dormer-windows stood open and hospitable; for Mackinac was en fête while the fur season lasted. One huge storage-room, a wing of the Fur Company's building, was lighted with candles around the sides for the nightly ball. Squared dark joists of timber showed overhead. The fiddlers sat on a raised platform, playing in ecstasy. The dark, shining floor was thronged with dancers, who, before primrose-color entirely withdrew from evening twilight, had rushed to their usual amusement. Half-breeds, quarter-breeds, sixteenth-breeds, Canadian French, Americans, in finery that the Northwest was able to command from marts of the world, crossed, joined hands, and whirled, the rhythmic tread of feet sounding like the beating of a great pulse. The doors of double timber stood open. From where he paused outside, Owen could see mighty hinges stretching across the whole width of these doors.
And he could see John McGillis moving among the most agile dancers. When at last the music stopped, and John led Amable Morin's girl to one of the benches along the wall, Owen was conscious that an Indian woman crossed the lighted space behind him, and he turned and looked full at Blackbird, and she looked full at him. But she did not stay to be included in the greeting of John McGillis, though English might be better known to her than Owen had supposed.
John came heartily to the door and endeavored to pull his countryman in. He was a much younger man than Owen, a handsome, light-haired voyageur, with thick eyelids and cajoling blue eyes. John was the only Irish engagé in the brigades. The sweet gift of blarney dwelt on his broad red lips. He looked too amiable and easily entreated, too much in love with life, indeed, to quarrel with any one. Yet as Owen answered his invitation by a quick pass that struck his cheek, his color mounted with zest, and he stepped out, turning up his sleeves.
“Is it a foight ye want, ye old wizard from the Divil's Kitchen?” laughed John, still good-natured.
“It's a foight I want,” responded Owen. “It's a foight I'm shpilin' for. Come out forninst the place, where the shlobberin' Frinch can lave a man be, and I'll shpake me moind.”
John walked bareheaded with him, and they passed around the building to a fence enclosing the Fur Company's silent yard. Stockades of sharp-pointed cedar posts outlined gardens near them. A smell of fur mingled with odors of sweet-brier and loam. Again the violins excited that throb of dancing feet, and John McGillis moved his arms in time to the music.
“Out wid it, Owen. I'm losin' me shport.”
“John McGillis, are ye not own cousin to me by raisin of marryin' on as fine a colleen as iver shtepped in Ireland?”
“I am, Owen, I am.”
“Did ye lave that same in sorrow, consatin' to fetch her out to Ameriky whin yer fortune was made?”
“I did, Owen, I did.”
“Whin ye got word of her death last year, was ye a broken-hearted widdy or was ye not?”
“I was, Owen, I was.”
“John McGillis, do ye call yerself a widdy now, or do ye not call yerself a widdy?”
“I do, Owen, I do.”
“Thin ye're the loire,” and Owen slapped his face.
For a minute there was danger of manslaughter as they dealt each other blows with sledge fists. Instead of clinching, they stood apart and cudgelled fiercely with the knuckled hand. The first round ended in blood, which John wiped from his face with a new bandanna, and Owen flung contemptuously from his nose with finger and thumb. The lax-muscled cobbler was no match for the fresh and vigorous voyageur, and he knew it, but went stubbornly to work again, saying, grimly:
“I've shpiled yer face for the gu'urls the night, bedad.”
They pounded each other without mercy, and again rested, Owen this time leaning against the fence to breathe.
“John McGillis, are ye a widdy or are ye not a widdy?” he challenged, as soon as he could speak.
“I am, Owen Cunnin', I am,” maintained John.
“Thin I repate ye're the loire!” And once more they came to the proof, until Owen lay upon the ground kicking to keep his opponent off.
“Will I bring ye the dhrop of whiskey, Owen?” suggested John, tenderly.
His cousin by marriage crawled to the fence and sat up, without replying.
“I've the flask in me pouch, Owen.”
“Kape it there.”
“But sure if ye foight wid me ye'll dhrink wid me?”
“I'll not dhrink a dhrop wid ye.”
The cobbler panted heavily. “The loikes of you that do be goin' to marry on a Frinch quarther-brade, desavin' her, and the father and the mother and the praste, that you do be a widdy.”
“I am a widdy, Owen.”
The cobbler made a feint to rise, but sank back, repeating, at the top of his breath, “Ye're the loire!”
“What do ye mane?” sternly demanded John. “Ye know I've had me throuble. Ye know I've lost me wife in the old counthry. It's a year gone. Was the praste that wrote the letther a loire?”
“I have a towken that ye're not the widdy ye think ye are.”
John came to Owen and stooped over him, grasping him by the collar. Candle-light across the street and stars in a steel-blue sky did not reveal faces distinctly, but his shaking of the cobbler was an outcome of his own inward convulsion. He belonged to a class in whom memory and imagination were not strong, being continually taxed by a present of large action crowded with changing images. But when his past rose up it took entire possession of him.
“Why didn't ye tell me this before?”
“I've not knowed it the long time meself.”
“What towken have ye got?”
“Towken enough for you and me.”
“Show it to me.”
“I will not.”
“Ye're desavin' me. Ye have no towken.”
“Thin marry on yer quarther-brade if ye dare!”
To be unsettled and uninterested in his surroundings was John McGillis's portion during the remaining weeks of his stay on the island. Half savage and half tender he sat in his barracks and smoked large pipes of tobacco.
He tramped out nearly every evening to the Devil's Kitchen, and had wordy battles, which a Frenchman would have called fights, with the cobbler, though the conferences always ended by his producing his ration and supping and smoking there. He coaxed his cousin to show him the token, vacillating between hope of impossible news from a wife he had every reason to believe dead, and indignation at being made the sport of Owen's stubbornness. Learning in the Fur Company's office that Owen had received news from the old country in the latest mail sent out of New York, he was beside himself, and Amable Morin's girl was forgotten. He began to believe he had never thought of her.
“Sure, the old man Morin and me had some words and a dhrink over it, was all. I did but dance wid her and pinch her cheek. A man niver knows what he does on Mackinac till he comes to himself in the winter camps wid a large family on his moind.”
“The blarney of your lip doesn't desave me, John McGillis,” responded his cousin the cobbler, with grimness.
“But whin will ye give me the word you've got, Owen?”
“I'll not give it to ye till the boats go out.”
“Will ye tell me, is the colleen alive, thin?”
“I've tould ye ye're not a widdy.”
“If the colleen is alive, the towken would be sint to me.”
“Thin ye've got it,” said Owen.
Poor John smoked, biting hard on his pipe-stem. Ignorance, and the helplessness of a limited man who is more a good animal than a discerning soul; time, the slow transmission of news, his fixed state as a voyageur—all these things were against him. He could not adjust himself to any facts, and his feelings sometimes approached the melting state. It was no use to war with Owen Cunning, whom he was ashamed of handling roughly. The cobbler sat with swollen and bandaged face, talking out of a slit, still bullying him.
But the time came for his brigade to go out, and then there was action, decision, positive life once more. It went far northward, and was first to depart, in order to reach winter-quarters before snow should fly.
At the log dock the boats waited, twelve of them in this outfit, each one a mighty Argo, rowed by a dozen pairs of oars, and with centre-piece for stepping a mast. Hundreds of pounds they could carry, and a crew of fifteen men. The tarpaulin used for a night covering and to shelter the trading-goods from storms was large as the roof of a house. Quiescent on lapping water they rested, their loads and each man's baggage of twenty or fewer pounds packed tightly to place.
The cobbler from the Devil's Kitchen was in the crowd thronging dock and shore. The villagers were there, saying farewells, and all the voyageurs who were soon to go out in other brigades snuffed as war-horses ready for the charge. The life of the woods, which was their true life, again drew them. They could scarcely wait. Dancing and love-making suddenly cloyed; for a man was made to conquer the wilderness and take the spoils of the earth. Woodsman's habits returned upon them. The frippery of the island was dropped like the withes which bound Samson. Their companions the Indians were also making ready the canoes. Blackbird stood erect behind the elbow of John McGillis as he took leave of his cousin the cobbler.
“Do ye moind, Owen,” exclaimed John, turning from the interests of active life to that which had disturbed his spirit, convinced unalterably of his own widowed state, yet harrowed unspeakably, “ye promised to show me that word from the old counthry before the boats wint out.”
“I niver promised to show ye any word from the old counthry,” responded Owen, having his mouth free of bandages and both eyes for the boats.
“Ye tould me ye had a towken from the old counthry.”
“I niver tould ye I had a towken from the old counthry.”
“Ye did tell me ye had a towken.”
“I have.”
“Ye said it proved I was not a widdy.”
“I did.”
“Show me that same, thin.”
“I will.”
Owen looked steadily past John's shoulder at Blackbird, and laid in John's hand a small gold coin with a hole in it, on one side of which was rudely scratched the outline of a bird.
John McGillis's face burned red, and many expressions besides laughter crossed it. Like a child detected in fault, he looked sheepishly at Owen and glanced behind his shoulder. The faithful sunset-tinted face of Blackbird, immovable as a fixed star, regarded the battered cobbler as it might have regarded a great manitou when the island was young.
“How did you come by this, Owen?”
“I come by it from one that had throuble. Has yerself iver seen it before, John McGillis?”
“I have.”
“Is it a towken that ye're not a widdy?”
“It is.”
The boats went out, and Blackbird sat in her Irish husband's boat, on his baggage. Oars flashed, and the commandant's boat led the way. Then the life of the Northwest rose like a great wave—the voyageurs' song chanted by a hundred and fifty throats, with a chorus of thousands on the shore:
Dans les chan-tiers nous hi-ver-ne-rons!
Dans les chan-tiers nous hi-ver-ne-rons!
[Listen]
When Owen returned to his Kitchen he found a robe of the finest beaver folded and laid on his shoemaker's bench.
“Begorra!” observed the cobbler, shaking it out and rubbing it against his cheek, “she has paid me a beaver-shkin and the spalpeen wasn't worrth it. But she can kape him now till she has a moind to turn him out herself. Whin a man marries on a haythen, wid praste or widout praste, let him shtick to his haythen.”
THE SKELETON ON ROUND ISLAND
On the 15th day of March, 1897, Ignace Pelott died at Mackinac Island, aged ninety-three years.
The old quarter-breed, son of a half-breed Chippewa mother and French father, took with him into silence much wilderness lore of the Northwest. He was full of stories when warmed to recital, though at the beginning of a talk his gentle eyes dwelt on the listener with anxiety, and he tapped his forehead—“So many things gone from there!” His habit of saying “Oh God, yes,” or “Oh God, no,” was not in the least irreverent, but simply his mild way of using island English.
While water lapped the beach before his door and the sun smote sparkles on the strait, he told about this adventure across the ice, and his hearer has taken but few liberties with the recital.
I AM to carry Mamselle Rosalin of Green Bay from Mackinac to Cheboygan that time, and it is the end of March, and the wind have turn from east to west in the morning. A man will go out with the wind in the east, to haul wood from Boblo, or cut a hole to fish, and by night he cannot get home—ice, it is rotten; it goes to pieces quick when the March wind turns.
I am not afraid for me—long, tall fellow then; eye that can see to Point aux Pins; I can lift more than any other man that goes in the boats to Green Bay or the Soo; can swim, run on snow-shoes, go without eating two, three days, and draw my belt in. Sometimes the ice-floes carry me miles, for they all go east down the lakes when they start, and I have landed the other side of Drummond. But when you have a woman with you—Oh God, yes, that is different.
The way of it is this: I have brought the mail from St. Ignace with my traino—you know the train-au-galise—the birch sledge with dogs. It is flat, and turn up at the front like a toboggan. And I have take the traino because it is not safe for a horse; the wind is in the west, and the strait bends and looks too sleek. Ice a couple of inches thick will bear up a man and dogs. But this old ice a foot thick, it is turning rotten. I have come from St. Ignace early in the afternoon, and the people crowd about to get their letters, and there is Mamselle Rosalin crying to go to Cheboygan, because her lady has arrive there sick, and has sent the letter a week ago. Her friends say:
“It is too late to go to-day, and the strait is dangerous.”
She say: “I make a bundle and walk. I must go when my lady is sick and her husband the lieutenant is away, and she has need of me.”
Mamselle's friends talk and she cry. She runs and makes a little bundle in the house and comes out ready to walk to Cheboygan. There is nobody can prevent her. Some island people are descend from noblesse of France. But none of them have travel like Mamselle Rosalin with the officer's wife to Indiana, to Chicago, to Detroit. She is like me, French. [1] The girls use to turn their heads to see me walk in to mass; but I never look grand as Mamselle Rosalin when she step out to that ice.
[1] The old fellow would not own the Chippewa.
I have not a bit of sense; I forget maman and my brothers and sisters that depend on me. I run to Mamselle Rosalin, take off my cap, and bow from my head to my heel, like you do in the dance. I will take her to Cheboygan with my traino—Oh God, yes! And I laugh at the wet track the sledge make, and pat my dogs and tell them they are not tired. I wrap her up in the fur, and she thank me and tremble, and look me through with her big black eyes so that I am ready to go down in the strait.
The people on the shore hurrah, though some of them cry out to warn us.
“The ice is cracked from Mission Point to the hook of Round Island, Ignace Pelott!”
“I know that,” I say. “Good-day, messieurs!”
The crack from Mission Point—under what you call Robinson's Folly—to the hook of Round Island always comes first in a breaking up; and I hold my breath in my teeth as I skurry the dogs across it. The ice grinds, the water follows the sledge. But the sun is so far down in the southwest, I think “The wind will grow colder. The real thaw will not come before to-morrow.”
THE TRAIN-AU-GALISE
I am to steer betwixt the east side of Round Island and Boblo. When we come into the shadow of Boblo we are chill with damp, far worse than the clear sharp air that blows from Canada. I lope beside the traino, and not take my eyes off the course to Cheboygan, except that I see the islands look blue, and darkness stretching before its time. The sweat drop off my face, yet I feel that wind through my wool clothes, and am glad of the shelter between Boblo and Round Island, for the strait outside will be the worst.
There is an Indian burying-ground on open land above the beach on that side of Round Island. I look up when the thick woods are pass, for the sunset ought to show there. But what I see is a skeleton like it is sliding down hill from the graveyard to the beach. It does not move. The earth is wash from it, and it hangs staring at me.
I cannot tell how that make me feel! I laugh, for it is funny; but I am ashame, like my father is expose and Mamselle Rosalin can see him. If I do not cover him again I am disgrace. I think I will wait till some other day when I can get back from Cheboygan; for what will she say if I stop the traino when we have such a long journey, and it is so near night, and the strait almost ready to move? So I crack the whip, but something pull, pull! I cannot go on! I say to myself, “The ground is froze; how can I cover up that skeleton without any shovel, or even a hatchet to break the earth?”
But something pull, pull, so I am oblige to stop, and the dogs turn in without one word and drag the sledge up the beach of Round Island.
“What is the matter?” says Mamselle Rosalin. She is out of the sledge as soon as it stops.
I not know what to answer, but tell her I have to cut a stick to mend my whip-handle. I think I will cut a stick and rake some earth over the skeleton to cover it, and come another day with a shovel and dig a new grave. The dogs lie down and pant, and she looks through me with her big eyes like she beg me to hurry.
But there is no danger she will see the skeleton. We both look back to Mackinac. The island have its hump up against the north, and the village in its lap around the bay, and the Mission eastward near the cliff; but all seem to be moving! We run along the beach of Round Island, and then we see the channel between that and Boblo is moving too, and the ice is like wet loaf-sugar, grinding as it floats.
We hear some roars away off, like cannon when the Americans come to the island. My head swims. I cross myself and know why something pull, pull, to make me bring the traino to the beach, and I am oblige to that skeleton who slide down hill to warn me.
When we have seen Mackinac, we walk to the other side and look south and southeast towards Cheboygan. All is the same. The ice is moving out of the strait.
“We are strand on this island!” says Mamselle Rosalin. “Oh, what shall we do?”
I tell her it is better to be prisoners on Round Island than on a cake of ice in the strait, for I have tried the cake of ice and know.
“We will camp and build a fire in the cove opposite Mackinac,” I say. “Maman and the children will see the light and feel sure we are safe.”
“I have done wrong,” says she. “If you lose your life on this journey, it is my fault.”
Oh God, no! I tell her. She is not to blame for anything, and there is no danger. I have float many a time when the strait breaks up, and not save my hide so dry as it is now. We only have to stay on Round Island till we can get off.
“And how long will that be?” she ask.
I shrug my shoulders. There is no telling. Sometimes the strait clears very soon, sometimes not. Maybe two, three days.
Rosalin sit down on a stone.
I tell her we can make camp, and show signals to Mackinac, and when the ice permit, a boat will be sent.
She is crying, and I say her lady will be well. No use to go to Cheboygan anyhow, for it is a week since her lady sent for her. But she cry on, and I think she wish I leave her alone, so I say I will get wood. And I unharness the dogs, and run along the beach to cover that skeleton before dark. I look and cannot find him at all. Then I go up to the graveyard and look down. There is no skeleton anywhere. I have seen his skull and his ribs and his arms and legs, all sliding down hill. But he is gone!
The dusk close in upon the islands, and I not know what to think—cross myself, two, three times; and wish we had land on Boblo instead of Round Island, though there are wild beasts on both.
But there is no time to be scare at skeletons that slide down and disappear, for Mamselle Rosalin must have her camp and her place to sleep. Every man use to the bateaux have always his tinder-box, his knife, his tobacco, but I have more than that; I have leave Mackinac so quick I forget to take out the storekeeper's bacon that line the bottom of the sledge, and Mamselle Rosalin sit on it in the furs! We have plenty meat, and I sing like a voyageur while I build the fire. Drift, so dry in summer you can light it with a coal from your pipe, lay on the beach, but is now winter-soaked, and I make a fireplace of logs, and cut pine branches to help it.
It is all thick woods on Round Island, so close it tear you to pieces if you try to break through; only four-footed things can crawl there. When the fire is blazing up I take my knife and cut a tunnel like a little room, and pile plenty evergreen branches. This is to shelter Mamselle Rosalin, for the night is so raw she shiver. Our tent is the sky, darkness, and clouds. But I am happy. I unload the sledge. The bacon is wet. On long sticks the slices sizzle and sing while I toast them, and the dogs come close and blink by the fire, and lick their chops. Rosalin laugh and I laugh, for it smell like a good kitchen; and we sit and eat nothing but toasted meat—better than lye corn and tallow that you have when you go out with the boats. Then I feed the dogs, and she walk with me to the water edge, and we drink with our hands.
It is my house, when we sit on the fur by the fire. I am so light I want my fiddle. I wish it last like a dream that Mamselle Rosalin and me keep house together on Round Island. You not want to go to heaven when the one you think about all the time stays close by you.
But pretty soon I want to go to heaven quick. I think I jump in the lake if maman and the children had anybody but me. When I light my pipe she smile. Then her great big eyes look off towards Mackinac, and I turn and see the little far-away lights.
“They know we are on Round Island together,” I say to cheer her, and she move to the edge of the fur. Then she say “Good-night,” and get up and go to her tunnel-house in the bushes, and I jump up too, and spread the fur there for her. And I not get back to the fire before she make a door of all the branches I have cut, and is hid like a squirrel. I feel I dance for joy because she is in my camp for me to guard. But what is that? It is a woman that cry out loud by herself! I understand now why she sit down so hopeless when we first land. I have not know much about women, but I understand how she feel. It is not her lady, or the dark, or the ice break up, or the cold. It is not Ignace Pelott. It is the name of being prison on Round Island with a man till the ice is out of the straits. She is so shame she want to die. I think I will kill myself. If Mamselle Rosalin cry out loud once more, I plunge in the lake—and then what become of maman and the children?
She is quieter; and I sit down and cannot smoke, and the dogs pity me. Old Sauvage lay his nose on my knee. I do not say a word to him, but I pat him, and we talk with our eyes, and the bright camp-fire shows each what the other is say.
“Old Sauvage,” I tell him, “I am not good man like the priest. I have been out with the boats, and in Indian camps, and I not had in my life a chance to marry, because there are maman and the children. But you know, old Sauvage, how I have feel about Mamselle Rosalin, it is three years.”
Old Sauvage hit his tail on the ground and answer he know.
“I have love her like a dog that not dare to lick her hand. And now she hate me because I am shut on Round Island with her while the ice goes out. I not good man, but it pretty tough to stand that.”
Old Sauvage hit his tail on the ground and say, “That so.” I hear the water on the gravel like it sound when we find a place to drink; then it is plenty company, but now it is lonesome. The water say to people on Mackinac, “Rosalin and Ignace Pelott, they are on Round Island.” What make you proud, maybe, when you turn it and look at it the other way, make you sick. But I cannot walk the broken ice, and if I could, she would be left alone with the dogs. I think I will build another camp.
But soon there is a shaking in the bushes, and Sauvage and his sledgemates bristle and stand up and show their teeth. Out comes Mamselle Rosalin with a scream to the other side of the fire.
I have nothing except my knife, and I take a chunk of burning wood and go into her house. Maybe I see some green eyes. I have handle vild-cat skin too much not to know that smell in the dark.
I take all the branches from Rosalin's house and pile them by the fire, and spread the fur robe on them. And I pull out red coals and put more logs on before I sit down away off between her and the spot where she hear that noise. If the graveyard was over us, I would expect to see that skeleton once more.
“What was it?” she whisper.
I tell her maybe a stray wolf.
“Wolves not eat people, mamselle, unless they hunt in a pack; and they run from fire. You know what M'sieu' Cable tell about wolves that chase him on the ice when he skate to Cheboygan? He come to great wide crack in ice, he so scare he jump it and skate right on! Then he look back, and see the wolves go in, head down, every wolf caught and drown in the crack. It is two days before he come home, and the east wind have blow to freeze that crack over—and there are all the wolf tails, stick up, froze stiff in a row! He bring them home with him—but los them on the way, though he show the knife that cut them off!”
“I have hear that,” says Rosalin. “I think he lie.”
“He say he take his oat on a book,” I tell her, but we both laugh, and she is curl down so close to the fire her cheeks turn rosy. For a camp-fire will heat the air all around until the world is like a big dark room; and we are shelter from the wind. I am glad she is begin to enjoy herself. And all the time I have a hand on my knife, and the cold chills down my back where that hungry vild-cat will set his claws if he jump on me; and I cannot turn around to face him because Rosalin thinks it is nothing but a cowardly wolf that sneak away. Old Sauvage is uneasy and come to me, his fangs all expose, but I drive him back and listen to the bushes behind me.
“Sing, M'sieu' Pelott,” says Rosalin.
Oh God, yes! it is easy to sing with a vild-cat watch you on one side and a woman on the other!
“But I not know anything except boat songs.”
“Sing boat songs.”
So I sing like a bateau full of voyageurs, and the dark echo, and that vild-cat must be astonish. When you not care what become of you, and your head is light and your heart like a stone on the beach, you not mind vild-cats, but sing and laugh.
I cast my eye behin sometimes, and feel my knife. It make me smile to think what kind of creature come to my house in the wilderness, and I say to myself: “Hear my cat purr! This is the only time I will ever have a home of my own, and the only time the woman I want sit beside my fire.”
Then I ask Rosalin to sing to me, and she sing “Malbrouck,” like her father learn it in Kebec. She watch me, and I know her eyes have more danger for me than the vild-cat's. It ought to tear me to pieces if I forget maman and the children. It ought to be scare out the bushes to jump on a poor fool like me. But I not stop entertain it—Oh God, no! I say things that I never intend to say, like they are pull out of my mouth. When your heart has ache, sometimes it break up quick like the ice.
“There is Paul Pepin,” I tell her. “He is a happy man; he not trouble himself with anybody at all. His father die; he let his mother take care of herself. He marry a wife, and get tired of her and turn her off with two children. The priest not able to scare him; he smoke and take his dram and enjoy life. If I was Paul Pepin I would not be torment.”
“But you are not torment,” says Rosalin. “Everybody speak well of you.”
“Oh God, yes,” I tell her; “but a man not live on the breath of his neighbors. I am thirty years old, and I have take care of my mother and brothers and sisters since I am fifteen. I not made so I can leave them, like Paul Pepin. He marry when he please. I not able to marry at all. It is not far I can go from the island. I cannot get rich. My work must be always the same.”
“But why you want to marry?” says Rosalin, as if that surprise her. And I tell her it is because I have seen Rosalin of Green Bay; and she laugh. Then I think it is time for the vild-cat to jump. I am thirty years old, and have nothing but what I can make with the boats or my traino; the children are not grown; my mother depend on me; and I have propose to a woman, and she laugh at me!
But I not see, while we sing and talk, that the fire is burn lower, and old Sauvage has crept around the camp into the bushes.
That end all my courtship. I not use to it, and not have any business to court, anyhow. I drop my head on my breast, and it is like when I am little and the measle go in. Paul Pepin he take a woman by the chin and smack her on the lips. The women not laugh at him, he is so rough. I am as strong as he is, but I am afraid to hurt; I am oblige to take care of what need me. And I am tie to things I love—even the island—so that I cannot get away.
“I not want to marry,” says Rosalin, and I see her shake her head at me. “I not think about it at all.”
“Mamselle,” I say to her, “you have not any inducement like I have, that torment you three years.”
“How you know that?” she ask me. And then her face change from laughter, and she spring up from the blanket couch, and I think the camp go around and around me—all fur and eyes and claws and teeth—and I not know what I am doing, for the dogs are all over me—yell—yell—yell; and then I am stop stabbing, because the vild-cat has let go of Sauvage, and Sauvage has let go of the vild-cat, and I am looking at them and know they are both dead, and I cannot help him any more.
“'I THINK THE CAMP GO AROUND AND AROUND ME'”
You are confuse by such things where there is noise, and howling creatures sit up and put their noses in the air, like they call their mate back out of the dark. I am sick for my old dog. Then I am proud he has kill it, and wipe my knife on its fur, but feel ashame that I have not check him driving it into camp. And then Rosalin throw her arms around my neck and kiss me.
It is many years I have tell Rosalin she did that. But a woman will deny what she know to be the trut. I have tell her the courtship had end, and she begin it again herself, and keep it up till the boats take us off Round Island. The ice not run out so quick any more now like it did then. My wife say it is a long time we waited, but when I look back it seem the shortest time I ever live—only two days.
Oh God, yes, it is three years before I marry the woman that not want to marry at all; then my brothers and sisters can take care of themselves, and she help me take care of maman.
It is when my boy Gabriel come home from the war to die that I see the skeleton on Round Island again. I am again sure it is wash out, and I go ashore to bury it, and it disappear. Nobody but me see it. Then before Rosalin die I am out on the ice-boat, and it give me warning. I know what it mean; but you cannot always escape misfortune. I cross myself when I see it; but I find good luck that first time I land; and maybe I find good luck every time, after I have land.
[1] The old fellow would not own the Chippewa.
Mamselle's friends talk and she cry. She runs and makes a little bundle in the house and comes out ready to walk to Cheboygan. There is nobody can prevent her. Some island people are descend from noblesse of France. But none of them have travel like Mamselle Rosalin with the officer's wife to Indiana, to Chicago, to Detroit. She is like me, French. [1] The girls use to turn their heads to see me walk in to mass; but I never look grand as Mamselle Rosalin when she step out to that ice.
THE PENITENT OF CROSS VILLAGE
THE cross cast its shadow around its feet, so high noon stood over Cross Village. It was behind the church, rising above the gable, of silver-colored wood stained by weather to an almost phosphorescent glint. Seen from the lake the cross towered the most conspicuous thing on the bluff. A whitewashed fence stretched between it and the cliff, and on this fence sat Moses Nazagebic, looking across Lake Michigan.
He heard a soft tap on the ground near him and knew that his wife's grandmother had come out to walk there. She was the only villager, except his wife, whose approach he could endure. His wife stood some distance apart, protecting him, as Miriam protected the first Moses. Other women, gathered in the grove along the bluff to spread the festival mid-day meal, said to one another:
“Moses has now mourned a week for Frank Chibam and his shipwrecked boat and the white men. We shall miss Lucy's fish-pie this year.”
“It was at last year's festival that Frank began to notice Catharine. They were like one family, those four and the grandmother, especially after Moses and Frank bought the sail-boat together. No wonder the poor fellow sits on the fence and says nothing while the tribes are racing horses.”
“But it is worst for poor Catharine, who was to have been a bride. See her sit like a stone in the sun! It is little any one can say to comfort Catharine.”
The women, who knew no English, used soft Chippewa or Ottawa gutturals. The men who ventured on the conquerors' language used it shorn and contracted, as white children do.
The annual festivities of the Cross Village were at their height. Yells and the tumultuous patter of racing hoofs fell on Moses' ear. A trial of horse speed was now in progress; and later in the day would come a trial of agility and endurance in the Ottawa and Chippewa dances. The race-course was the mile-long street, beginning at the old chapel and ending at the monastery. Young Indians, vividly clad in red calico shirts and fringed leggings, leaned over their horses' necks, whipping and shouting. Dust rose behind the flying cavalcade, and spectators were obliged to keep close to the small carved houses or risk being run down. Young braves denied the war-path were obliged to give themselves unbridled range of some sort.
The monastery brethren had closed their whitewashed gates, not because they objected to the yearly fête, nor because custom made the monastery the goal in horse-racing, but because there was in the festivities an abandoned spirit to be dealt with only by the parish priest. On ordinary days the brethren were glad to show those beneficial death's heads with which their departed prior had ornamented the inner walls of his tomb before he came to use it. The village knew it had been that good prior's habit to sit in a coffin meditating, while he painted skulls and cross-bones in that roofed enclosure which was to be his body's last resting-place. Young squaws and braves often peeped at the completed grave and its surrounding symbols of mortality. It was as good as a Chippewa ghost-story.
The priest let himself be seen all the morning. Without speaking a word, he was a check upon the riotous. Ottawa and Chippewa had a right to commemorate some observances of their forefathers. He always winked at their dances. And this day the one silent Indian on the fence troubled him more than all the barbaric horsemen.
Moses' wife had been to him. Lucy was very indignant at her cousin Catharine. Moses neither ate nor slept, and he groaned in the night as if he had toothache. He would not talk to her. The good father might not believe it, but Catharine was putting a spell on Moses, in revenge for Frank Chibam. Catharine blamed Moses for everything—the shipwreck, the drowning, perhaps even for the storm. She hounded him out of the house and then she hounded him in again, by standing and looking at him with fixed gaze. It was more than flesh could bear. The father must see that Moses and Lucy would have to leave Cross Village and go to the Cheneaux or Mackinac, taking the grandmother with them. It would be hard for Moses to live without a boat. But then, Lucy demanded triumphantly, what would Catharine do without a man or any relation left in the house?
The priest looked from Catharine, motionless as a rock in the sun by the church gable, to Moses on the fence with his back towards her. The grandmother, oblivious to both, felt her way along the ground with a stick, and Lucy watched, nearer the grove. These four had occupied one of the small unpainted wooden houses as a united family. It was a sorrow to the priest that they might now be divided, one of them bearing an unconfessed trouble on his mind. For if Moses Nazagebic was as innocent as his wife Lucy believed him to be of the catastrophe which he said had happened on Lake Superior, he would not fly from poor Catharine as from an avenger.
There were fences of silver flattened out on the water; farther from shore flitted changeable bars of green and rose and pale-blue, converging until they swept the surface like some colossal peacock's tail. The grandmother stumping with her stick came quite near the cliff edge and stopped there. She was not blind or deaf, but her mind had long been turned inward and backward. She saw daily happenings as symbols of what had been. She knew more tribal lore than any other Indian of Cross Village; and repeated, as she had repeated a hundred times before when scanning the log dock with its fleet of courtesying boats, the steep road, and the strip of sand below:
“Down there was the first cross set up, many years ago, by a man who came here in a large boat moved by wings like the wings of a gull. The man had a white face and long hair the color of the sun. When he first landed he fell on his knees and then began to count a string of beads. Then he sang a song and called the other men, some of whom were Indians, from the boat. They cut down trees, and he made them set up a large cross at the foot of the bluff. Since then that strip of sand has been sacred, though the cross is gone and a new one is set here by our priest.”
The old squaw indicated with her stick the silver-colored relic behind Moses Nazagebic. Her guttural chant affected none of her hearers, except that Catharine frowned at a sight which could divert Moses. The Ottawas and Chippewas are a hard-featured people. Catharine was, perhaps, the handsomest product of an ill-favored village. Haggard pallor now encroached on the vermilion of her cheek. She wore an old hat of plaited bark pulled down to her eyes, and her strong black hair hung in two neglected braids. The patience of aboriginal womanhood was not stamped on her as it was on Lucy. A panther could look no fiercer than this lithe young Indian girl, whose bridal finery was hid in the house and whose banns had been published in the mission church.
Trying to grapple with the trouble of Moses Nazagebic and Catharine, the priest also stood gazing at the dock, where children usually played, tumbling in to swim or be drawn out, only more roseate for the bath. The children were now gathered in the grove or along the race-course. Nothing moved below except lapping water. It was seldom that these lake-going people left their landing-place so deserted. Gliding down from the north where the cliff had screened it from view, came a small schooner. The priest, shaded by his broad hat, watched the passing craft with barely conscious recognition of it as an object until handkerchiefs fluttered from the deck and startled him.
The tall silver-white cross was so conspicuous that any one standing near it must be observed. The priest shook his handkerchief in reply. He had many friends along the coast and among the islands. But his long sight caught some familiar guise which made him directly signal and entreat with wide peremptory sweeps of the arm.
“Moses,” commanded the priest, “you must unfasten a boat and go with me. There are people on board yonder that I want to see.”
No other man being at hand, the request was a natural one, and Moses had been used to responding to such needs of the priest. But he cast a quick look at the black robe and sat sullenly until a stern repetition compelled him.
The priest had continued his signals, and the schooner came about and waited. It was not a long pull. Moses, rowing with his back towards the schooner, watched the face of his spiritual father.
“That will do,” said the priest, and almost instantly some one on the schooner deck hailed him:
“Good-day, your reverence! What can we do for you?”
And another voice that Moses knew well shouted:
“Hello, Moses, is that you? Where's Frank? Did you get back all right with the sail-boat?”
The Indian cowered over his oars without answering or turning his head.
“I have come out,” answered the priest, “to satisfy myself that I really see you here alive. We heard you were shipwrecked and drowned in Lake Superior.”
“Shipwrecked, your reverence! What nonsense! We had a fine voyage and dismissed the men at the Sault. But since then we decided to make another cruise to the head of Lake Michigan, and hired another skipper. There is Moses in the boat with you, and Frank came home with him. They knew we were not shipwrecked.”
“Will you land at Cross Village?”
“No, your reverence. We only tacked in to salute the cross in passing.”
“But where shall I find you if I have urgent business with you?”
“At Little Traverse Bay. We cannot stop here.”
The schooner was drifting away broadside, and the voice of the speaker came across a widening swell of water. Then she came up into her course, cutting a breastwork of foam in front of her as she passed on southward. With pantomime salutations the priest and the two men who had hired Moses Nazagebic and Frank Chibam took leave of each other.
It had been a brief conference, but Moses rowed back a convicted criminal. He did not look at his conscience-keeper in the end of the boat. His high-cheeked face seemed to have had all individuality blotted out of it. Dazed and blear-eyed, he shipped his oars and tied the boat to its stake. A great noise of drumming and shouting came from the grove above, for the dances were soon to begin.
The steep road was a Calvary height to Moses. He dragged his feet as he climbed and stumbled in the deep sand; he who was so lithe of limb and nimble in any action. He had felt Catharine's eyes on his back like burning-glasses as he sat on the fence. They reflected on him now in one glare all the knowledge that the priest had gained of his crime. It was easier to follow to instant confession than to stay outside longer where Catharine could watch him. His wife's grandmother passed him, tapping along the fence and repeating again the legend of the first cross in Cross Village. Even in that day men who had slain their brothers were expected to give satisfaction to the tribe. It was either a life for a life or the labor of long hunting to solace a bereaved family.
He knelt down in the place where he had often confessed such little sins as lying or convivial drunkenness. How slight and innocent these offences seemed as the hopeless weight of this burden crushed him. The stern yet compassionate face over him exacted every word.
The priest remembered that this had not been a bad Chippewa. He had lived a steady, honest life in his humble station, keeping the three women well provided with such comforts as they needed; he had fished, he had labored at wood-chopping, and in the season helped Lucy fill her birch-bark mococks with maple sugar for sale at the larger settlements. The anguish of Cain was in the man's eyes. Natural life and he had already parted company. The teeth showed between his relaxed lips.
“Moses Nazagebic,” said the priest, disregarding formula and dealing with the primitive sinner, “what have you done with Frank Chibam?”
“Father, I kill him.”
The brief English which the Indian men mastered and used in their trading at the settlements was Moses' refuge in confession. To profane his native language with his crime seemed the last enormity of all.
“It was a lie that there was a wreck in Lake Superior?”
“Yes, father.”
“It was a lie that you lost your sail-boat?”
“Yes, father.”
“Did you intend to kill Frank?”
Moses swallowed as if his throat were closing.
“No—no! We both drunk. We quarrel; Frank sitting on edge of boat. I come up behind and hit him with oar. I knock him into the water.”
“This was after the white men left you?”
“Yes, father. We have our money. We get drunk at Sault.”
“Where is his body?”
“In St. Mary's River. Not far above Drummond Island.”
“Are you sure he was drowned?”
“Oh, sure!” Moses' jaw dropped. “Frank he go down like a stone; and his spirit follow me ever since. His spirit tell Catharine. His spirit drive these men back so Cross Village know the truth. Good name, Chibam—that mean spirit. It follow me all the time. I get no rest till that spirit satisfied.”
“My unhappy son, you must confess and give yourself up to justice.”
“Justice no good. Justice hang. Frank Chibam want me go down like stone. Frank Chibam drive me back where he went down. But I not have my boat. Next thing Frank Chibam send me boat.”
“What did you do with Frank's and yours?”
“I leave it at Drummond Island, with Chippewa there; and tell him to give it to nobody but Frank Chibam. I never set foot on that boat again—Frank's spirit angrier there than anywhere else.”
“But how did you come home?”
“I get other Chippewa at Drummond to bring me to Mackinac. Then I get Chippewa at Mackinac to bring me to Cross Village. I tell last Chippewa I had a shipwreck. After Frank drowned I not know what to do. I had to come home. I thought if I said the boat was wrecked my people might believe me. I have to see Lucy.” His bloodshot eyes piteously sought the compassion of his confessor. One moment's lapse into a brutal frenzy which now seemed some other man's had changed all things for him.
Never before had penitent come to that closet in such despair. Moses had repented through what seemed to him a long nightmare of succeeding days. There was no hope for him. He was called a Christian Indian, but the white man's consolations and ideas of retribution were not the red man's.
He heard the priest arrange a journey for him to give himself up to the law. The priest was a wise man, but this was uselessly clogging the wheels of fate. He did not want to sit in a jail with Frank Chibam's spirit. Such company was bad enough in the open sunlight. It was plain that neither Frank nor Catharine would be appeased by any offering short of their full measure of vengeance.
Having settled it that Moses' penance for his crime must be to give himself up to the law, the priest left him in the chapel and went out to press some sail-boat into service. It would be almost impossible to take any Indian from the festivities. The death of the most agile dancer and the withdrawal of the most ardent horse-racer had very mildly checked the usual joy.
Moses in his broken state was, perhaps, capable of sailing a boat, but it would be wiser to have another skipper aboard in crossing the strait to Mackinac.
It was fortunate, on the other hand, that the fête had prevented fishermen from hailing the passing schooner. The men were known by all the villagers, having stayed at the Cross Village inn, a place scarcely larger than a Chippewa cabin, kept by the only white family. These tribe remnants were gentle in their semi-civilization, yet the priest dreaded to think what might become of Moses if they discovered his lie and denied him the indulgence accorded to accidental man-killers.
To borrow a sail-boat would be easy enough while sympathy lasted for his penitent. He remembered also that Lucy could help sail it, and it would be best to take her to Mackinac for the parting with her husband.
The cross was stretching its afternoon shadow, and wind sweet with the moisture of many tossing blue miles flowed across the bluff. There never had been a fairer day for the yearly dances. Under his trouble the priest was conscious of trivial self-reproach that he had not told the passers it was fête day. But he reflected that few could love this remote little aboriginal world as he loved it, in joy or tragedy. The glamour of the North was over it through every season. At bleak January-end, in wastes of snow, the small houses were sealed and glowing with fires, and sledges creaked on the crust, while the shout of Indian children could be heard. Then the ice-boat shot out on the closed strait above and veered like a spirit from point to point, almost silent and terribly swift. On mornings after there had been a dry mist from the lake, this whole world was bridal-white, every twig loaded with frost blooms, until the far-reaching glory gave it a tropical beauty and lavishness and the frost fell like showers of flower petals.
His people stood respectfully out of his way as he entered the grove. The “throb, throb” and “pat, pat” of drum and feet were farther off, where young men were dancing in a ring. He could see their lithe bodies sway between tree boles. Old squaws sat with knees up to their chins, and old men smoked, pressing close to the spectacle. The priest was sensitive enough to feel a stir of uneasiness at his invasion of the aboriginal temple, and he was not long in having a boat put at his disposal.
The next thing was to induce Moses and Lucy to accompany him quietly down to the dock. He spoke to Lucy at her door. She sat in dull dejection, her basket-work and supply of sweet grass on the floor beside her.
“Come, Lucy! I have business in Mackinac, and Moses and you must take me there.”
“Did that schooner bring you news, father?”
“Yes.”
“But it is late.”
“We may remain there to-night. Take such things with you as your husband might need for a week.”
Lucy obediently put her basket-work away and prepared for the journey. She was conscious of triumph over Catharine, from whom the priest was about to rescue Moses. She put on her best sweet-grass hat and made up her bundle.
The priest brought Moses out of the chapel with a pity and tenderness that touched Lucy, and the three went down the steep road. Her grandmother was sitting in the sun by the gable and did not notice them. The old woman was telling herself the story of Nanabojou. The sail-boat which they were to take was anchored off the end of the dock. Moses rowed out after it and brought it alongside. He was busy raising the sails and the priest and Lucy had already taken their seats when the little craft answered to a light bound over the stern, and Catharine sat resolutely down, looking at Moses Nazagebic.
Moses let the sails fall and leaped out. He tied the rope to the dock.
“Get into the boat again, Moses!” commanded the priest. “And Catharine, you go back!”
Moses shook his head. His spirit was broken, but it was a physical impossibility for him to sail a boat to Mackinac with Catharine aboard.
The priest knew he might as well attempt to control gulls. French clamor or Anglo-Saxon brutality would be easy to persuade or compel, in comparison with this dense aboriginal silence. He took patience and sat still, reading his breviary. The boat ground softly against logs, and Lucy hugged her bundle, determined on the journey. Moses remained with his back to them, dangling his legs over the end of the dock. Catharine kept her place, grasping the edges of the craft. It was plain if Moses Nazagebic went to Mackinac it would be in the hands of officers sent to bring him at a later period. So the day dropped down in splendor, lake and sky becoming one dazzle of gold so bright the eye might not dwell on it. The party of four returned, and Catharine walked last up the hill. Religion and penance were nothing to a Chippewa girl who had distinct intentions of vengeance.
She kept an eye on her victim while she milked the cows as they came from the woods to keep their nightly appointment. The priest owned some lack in himself that he could not better handle the destinies around him. They hurt him, as rock would bruise tender flesh.
Barbaric instrumentation and shouting did not keep him awake after darkness closed in. He would have lain awake if a dog had not stirred in Cross Village. He heard the wind change and strike the east side of his house with gusts of rain. Fires must die down to wet ashes in the grove. He knew the cross stood white and tall in scudding mist, and on the crosses in the cemetery chaplets and flowers made of white rags hung bedraggled. He foresaw the kind of day which would open before his poor penitent and be a symbol of the life that was to follow.
It was the priest himself who introduced Moses to this day, opening the door and standing unheeding under the overflow of the eaves. The hiss of rain could be heard, and daylight penetrated reluctantly abroad. Moses sat drooped forward with his elbows on his knees by the open fire. Lucy hurried to answer the summons, believing the priest had found some new haven for Moses while her cousin was out of the house.
But there stood Catharine behind the priest, the spell of her fierceness broken, and at her side was Frank Chibam, undrowned and amiably grinning, his dark red skin stung by the weather, indeed, but otherwise little changed by water.
“Tell Moses I want him!” said the priest. “And Catharine, you go into the house!”
This time Catharine nimbly obeyed. As for Lucy, she made no outcry. She merely satisfied herself it was Frank Chibam before hurrying her husband to the spectacle.
Moses stepped out bareheaded into the rain, and his jaw dropped. The priest closed the door behind him.
Frank took his hand. Moses felt the young man's firm sinew and muscle. He looked piteously at the priest, his head sagging to one side, his face working in a spasm.
“I should have prepared him, Frank. This comes too suddenly on him.”
They took Moses between them and walked with him along the fence at the foot of the cross. The raindrops moved down his face like tears. He did not speak, but listened with a child's intentness, first to one and then to the other, leaning his arm on his partner's shoulder.
“I don't understand why he was so certain he had killed you, Frank. He told me he struck you with an oar and saw you go down in the water like a stone.”
“Whiskey, father,” explained Frank in trader's brief English. “Plenty very bad whiskey. It make me sick for a week. The boom knocked us both down, and I fell into the water. The fisherman from one of the little islands who pull me out say that. Moses, he drunker than me; he too drunk to bring the boat home.”
“The poor fellow told lies to cover the crime he thought he had committed. He has suffered, Frank. And I have suffered. We will say nothing about Catharine. Why didn't you come sooner?”
“I take the boat and go fishing. I say, 'Moses, that lazy Chippewa, leave the boat for me to bring home; I make him wait for it.'”
“Did you quarrel at all?”
“Maybe so,” said Frank. “Whiskey not let you remember much. But I could kill Moses easier than he could kill me.”
“He has suffered enough. But you, my son, ought to do heavy penance.”
“Not put off wedding?” suggested Frank, uneasily.
“I had not thought of unusual methods; it might be good discipline for Catharine, too. But we have lost enough cheer on your account.”
“I never spend my money for whiskey any more, father. If some man ask me to take a drink, I drink with him, but not get drunk—no.”
Moses laughed, his face shortening in horizontal lines.
“That Frank Chibam. Frank make me pay for all the whiskey. He not drowned. I not kill him. His spirit only an evil dream.”
“The evil dream is now past, Moses,” said the priest.
“Wake up, my brother!” said Frank in Chippewa. “I have a boatful of fish. You must come and help me with them. The good father will go back to his books when he sees you are yourself once more.”
Under the rain-cloud the lake had turned to blue-black velvet water pricked with thousands of tossing white-caps. Near shore it seemed full of submerged smoke. And the rack tore itself, dragging low across the west. Moses, remembering the last sunset and its sickening splendors, felt that he had never seen so fine a day. He worked bareheaded and with his sleeves above his elbows among the fish. Gulls were flying, each making a burnished white glare against that background of weather. Looking up, the Chippewa could see the cross at the top of the bluff, standing over him in holy benediction. He felt lighter-bodied than a gull. And the anguish of that wretch who had sat on the fence believing himself a murderer was forgotten.
In the house his wife was exacting what in elder times would have been typified by an intricate piece of wampum, from her repentant cousin. Catharine brought in wood and carried water. Catharine was not permitted to make the great fish-pie, but could only look on. She served humbly. She had wronged her kinspeople by evil suspicion, and must make atonement. No words were lost between her and Lucy. She must lay her hand upon her mouth and be tasked until the elder woman was appeased. It was not the way of civilized women, but it was the aboriginal scheme, which the priest found good.
Lucy was not yet ready to demand the truth about the two white men and the shipwrecked boat. Her entire mind was given to humbling Catharine and impressing upon that forward young squaw that her husband was in no way accountable for the disappearance and vagrancy of Frank Chibam.
The grandmother basked at the hearth corner while this silent retribution went on unseen. She was repeating again the story of the first cross in Cross Village. She did not know that anything had happened in the house.
