The Road to Frontenac. Merwin Samuel

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      “Lieutenant Danton is not here?”

      “No, M’sieu, he walked away.”

      They sat about a log. Danton had not strayed far, for he joined them shortly, wearing a sulky expression. Menard looked about the group. The maid was silent. Father Claude was beginning at once on the food before him. The twilight was growing deeper, and Guerin dragged a log to the fire, throwing it on the pile with a shower of sparks, and half a hundred shooting tongues of flame. The Captain looked again at Danton, and saw that the boy’s glance shifted uneasily about the group. Altogether it was an unfortunate start for his plan. But it was clear that no other would break the ice, so he drew a long breath, and plunged doggedly into the story of his first fight on the St. Lawrence.

      It was a brave story of ambuscade and battle; and it was full of the dark of night and the red flash of muskets and the stealth and treachery of the Iroquois soul. When he reached the tale of the captured Mohawk, who sat against a tree with a ball in his lungs, to the last refusing the sacrament, and dying like a chief with the death song on his lips, Danton was leaning forward, breathless and eager, hanging on his words. The maid’s eyes, too, were moist. Then they talked on, Danton asking boyish questions, and Father Claude starting over and again on a narrative of the wonderful conversion of the Huron drunkard, Heroukiki, who, in his zeal,–and here Menard always swept in with a new story, which left the priest adrift in the eddies of the conversation. At last, when they rose, and the dusk was settling over the trees, the maid was laughing with gentle good fellowship.

      While they were eating, the voyageurs had brought the canoe a short way up the bank, resting it, bottom up, on large stones brought from the shore. Underneath was a soft cot of balsam; over the canoe were blankets, hanging on both sides to the ground. Then Mademoiselle said good-night, with a moment’s lingering on the word, and a wistful note in her voice that brought perhaps more sympathy than had the sad eyes of the morning. For after all she was only a girl, and hers was a brave little heart.

      The three men lay on the slope with hardly a word, looking at the river, now shining like silver through the trees. This new turn in the life of the party was not as yet to be taken familiarly. Father Claude withdrew early to his meditations. Menard stretched out on his back, his hands behind his head, gazing lazily at the leaves overhead, now hanging motionless from the twigs.

      Danton was sitting up, looking about, and running the young reeds through his fingers.

      “Danton,” Menard said, after a long silence, “I suppose you know that we have something of a problem on our hands.”

      Danton looked over the river.

      “What have you thought about Mademoiselle?”

      “I don’t understand.”

      “Father Claude and I have been talking this evening about her. I have thought that she does not look any too strong for a hard journey of a hundred and more leagues.”

      “She has little colour,” said Danton, cautiously.

      “It seems to me, Danton, that you can help us.”

      “How?”

      “What seems to you the cause of the trouble?”

      “With Mademoiselle? She takes little impression from the kindness of those about her.”

      “Oh, come, Danton. You know better. Even a boy of your age should see deeper than that. You think she slights you; very likely she does. What of that? You are not here to be drawn into a boy-and-girl quarrel with a maid who chances to share our canoe. You are here as my aid, to make the shortest time possible between Quebec and Frontenac. If she were to fall sick, we should be delayed. Therefore she must not fall sick.”

      Danton had plucked a weed, and now was pulling it to pieces, bit by bit.

      “What do you want me to do?”

      “Stop this moping, this hanging about. Take hold of the matter. Devise talks, diversions; fill her idle moments; I care not what you do,–within limits, my boy, within limits.”

      “Oh,” said Danton, “then you really want me to?”

      “Certainly. I am too old myself.”

      Danton rose, and walked a few steps away and back.

      “But she will have none of me, Menard. It is, ‘No, with thanks,’ or, worse, a shake of the head. If I offer to help, if I try to talk, if I–oh, it is always the same. I am tired of it.”

      Menard smiled in the dark.

      “Is that your reply to an order from your superior officer, Danton?”

      The boy stood silent for a moment, then he said, “I beg your pardon, Captain.” And with a curious effort at stiffness he wandered off among the trees, and was soon out of Menard’s sight.

      Menard walked slowly down to the fire, opened his pack, and spreading out his blanket, rolled himself in it with his feet close to the red embers. For a long time he lay awake. This episode took him back nearly a decade, to a time when he, like Danton, would have lost his poise at a glance from the nearest pair of eyes. That the maid should so interest him was in itself amusing. Had she been older or younger, had she been any but the timid, honest little woman that she was, he would have left her, without a second thought, in the care of the Commandant at Montreal, to be escorted through the rapids by some later party. But he had fixed his mind on getting her to Frontenac, and the question was settled. His last thought that night was of her quiet laughter and her friendly, hesitating “good-night.”

      He was awakened in the half light before the sunrise by a step on the twigs. At a little distance through the trees was the maid, walking down toward the water. She slipped easily between the briers, holding her skirt close. From a spring, not a hundred yards up the hillside, a brook came tumbling to the river, picking its way under and over the stones and the fallen trees, and trickling over the bank with a low murmur. The maid stopped by a pool, and kneeling on a flat rock, dipped her hands.

      The others were asleep. A rod away lay Danton, a sprawling heap in his blanket. Menard rose, tossed his blanket upon his bundle, and walked slowly down toward the maid.

      “Mademoiselle, you rise with the birds.”

      She looked around, and laughed gently. He saw that she had frankly accepted the first little change in their relations.

      “I like to be with the birds, M’sieu.”

      Menard had no small talk. He was thinking of her evident lack of sleep.

      “It is the best hour for the river, Mademoiselle.” The colours of the dawn were beginning to creep up beyond the eastern bank, sending a lance of red and gold into a low cloud bank, and a spread of soft crimson close after. “Perhaps you are fond of the fish?”

      The maid was kneeling to pick a cluster of yellow flower cups. She looked up and nodded, with a smile.

      “We fished at home, M’sieu.”

      “We will go,” said Menard, abruptly. “I will bring down the canoe.”

      He threw the blankets to one side, and stooping under the long canoe, carried it on his shoulders to the water. A line and hook were in his bundle; the bait was ready at a turn of the grass and weeds.

      “We СКАЧАТЬ