At Fort Latrobe sentiment was not of the most refined kind. Local
customs were pronounced and crude in outline; language was often highly
coloured, and action was occasionally accentuated by a pistol shot. For
the first few months of its life the place was honoured by the presence
of neither wife, nor sister, nor mother. Yet women lived there.
When some men did bring wives and children, it was noticed that the girl
Blanche was seldom seen in the streets. And, however it was, there grew
among the men a faint respect for her. They did not talk of it to each
other, but it existed. It was known that Blanche resented even the most
casual notice from those men who had wives and homes. She gave the
impression that she had a remnant of conscience.
"Go home," she said to Harry Delong, who asked her to drink with him on
New Year's Day. "Go home, and thank God that you've got a home--and a
wife."
After Jacques, the long-time friend of Pretty Pierre, came to Fort
Latrobe, with his sulky eye and scrupulously neat attire, Blanche
appeared to withdraw still more from public gaze, though no one saw any
connection between these events. The girl also became fastidious in her
dress, and lost all her former dash and smart aggression of manner. She
shrank from the women of her class, for which, as might be expected, she
was duly reviled. But the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air
have nests, nor has it been written that a woman may not close her ears,
and bury herself in darkness, and travel alone in the desert with her
people--those ghosts of herself, whose name is legion, and whose slow
white fingers mock more than the world dare at its worst.
Suddenly, she was found behind the bar of Weir's Tavern at Cedar Point,
the resort most frequented by Jacques. Word went about among the men
that Blanche was taking a turn at religion, or, otherwise, reformation.
Soldier Joe was something sceptical on this point from the fact that she
had developed a very uncertain temper. This appeared especially
noticeable in her treatment of Jacques. She made him the target for her
sharpest sarcasm. Though a peculiar glow came to his eyes at times, he
was never roused from his exasperating coolness. When her shafts were
unusually direct and biting, and the temptation to resent was keen, he
merely shrugged his shoulders, almost gently, and said: "Eh, such women!"
Nevertheless, there were men at Fort Latrobe who prophesied trouble,
for they knew there was a deep strain of malice in the French half-breed
which could be the more deadly because of its rare use. He was not
easily moved, he viewed life from the heights of a philosophy which could
separate the petty from the prodigious. His reputation was not wholly
disquieting; he was of the goats, he had sometimes been found with the
sheep, he preferred to be numbered with the transgressors. Like Pierre,
his one passion was gambling. There were legends that once or twice in
his life he had had another passion, but that some Gorgon drew out his
heartstrings painfully, one by one, and left him inhabited by a pale
spirit now called Irony, now Indifference--under either name a fret and
an anger to women.
At last Blanche's attacks on Jacques called out anxious protests from
men like rollicking Soldier Joe, who said to her one night, "Blanche,
there's a devil in Jacques. Some day you'll startle him, and then he'll
shoot you as cool as he empties the pockets of Freddy Tarlton over
there."