It was five years later that Simon McQuarrie and Herman Vogelaar came
to Five Fingers. They were a queer but lovable combination. Simon
was a Scotchman, tall and spare, with a thin face which seldom broke
into a smile and which had the appearance of being made of flint. His
companion was a Dutchman, short and round as a dumpling, with a pink,
smooth face, light blue eyes and a great habit of puffing when he
exerted himself a little, which came, Simon said, from overeating. They
had been boys together more than thirty years ago in a little Ontario
town, and now they were partners, timber-looking, prospecting and
bartering and saving a little money as the years went on. Herman was a
widower, and his only daughter, Geertruda, had married Jeremie Poulin
back in Quebec, and Jeremie was a cousin of the Clamarts and lived now
at Five Fingers. It was Herman's first visit. He had come to see the
new baby and had brought Simon along with him.
The instant Simon's shrewd eyes came upon the clearing and the little
settlement, with the fingers of water reaching in from the big lake, he
began having thoughts which he did not at once announce to Herman.
The years had brought changes to Five Fingers. The single-room cabins
which Pierre and Dominique had built were gone, and in their places
stood larger buildings of clean-cut and nicely squared logs, with
flowers and garden plots around them, and rows of smooth stones painted
white. Josette, now almost forty, was still slim and pretty, and Pierre
was more than ever her lover, in spite of a great disappointment which
he kept shut up in his own heart. He wanted children. His love for them
was a passion, but for him stalwart young Joe, now fourteen years old,
was the first and the last. Pierre had implicit faith in prayer, and
ever since that first summer at Five Fingers he had prayed devoutly
that God might send more children.
And God answered, though somewhere there was a slip that puzzled
Pierre, for the more he prayed the more children came to Dominique and
Marie. First there was a pair of them, Louis and Julie, then three
singles as regularly as could be--Aimé and Félipe and Dominique--and
with each one of them Marie grew plumper and jollier and began questing
about in her head for a name to be given the next.
But Pierre was happy, for if they were not entirely his own there were
at least children all about him. Poleon and Sara Dufresne had come with
three children and had built their cabin a stone's throw away; Jeremie
and Geertruda had a baby, and at the edge of the green bit of meadow
which he had pointed out to Josette five years ago were the homes of
Jean Croisset and Telesphore Clamart, and Aleck Clamart was courting
Anne Croisset. With Pierre he was secretly making plans for a home the
following year, after one more season of trapping.
And right at the tip of the evergreen forest, where Pierre had
promised, was the little log church in which they gathered each Sunday,
and to which Father Albanel, a wandering minister of the forests, came
once and sometimes twice a month.
As the population had grown, so had the clearing expanded. There were
a good dozen acres or more under careful tillage, and in the open were
cattle and several horses, and in every wild meadow for miles about a
stack of harvested hay in season. There were chickens and geese and a
community flock of turkeys, and at all seasons plenty of eggs and milk
and cream and the sweet butter, and the dug-out cellars were filled
to the brim with good things to eat when the first cold blasts of
winter came. Pierre and Aleck had built a boat, and the six families
had combined in the purchase of two nets, so there was no lack of fish
either winter or summer at Five Fingers.
For two winters, much against his desire, young Joe had been sent back
over the new Canadian Pacific to attend school at Ste. Anne.
Simon McQuarrie made note of all these things with the judgment of a
fox and the keenness of a weasel. No one would have judged Simon for
what he really was, at least not on short acquaintance. In him was a
heart so honest he would have cut off a little finger before taking a
mean advantage of any other man or woman. But, as Herman put it, he was
always looking around to see what he could pick up. Herman furnished
the laughter, the jollity, the never-ending good humor and four-fifths
of the stomach of the partnership, and Simon was the ferret who smelled
out the dollars; so when Simon said one day, "I never knew a better
place than this for a little mill, Herman," the proud grandfather of
baby Tobina knew something was in the air.
First of all, with his native shrewdness, Simon took stock of the
happiness at Five Fingers. This contentment, the community affection
which brought all together like members of one family, was a big asset
in the very beginning. The mill itself could be made a sort of family
affair, and a boat arranged for twice or three times a year to run up
from Duluth or Fort William and carry away the lumber. There was enough
fine birch and cedar and spruce right about them to keep going for
years, and the mill would bring even greater prosperity than trapping,
which was sure to wear out now that the settlements were filling up
rapidly along the line of the railroad.
At last he talked over the matter with Pierre, and Pierre called in
Dominique, and there was a meeting of all the men-folk of the families
at which it was agreed nothing could be finer for Five Fingers than a
mill. Simon promised the first thing to be made from its lumber should
be a schoolhouse, and they would have to see to it the schoolhouse had
a teacher, for if Dominique and Jeremie and Poleon kept up the pace
they were going there surely must be teaching at Five Fingers.
This was on Saturday. The next day Father Albanel came, a little,
gray-haired, rosy-cheeked man who loved life and all living things, and
who had no settled church because he saw in nature a greater God than
he had ever been able to find in the Book written by man, a freedom of
thought which had been labeled heresy by those who traveled the old
and unchangeable paths. But Father Albanel was loved by every man,
woman and child who knew him, and while his stricter brethren chanted
and prayed in their vaulted cathedrals and little mission houses, his
Church was ten thousand square miles of forest land. And on this Sunday
Father Albanel prayed that Simon McQuarrie might be able to keep his
promises.
So the mill came. There was not much to it, but when on a certain
September afternoon a tug and a scow came creeping up the middle inlet
every soul in Five Fingers was down to meet them, and every heart was
beating with the biggest excitement that had ever come into the lives
of Pierre and his people. With the tug came Simon McQuarrie, proud as
an admiral in command of a fleet, and with him a Norwegian engineer and
his wife, two mill-hands, and a sallow-faced, anemic-looking young man
who was to teach Jeremie Poulin's children and Dominique's kindergarten
during the winter for fifteen dollars a month and board.
The mill was set up, with only pieces of tarpaulin for roof at first.
Axes rang merrily in the woods, and the three horses at Five Fingers
dragged in the logs at the ends of chains. Even the women were excited,
and the children waited eagerly for the set day when smoke would pour
from the tall boiler stack and the saws would begin to hum and grind.
This happened on the fifth day, and when at last steam was up, and the
long belt began to turn, and the big, shining saw to whirl, there rose
a great hurrah, and even Baby Tobina waved her tiny fists and crowed as
loudly as she could. Then the sharp teeth of the saw touched the end
of the first log, and there came the first of that beautiful, droning
song--the song of live steel cutting through sweet wood--which was to
last for many years at Five Fingers, and which may be heard at times to
this very day.
No one, not even his sweetheart wife, Josette, was permitted to look
deeply and completely into the heart of Pierre. As time passed he saw
his beloved forest dragged in, a log at a time, to be cut into pieces
by that droning, merciless saw. He watched the life's blood of the
timber pile up in great golden heaps of sweet-smelling sawdust in which
the growing children loved to play, and down on the shore he saw his
wilderness garnered in huge piles of boards, waiting for the little
black tugs to come in and drag them away. He knew that it was all as
it should be, for new prosperity came with the mill, more comforts and
happiness for the women and children, and a few more people to Five
Fingers. This was progress. Yet an ache was in his heart which he kept
to himself, and which would never quite die away. For with a passion
next to his love for children he loved his forests, and with him every
tree was a word of God.
Yet he would not have changed conditions, for he knew it was himself
who was wrong. Everything told him that. Even the wild things seemed
to love this more intimate companionship with man, for the birds and
squirrels were never more numerous about Five Fingers. They sang and
chattered with the music of the mill, ran over the roofs of the houses
and built their nests under the eaves, and in winter came to the very
doorsteps to eat crumbs and grain thrown out for them. It was Pierre
whose word was unwritten law at Five Fingers. One of his laws was that
no living thing that was not a pest should ever be harmed near the
settlement, and when ice and snow were heavy in the hills and between
the ridges deer came out shyly to eat with the cattle.
Pierre went no more on the trap line but attended to the business of
the mill, and Josette pleased him by saying this made her happiness
complete. In spare hours one could always find children about him, and
in the evenings, when the droning of the mill saw had ceased, there
were games and races and fun among the sawdust piles, and never a day
passed that the home of Pierre and Josette was not filled with childish
laughter and the patter of little feet, although the little girl they
prayed for never came to bear their name. "But she will," said Pierre,
keeping up that undying hope in his heart. "Some day, my Josette, there
will come a little girl to be a sister to Joe."
Even Joe, his one child, seemed to be getting farther away from him,
for as time passed the boy needed no urging to return to Ste. Anne,
but was restless and ill at ease when back home from school, and was
excited when the day drew near that would take him from Five Fingers
again. He was eighteen when Josette learned his secret, and she laughed
softly, and kissed him, and told Pierre so that he would not worry any
more. The girl was none other than Marie Antoinette, the beautiful
little daughter of Jacques Thiebout, whom they had known years ago on
the St. Lawrence. She was a year younger than Joe, and had told him he
must wait until she had finished completely with the school of Ste.
Anne de la Perade, for that was her ambition, and her father's, too.
Then she would come with him to Five Fingers.
Tears of joy filled Pierre's eyes the night Josette whispered the
secret to him, for if the little girl they both wanted persisted in not
coming they would at least have grandsons and granddaughters to make up
for it.
"And it may be this is the answer to my prayers," Pierre said to
himself. "For Joe's children will be of our own flesh and blood, and
we shall love Marie Antoinette as our own. And as Joe is younger and
stronger than Dominique, who is growing fat, I do not see why he should
fall behind him in the matter of family."
Few changes came to Five Fingers as the years rolled on. The little
mill continued to hum and the axes to ring farther and farther back in
the forest, and twice or three times in a season the boat came up with
loads of supplies and carried away the lumber.
Not a single year did the stork fail to build his nest somewhere about
the sawdust piles. Twice he visited Aleck Clamart, who married Anne
Croisset; two little Dutchmen he brought to Geertruda Poulin, and there
were nine pairs of feet to shoe in the home of Dominique and Marie when
young Joe Gourdon brought Marie Antoinette to Five Fingers as his wife.
The mill did not run that day, for it was a day of feasting and
rejoicing, and all the world held no prouder monarch than Joe. Marie
Antoinette, tall and slim, with her great dark eyes, her glad smile and
her outreaching arms of love for the people who had now become her own,
was as sweet and beautiful as his mother had been in the days of her
youth. And Pierre, in his joy, found in her a rival, for the children
gathered round her in dumb worship, and in her pretty arms Marie
Antoinette gathered every one, kissing each in turn, even to bashful
Louis, the eldest son of Dominique. And when, in their cabin, she flung
those same pretty arms around Josette's neck and called her Mother,
Pierre winked hard and went outside to puff at his pipe, for he felt
like a boy who wanted to cry.
God had been good to him. God had blessed Five Fingers. In the going
down of the sun his eyes rested upon a green slope where no plow had
touched and no cabin had been built. Religiously that sacred little
plot had been held for the time when death might find its way among
them. And death had not come. Gratitude welled up in Pierre's heart
and choked him--gratitude and pride and faith, for all this was the
handiwork of the great and good God he believed in, the God of his
forests, the open, the sun and the sky. And the thought came to him
that when at last there was a break in the little green slope it was
only right that he should be the first to go, for God had filled his
measure to the brim, and it seemed to him he could hear the whisper of
a message from the violets and red roses of that little knoll in the
setting of the sun.
Marie Antoinette, coming to him so quietly he did not hear, put her
little hand in his and whispered, "It is beautiful here, my father!"