The work of raising the new cabins went forward merrily. Every one lent
a hand, and by the end of May the new families were installed and living
happily. In that last house near the northeast corner of the post dwelt
Henri and Marie Baptiste and Maren Le Moyne.
A goodly place it was, divided into two rooms and already the hands of
the two sisters had fashioned of such scant things as they possessed and
dared buy from the factory on the year's debt, a semblance of comfort.
In the other cabins the rest of the party managed to double, each family
taking one of the two rooms in each, and the women at least drew a
sigh of content that the long trail had at last found an end, however
unstable of tenure.
“Ah, Maren,” said Marie Baptiste, sitting on the shining new log step
of her domicile, “what it is to have a home! Does it not clutch at your
heart sometimes, ma cherie, the desire for a home, and that which goes
with it, the love of a man?”
She raised her eyes to the face of Maren leaning above her against the
lintel, and they were full of a puzzled question.
Maren answered the look with a swift smile, toying lightly with a fold
of the faded sleeve rolled above her elbow.
“Home for me, Marie, is the wide blue sky above, the wind in the tossing
trees, the ripple of soft waters on the bow of a canoe. For me,--I
grieve that we have stopped. Not this year do we reach the Land of the
Whispering Hills.”
A swift change had fallen into the depth of her golden voice, a subtle
wistfulness that sang with weird pathos, and the eyes raised toward the
western rim of the forest were suddenly far and sombre.
“Forgive!” said her sister gently; “I had forgot. I know the dream, but
is it not better that we rest and gain new strength for another season?
Here might well be home, here on this pretty river. We have come a
mighty length already. What could be fairer, cherie,--even though we
leave another to win to the untracked West.”
A small spasm drew across the features of Maren, a twitching of the full
lips.
“Faint heart of you,” she said sadly. “Oh, Marie, 'tis your voice has
ever held us back. They would prod faster but for you. Is there no
glory within you, no daring, no dreams of conquest? Bien! But I could go
alone. This dallying stiffles the breath in me!”
She put up a hand and tore open the garment at her throat, taking a deep
breath of the sunlit air.
“But it is poverty that must be reckoned with. By spring again we may be
better equipped than ever.”
So rode up the hope that was ever in her.
“Yes,” sighed Marie, “as the good God wills.”
But she glanced wistfully around the new cabin, to be her own for the
length of the four seasons. And who should say what might not happen in
four seasons?
She wondered fretfully what fate had fashioned the glorious creature
beside her in the form of Love itself to put within the soul of the
restless conqueror. Never had she known Maren, though they two had come
from the same lap.
Presently Maren looked down at her, and the shimmering smile, like light
across dark waters, had again returned.
“Nay,” she said gently, “fret not. It is spring-and you have at last a
home.”
True, it was spring.
Did not each breath of the south wind tell it, each flute-like call
from the budding forest without the post, each burst of song from some
hot-blooded youth with his red cap perched on the back of his head, his
gay sash knotted jauntily?
It stirred the heart in the breast of Maren Le Moyne, but not with the
thought of love. It called to her as she stood at night alone under the
stars, with her head lifted as if to drink the keen, sweet darkness;
called to her from far-distant plains of blowing grass, virgin of man's
foot; from rushing rivers, bare of canoe and raft; from high hills,
smiling, sweet and fair, up to the cloudless sky--and always it called
from the West.
Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,--fate held back her
eager hand.
A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the
long trail, without which all would fail.
Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand its
toll of salvage.
At Rainy Lake they had been held by thieving Indians and a great part
of their provisions taken from them, leaving them to make their way in
comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.
Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of
the trappers with the factor.
And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among them,
urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in her
eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait at
Fort de Seviere for another spring.
Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her
eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by
her fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for the
woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of conquest
which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on the
perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for itself
an ideal holding.
Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood
to tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs
and trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the
peace-pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of
woman she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father,
grimy from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and
watch the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her
hands for that she was not born a man.
And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which
slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way
of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.
Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the
head of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.
Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years, why
not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place
of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap and
stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through the
stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River each
season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams where the
call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him,--how long none might
know. And at last he had heeded, laid down the staid, the sane, and
followed the will-o'-the-wisp of conquest and adventure that took the
current by his door.
Never had Maren chided him,--never for one moment held against him the
desertion of his children. For that, they were well provided for since
he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much, but
enough to bring both of them to the marriage age.
And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the
trust,--Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting
at Grand Portage.
So tenderly had the two maids grown in the love of the family that
Marie had, but at the start of the great journey, married young Henri
Baptiste.
Marie was all for a home and some black-eyed babies, but she clung to
Maren as she had ever done,--and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren
had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her
face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,--bound
for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague
rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing for
the father whose heart must be the pattern of her own.
And in her train, swept together by that fire within her, touched into
flame by her ever-mounting hope, her courage, and her magnetism, went
that small band of men and women, all young, all of adventurous blood,
all daring the odds that let reluctantly a woman into the wilderness.
Yet it has been ever women who have conquered the wilderness, for until
they trod the trace the men had cut it still remained a wilderness.
So she leaned in the door of Marie's new home, this taut-strung Maren
Le Moyne, and gazed away above the rim of the budding forest, and her
spirit was as a chaffing steed held into quiet by a hand it knows its
master.
For a year she must endure the strain,--then, as the good God willed,
the leap forward, the wild breath in her nostrils, the forging into the
unknown.
“Ah, yes!” she said again, “it is the spring.”
“Bon jour,” she nodded, unsmiling, as a slim youth swung jauntily up the
hard-beaten way between the cabins.
“Eh!” said Marie, alert, “and who is that lord-high-mighty, with his red
cheeks and his airs, Maren? You know, as it is always, every man in the
post already. It is not so with the women, I'll wager. For instance, who
lives in the tiny house there by the south bastion?”
“I know not,” answered Maren, as though she humoured a child, and taking
the last question first; “as for the youth, 'tis young Marc Dupre, and
one of a sturdy nature. I like his spirit, though all I know of it is
what sparkles from his roguish eyes. A fighter,--one to dare for love of
chance.”
Marie looked quickly up, ever ready to pounce on the first gleam of
aught that might ripen into a love interest, but she saw Maren's eyes,
cool and shining, watching the swaggering figure with a look that
measured its slim strength, its suggestion of reserve, its gay joy of
life, and naught else.
“A pretty fellow,” she said, with a touch of disappointment.
Each and every man went by Maren just so,--eliciting only that interest
which had to do apart from the personal.
But the black eyes of Marc Dupre had softened a bit under their daring
as he approached the factory.
“Holy Mother!” he whispered to himself; “what a woman! No maid, but
a WOMAN--for whose word one would fillip the face of Satan. She is
fire--and, if I am sure, all men are tow.”