The Frenchwoman's Son

IT was the year of the coarse April that the Frenchwoman’s son took to the woods. He had no reason, except that with the spring he had become abruptly aware that since his mother’s death his house was intolerable, and that he could farm no longer on the small holding that had been hers. It was beyond him to dig, and plant potatoes, and raise two lean pigs to be killed in the fall. He left Bear Cove without ostentation, and his absence found it indifferent; he had never been an ornament, nor precisely a reproach; but neither was he missed. The priest was the only soul in the parish who stood an instant at the shut door of the silent, forlorn house, and even he said nothing. As for his thoughts, they were more in tune with the ceaseless rain than with the battering west wind that was driving the ice off the shore and lifting up the dull winter grass. But he had been too cold all winter, and too much given to fasting that the poor of his flock might eat, to have much of the spring in his blood. And the fact remained ; the Frenchwoman’s son was gone.

He had made inland of a rough, gray morning, and his method of traveling was the method of the otter, who never sleeps two nights in the same place ; and for a fortnight he rioted in it. He sang to himself as he toiled over the wet, treeless barrens ; laughed when he just got out with his life from the sucking soil of the Long Swamp, which was not a thoroughfare; was exultant when he came at last to the woods where the trees were a man’s girth round. He had turned his back on the sea for good and all; on the gray swelter of the spring tides ; on the winter-thickened waves that ran sullen, too cold to break; on the miserable village that dragged a living out of the bitter water and the sour, brackish land. He was free. He did not even mind the icy rain, nor the wicked gales that blew all that month, though down on the shore he had left they would have been another matter. He was where he belonged; and he accepted the rough weather as placidly as did the just come robins that sang all round him, no more at home than he. Things he had never known came to him spontaneously. He built and lit his fires of wet wood without any trouble to speak of, though he had scarcely made a fire out-of-doors in his life; and the camp that he began to build one morning by the head waters of the lonely Sou’west was done in a way which was not that of the shore settlements, nor of any shelter he had ever seen. But it had a form of its own, and it pleased him; also it shed water like a loon’s back, and when he was inside it the roar and lash of the spring storms might be sounding like a mighty organ in the great hemlocks overhead, and the rain sluicing on the open spaces, but he was in his house.

“ It is,” he said to himself thoughtfully, “ a camp with long walls.” The words pleased him, and sounded familiar ; which was absurd, because in all his twenty years he had never heard of anything but shingled houses.

He had no plans about life; it was merely a thing that had been thoroughly distasteful, and was become an insistent, ever-present pleasure and excitement; and when one morning the sun at last came out clear and scorching he sat on a drying deadfall and basked in it, and smelt the spring out of the soggy ground. He never thought at all of Bear Cove, nor even of the priest; and he had been fond of the priest. His mother had been on curiously equal terms with the smoothfaced old man. She had never been a common woman, no matter what else she had been in the years she cast behind her when she arrived in the ugly little English-speaking settlement and bought Jim Miller’s house.

“The Frenchwoman,” the village called her, all but the priest; who, perhaps, was sorry for her, for he was kind to her and the boy, and unoffended by her wild moods and flinging tongue. But she had been dead for a year now, and there was no tombstone over her till Sandy Brine had time to cut one. Father Gillespie had not hurried him. There was in his mind a discrepancy between his answers to her dying instructions as to a truthful inscription over her grave, and those regarding her son. But the son had cut away the knot of both promises by his absolute unconsciousness that there was any to cut. Whereby he sat and whistled on his sunny perch, and mocked a song sparrow till it suddenly flew away. The boy sniffed the air quite as suddenly, and swung round his long legs till he faced the east.

An Indian was standing close beside him. He looked young, but it was not then the Frenchwoman’s son could tell an Indian’s age. Anyhow, he was not thinking of it. He sat angry and very still; and the man greeted him eagerly with a long-drawn “Well?”

“ What do you want ? ” he asked roughly. He had been thoroughly startled, for he had not heard a sound of footsteps. “ Do you live here? ”

“ Want you.” The man regarded him from under the thatch of stiff hair that stuck out from his hat. “ Your name John— John Noel ? ” He said Noo-el, with the soft Indian o.

The boy stared. “ Yes — But I don’t use that name ! Ba’tiste, I use.”

“ That all same,” said the visitor blandly. “ Ba’tiste your mother call you; your father John. You his son, so we come.”

“ Whose son ? ” snapped John Ba’tiste ; he had never heard mention of his father, nor been particularly concerned about him.

The Indian took off his hat. “ The Old Man’s.”

It was Greek to the hearer, to whom an old man was an old man ; he never dreamed that the words and the act were a shibboleth of respect for an Indian esteemed next to a chief.

“ What old man ? ” he asked contemptuously ; the thing had nothing to do with him if his name were John ten times over.

“ He tell me you come some day ” — the question was placidly ignored — “ so we come. Long time ago that — fifteen year — we don’ know ! But he say you come all same as him.”

“You couldn’t know I was here ! ”

“We come see,” quietly ; “ every year we come. Old Man my friend ; he say, ‘We die. You be good friend my son. Some time he come to the Sou’west, where he was born at. You be help to my son.’ ”

The listener got down from his log and spoke with rage. “ I was born at Mirimichi; and I don’t know who you are, but you never knew my father. He’s been dead for years, and he never needed Indians for friends. Where d’ ye live ? Because you’d better go back there.”

The Indian turned away with an ugly dignity. “ Old Man good man to me, he say you all same ; very well. You say not so ; very well too. We go.”

“ Oh, stop. Do you live round here ? That’s what I want to know.” If he had neighbors he would tramp at once.

“No one live here. No Indian come but me.” He waved his hand around him. “ We come not one time more. Your house, your place,” he observed finally ; and the Frenchwoman’s son affirmed it with an oath.

Yet his curiosity was awake in him, and he turned a volley of questions on his visitor; but the man walked away untouched by the demands fired at him. The Frenchwoman’s son never knew what made him care, but he made a dash after him and held out his hand.

The Indian seized it, his whole face changing, till it was another man who smiled.

“We bring things,” he cried ; “ flour, all what you say ! You good friend; we give you this. Every year we bring it here, like Old Man say. He say: ‘ Good friend to you, you give it; bad friend, you go ’way ! ’ ” He fumbled in his coat and brought out a letter.

The Frenchwoman’s son stared at it. Old, tattered, dirty, and written in characters and a language he did not know, it could not belong to him. But he took it. And then a lordly thought struck him.

“ Come in and have something to eat.” Houses still meant eating to him, and his house was his pride.

The Indian laughed. “ We got plenty meat! We kill caribou two days back. You got plenty meat ? ”

“Yes.” John Ba’tiste was savage again. It had seemed to him that he was doing great things by living alone in the wilderness, and here was a low person who considered it a storehouse.

“ Well,” he nodded offendedly, “ goodby ; if you don’t want anything to eat! ”

“Adiou,” returned the man, and laughed again. He was gone into the bushes while the Frenchwoman’s son stood staring stupidly, and wondering where he had heard people say adieu with that twist to it before, till suddenly there came back to him his mother’s daily cry at him: “ Will you speak like a pig and an outcast ? Whistle your u, I tell you; shape your mouth ! I will not have you ‘ adiou ’ like an outcast.” It was funny, and he laughed. Through the laugh a voice came to him suddenly.

“ Bimeby you hungry ; then we come,” it remarked.

The Frenchwoman’s son swore at it, and retired to his house. He glanced contemptuously at the extraordinary letter which was meant for somebody else, and was going to burn it; only his fire was out; and then he applied himself once more to the joys of doing nothing, and not caring what time it was; he had had to care in the village. Yet daylight of the next morning found him pulling the letter out of a crack in his wall, and staring at it. What if it were for him, after all ? But the queer words were nothing that he could make out, and only made him angry ; he put it away again, and was suddenly aware that he was lonely, and afraid ; something had taken the heart out of him. He had no pleasure any more in his house, nor in his prowls over the country. He took to sitting at his door, beside a senseless anxiety. Every now and then he took out the crazy letter that was not meant for him, and all he got from it was a biting anger that he could not read the thing. It grew to be an obsession ; he woke to it in the long mornings, could not eat for the memory of it lying in its chink; time and again tried to burn it, and never did. He let his food give out, because every day he meant to leave his camp and the letter in it; but he never started, and he knew it was because he had taken a terror of meeting more men who should speak to him of his father. It was like sitting alone in the dark and fearing a dead man at his elbow, and about as sensible. If he had been in his whitewashed house by the shore he would have sickened, but the woods he had loved kept him whole. They were kind to him, even while he was hardly conscious of them. The black birch twigs that he chewed, just to be chewing, took his bodily fever out of him ; the nameless sweetness in the wind of midnight made him drowsy; a hundred things helped him even while he was careless of all but his own haunting misery, till one May morning he woke to find himself lying hungry at his door with a man between him and the sunshine.

It was the Indian back again, and a queer pain jolted the boy’s heart, till he could not think of a word to say. He saw that the man carried a heavy load, and that there must be things to eat in it, but his real thought was that now he could get at that letter. He swayed on his feet as he stood up.

The man looked at him curiously. “We bring things,” he said, “ we cook; bimeby we talk. You call us Sabiel.”

He flung down his pack, and the Frenchwoman’s son sat and glared. He had not eaten fresh meat all that winter, — it was not an article of diet in Bear Cove, — and the smell of it made him forget even the letter. As he ate, the strong food went to his head like drink, till he sat happy in the sun, and, basking, lit his last fill of tobacco, or meant to. The match died in his fingers as he spilled half his pipeful in his palm and held it out to Sabiel, who shook his head.

“ Bâpkusedumeí! ” said he, bringing out a dirty clay.

The Frenchwoman’s son started. Somewhere, long and long ago, he had heard that word time and again. He swore to himself in French, and Sabiel smiled uncomprehendingly : —

“We say, we light our pipe ! ”

“ I know that,” snapped the boy, “ though I don’t see how you do; ” and through his angry puzzle a queer phrase came to him. “ Menuagaí tainôwayau ! ” said he, very slowly and falteringly ; and sat back lax and sick. The Indian had handed him a fig of tobacco, and gabbled something in a jargon of which at least two words were familiar even if he had not translated the last one as he pointed to the camp, — “ pembtek, a house with long walls.”

“ What are you talking ? ” screeched the Frenchwoman’s son ; “what kind of language ? ”

“Indian,” placidly. “Your father’s talk.”

“Indian! Do you mean my father was an Indian ? ” He hardly knew he said it, and he did not listen to the answer. He was seeing, as from a long way off, his mother making a fire on the ground; seeing himself, a little boy, playing with a burning stick, and an Indian man laughing where he sat beside him ; and the man had been his father. He knew it as he knew he sat now cheek by jowl with another Indian and understood his tongue. “ But my father was a Frenchman ! ” He found his voice without commanding it, and even in the making of the words, remembered they had never been said to him ; he had only taken them for granted. But he kept on speaking. “ I don’t believe you.”

Sabiel returned three slow sentences. They broke the defenses the boy was trying to make in his mind, because he knew them to be true ; and the gist of them checked his heart. He was a halfbreed ; just a half-breed. He knew now why there had been days when his mother hated him, knew why the priest had set him down to books and the choirsinging as soon as he began to take to the wind-swept woods over the village. He had never been meant to know ; and he saw how easy it had been to keep him ignorant. They never had Indians round Bear Cove, never thought of them ; his mother’s French blood had been enough to carry a darker skin and eyes than his. Half of his soul rose up in a dreadful revolt, and half of it in a wilder exaltation of freedom. He sat and stammered questions at the man on the other side of the fire, and finally got out what was last in his mind as it had been first. The letter: he wanted it read to him.

When he had heard it his eyes were different. He got up and lit his pipe as if he had never thrown it away from him ; and after a long time he spoke, with a laugh that was not a boy’s laugh.

“ While I choose to be a white man, I will be a white man! ” he said, and cast away salvation ; for in the woods he was one thing, and out of them another. He took the Indian letter he could not read for himself from where it lay on the ground, and threw it on the fire, and on top of it he tossed the red head handkerchief that had been his mother’s. The old paper blazed, and the common silk smouldered writhingly, but he did not look at them; neither of the two should ever call to him any more. He would be a white man now, and make a new name for himself.

But he never did it, his world being a jealous world which did its own christening. There were not ten people who ever knew him as John Noel, and they were unimportant, chief among them being a despised squatter called Welsh, to whose retired abode he was in the habit of repairing when he was tired of being the white man whom his intimates addressed as Frenchy. As for his official name, it was no new one; though when it cropped up in a lawless country it stood for a hundred things. Welloff people shook at the mention of it, but to the poor and desolate it was another matter. When Sabean the outlaw was finally caught and caged there were scores of prayers going up that the Frenchwoman’s son might not be caught too. Sabean had been the terror of two counties, and, having the poor on his side, had robbed with impunity ; there was not a man anxious for his capture but his victims and the sheriff, and every one but they knew he was only the tool of the Frenchwoman’s son. If there were darker things they were only whispered of; the Frenchwoman’s son had found a world full of friends by the simple process of placidly, and at once, cracking down on his enemies. There was always, or nearly always, a smack of righteous vengeance in his sins.

When McManus’s mill was burned just as he was bringing down his season’s cut, well-informed people did not consider it an accident, though not one of them said so ; and the Frenchwoman’s son was unostentatiously elsewhere on important business, so that the law did not seek him any more than public gossip named him. It was well for McManus that he had no insurance, or his friends would have said he fired his mill himself. As it was they smiled crookedly, and remarked that the attention drawn to the working of his lumber business was worse than the fire ; — whereat he swore impotently, and cast about for vengeance, which was not forthcoming; and was so unpleasant to Fanny, his housekeeper, that she ran away of a dark night with his foreman, and he had to do his own cooking, which did not cool him. He began to talk of sending for his only daughter, who had been banished to her uncle Welsh’s with the advent of Fanny; but it was a radical measure, and he put it off.

The Frenchwoman’s son heard nothing of these last matters because he had gone out to Welsh’s on the Long Swamp to make love to Welsh’s niece.

In the northern woods the spring comes up in scarlet, leaf and shrub and blossom, with white drifts of Indian pear flower flung across a blood-red world. He had seen the red of it often enough, but it was the first year in his life he had noticed the white, or thought of the priest at Secret Lake in connection with a woman ; and he had known a few as tall as Welsh’s niece, and not so ragged. In the intervals of his variegated life he had watched her growing up, cast off, half starved, and lonely, till his heart was soft within him.

Welsh was a kind man when he was not drunk, but his shack was too convenient a place to bestow an inconvenient child. In front of it stretched a lake, and close behind it the Long Swamp, which was not as pretty as it looked. It was not called a quicksand ; but it was not crossed, even in winter. A few Indians had tried it. Persons having business afterwards on the other side went round; and there grew up about it an ugly tradition with an Indian name. It looked an innocently sleeping waste; but it had its times, which were not seasons, for waking. In the dead calm of an August noon the Frenchwoman’s son had seen its bay bushes sway as with wind, bow, and spring backwards with the passage of things he could not see ; had heard out of it the crying that might have been the crying of a hurt loon, or the frantic screech of a man who tries to keep death off him by shrieking to the living. To a stray trapper hearing it meant to wipe the sweat from his face, if he knew any Indian words. But the Frenchwoman’s son was a white man determinedly, and had put away all fear of ghost-calling; it was merely a shamefaced care for the child that sent him to Welsh’s to see her after an absence of a year. He found her a woman. Also absolutely and astoundingly beautiful in an old flannel shirt of Welsh’s, and a skirt made of flour sacks.

At the sight of her he stood dumb for the first time in his pleasantly irresponsible life. Then, as she ran to him and put her hands on his, he was suddenly aware that the spring was scarlet, and the whiteness of the pear blossoms the whiteness of Mary McManus’s face and throat above her unspeakable clothes. It was not till he had spoken about the priest at Secret Lake that he kissed her.

He was not known by sight in that district, so that when he went to McManus and announced he was going to marry his daughter it was annoying to be shown the door — profanely. McManus’s mill happened to burn down the night John Noel went back to his courting. His plans were not changed, merely hurried, but back at Welsh’s by the Long Swamp they bade fair to be destroyed. Mary McManus had waked to the desire of clothes.

“ But,” said he, very tenderly and without laughter, “ I will buy you clothes for the wedding. Your father says ” — he had never lost his mother’s shrug — “ there will be no wedding; and he says other things, too.”

“ You saw Fanny ! ” She spoke without looking at him.

“ Yes.” For once his mind was slow.

“ Then,” very low, “ I ’ll have a dress with roses on it; and a pair of shoes! I never had a pair of shoes since I come here.”

“ I can buy them.” He smiled into her eyes, but they did not answer him.

“ No; I ’ll make him ! I’m his daughter; and Fanny has silk dresses.”

The Frenchwoman’s son sat down on the spring flowers, and looked across the nameless color of the Long Swamp.

“ Then it will be a long time to the wedding,” he said, softly considering, “ when he takes you home and I have to steal you out of his house in the dark. It is spring now, and there are a great many things to do where I live — in spring ! There is the loon to watch, — on her nest.” Something in his slow voice flooded her slim throat scarlet.

“ When I cook for you in your house you shall buy me clothes,” she retorted passionately.

The Frenchwoman’s son was not used to complex emotions. He sat silent, because he was provoked and grieved and proud of her all at once. He knew that the sooner he and she were off to the priest and the Sou’west the better, for many reasons. But she was extremely beautiful, and very white.

“ You go ’way and get me some paper,” she ordered suddenly, “and I’ll send him in a letter.” With his first word of love to her she had changed from the little girl who had openly adored him all her life at Welsh’s to a woman who dominated him body and soul. “ You learned me to write ; I’ll write to him.”

“ When we’ve been to the priest,” he said calmly; and she flung round on him.

“ I can’t — in these,” she sobbed. Her shame had caught her at her heart as she looked at her rags and her bare legs. " Why, there’s people, and — I can’t. And Welsh has n’t any money, and I want a — cotton dress — with roses on it.”

The Frenchwoman’s son took her in a strong arm and comforted her with more confidence in himself than in McManus.

“You shall have the dress with roses on it. I will bring the paper and you shall write ; but it will take two days. Will that do ? ”

“ What’s that ? ” she said, without answering. “ Don’t you hear some one calling ? ” She twisted away from him, and stood listening.

“ No ! ” And on the heel of it he did hear. It was only the old cry he was used to disbelieving in that floated over the loneliness, and he laughed. “ That ? It’s only a bird in the swamp ! You’ve often heard it.”

“ Never that way. There,” — every line of her was rigid, — “ it’s coming again ! It — it sounds like as if it was calling me. I — oh, I’m afraid ! ”

“ There’s no harm in it. Why,” — he moved to her serenely as he remembered, — “I went through the swamp once, when I was a boy. It’s a very good way to go if you know the path.”

“ There’s no path ! ”

“ I know one ; ” and over his comfortable voice the call came close and mocking.

“ Welsh says,” she clutched him, whispering, “ that’s lost people’s ghosts ; and they only call when they ’re hungry ! I — don’t it sound like my name ? ” and he felt the fear in her.

“ It’s only a bird,” he said softly. “ Do I look as if I were afraid of it ? If it were your name I would be afraid.”

McManus’s daughter looked at him, and at five-and-twenty the Frenchwoman’s son was a beautiful sight. There was no half-breed about him except the straight sling of his walk and the dark clearness of the cheek bent down to her ; and there was that in his eyes that made her safe and happy and miserable all at once. If she had not caught sight of her own incredible skirt she would have clung to him, and begged him to take her away then and there. But she had remembered the cotton dress, and her father’s money ; and Fanny in silk. And perhaps the sudden terror that cut the quiet air was only a bird ! What he said was gospel.

“ There’s nothing you’d be afraid of, except me ! ” she said, with the insolence of a woman to the man she adores. “ Get me the paper an’ a pencil.”

It was Welsh who took in the letter, half from honest affection for his niece, and half for the chance of getting thoroughly drunk on some one else’s whiskey. If he did it was not on McManus’s. Mary was no diplomatist, especially in the written word.

“ I take my pen in hand to tel you I am going to be mai*ried to mister Noel if you don’t send me some mony to get a dress I wil come down to the vilage and tel how you tret me I wil come in Welsh’s old shirt and the flower sak I hav for a petticoat that is al the dress I hav and show them Mary at Welsh’s.”

Perfectly sober, and a day before his time, the messenger returned, and sheepishly confronted his niece and Noel.

“ He says,” he announced sourly, “ that you ’re to come home right to once, and he ’ll flour-sack you ! — and his mill’s burnt down, and the talk is that the Frenchwoman’s son done it. And Fanny ’s run off with Jake Perry, and you ’re to go home to-morrow. And so I guess you two’d better git married and gone, and tell him afterwards : for he won’t give you nothing, and he’s wanting of you home.”

“ He can want,” said McManus’s daughter blackly. “ Did n’t he send me nothing ? ”

“ Just that word, honey ; and you ain’t but seventeen; he can git you. I — I ain’t a man to fight,” with sudden shrillness, “ and that letter made him dump me right out on the road! ”

She stood up straight and looked at him. “ I ’ll never go home, and I ’ll have my clothes; and I’m glad his mill’s burnt, and I love the Frenchwoman’s son for doing it, and I ’m glad Fanny’s run away ; and I hate dad,” she said, as emotionless as though she repeated a lesson.

Noel looked sharply from Welsh to the girl. “ What’s that about the Frenchwoman’s son ? ”

“ Some say it was him had a grudge again McManus. Labrador said so ; he only said so ; they don’t know who done it. I ain’t never seen the man, but he’s got a hard reputation, and Labrador thinks it was him. But when I wanted to know why, he soured on me ; and he said he’d kill me if I opened my mouth on it to McManus.”

“ He certainly would,” returned Mr. Noel placidly ; and having been hand in glove with Frank Labrador, perhaps he knew.

“ The Frenchwoman’s son ain’t bad if Labrador likes him,” said Mary unexpectedly. “ I love him, anyhow ! ”

“ Yes ” — began Noel stupidly, and stopped. She did not know any more than Welsh did, and perhaps he had never realized it before. But it was time to get away from the Long Swamp and take his wife with him. “ I am sorry about that burning,” he observed slowly. “ It was a pity ; and foolish. But he is not altogether a bad man, the Frenchwoman’s son.”

“ Well, there’s no handling McManus till he finds out who burnt his mill! ” muttered Welsh. He was suddenly tired of the subject. “ He ain’t heard of the Frenchwoman’s son, and he ain’t likely to. You git away and git married, honey ! Noel, he ’ll git you a dress.”

Mary made no answer; the Frenchwoman’s son saw there was no handling her, either. He stood and whistled a thoughtful tune, and she swung round on him.

“Who’s the Frenchwoman’s son?” she demanded.

“ Just a man.” He said it between two bars of the tune that covered his thoughts.

“ Is he in the village ? ”

He shook his head.

“ Can dad catch him ? ”

The whistle stopped abruptly in a scornful smile. “ Not if he’d seen him fire the mill! ”

“ Do you think he did it ? ”

“ Oh yes,” carelessly. “ But he had his reasons! ” He looked at her with amusement. “ He has never done things without his reasons.”

“ They say he’s a hard-living man,” Welsh objected casually.

“That’s a lie,” slowly. “And if he was he’s done with it. And catch him ”— he laughed superbly. “ When they can catch the screaming in the swamp!” He flung back at it with a free gesture of his head and shoulders, and McManus’s daughter drew a breath and set her teeth on it. There could not be in all the world a man like him ! She would go with him to the priest in a dress with roses on it, in spite of her father. She listened without objecting while he and Welsh arranged for the wedding in three days’ time, but when she turned away to the house she sat thinking, instead of getting supper. Noel had departed to interview the priest, and, incidentally, the proprietor of the only shop at Secret Lake. In three days he would be back for the wedding; and the dress with roses on it was no nearer. Nothing would take Welsh back to McManus, and she had no other messenger. But when in the white dawn Welsh arose and unexpectedly went fishing, ’ is niece leaped from her bed and cast on her casual garments. Even as his back disappeared in the thin spring bushes she was down at the lake shore, and the last sound of his going was covered by another sound: the plunging rush of a canoe launched and sprung into with one and the same movement. Frank Labrador, coming up half an hour later on business of his own, saw the shack deserted except for the blue jays making faces at him from the roof tree, and went halfheartedly away.

It was sunrise of the next day when the girl came back, to find the place still empty. She was tired, and she went to sleep, but once and again a horrible clamor in the swamp roused her till she went out to listen; when she came back for the second time she barred the door uneasily, and dressed herself. Her skin crept on her as she crouched down by the window and watched the empty glittering lake the long, silent morning, wishing impatiently that Welsh would come back ; if she had had even a dog to speak to it would have lightened the senseless dread that was on her. And at the thought, leaning out and shading her eyes, she forgot it. A canoe had shot round the point and was at the landing. There was one man in it, — a dirty messenger with a parcel.

When she raced down and dragged it out of his hand she saw her shoes, her stockings, and her wedding gown. Her father had been as good as his word, though he had sent the things by a stranger, instead of by Labrador as she had asked him. With a low laugh she plumped down on her knees and fondled the common print with roses on it; when she looked up to ask the man who had brought it if he wanted his dinner, he had gone away, and in the still air the rustling from the swamp was loud. For a moment her chill fear rushed back on her, but she would not heed it. She was back at the house, kneeling on the floor, feverishly putting the scissors into her wedding gown.

The Frenchwoman’s son, coming unexpectedly to the door in the late afternoon, stood thunderstruck. Mary had sprung to her feet at the sight of him, transfigured ; her face a pale flame, her eyes shining, her triumphant mouth scarlet. He let fall the things he had painfully procured for her as he stared.

“ I got it! ” she cried, and flung herself at him, her arms warm round his throat; “I made him. I’ve shoes and stockings and white cotton and a dress with roses on it. And it’s nearly done, and I ’ll marry you to-morrow ! ”

“ How did you get them ? ” He laughed because he was proud of her, and had never seen her so beautiful. “ Tell me ! How ? ”

“ I went down,” — simply, — “ and waited at the portage, and sent a boy with notes on the paper you gave me. I asked him if he would give me the dress if I told him who fired his mill, and he sent back ‘Yes.’ So I told him it was the Frenchwoman’s son, and he sent back to say ' it was cheap at a cotton gown, and he’d send it right away.’ And he did. And you said he could n’t catch the Frenchwoman’s son! ”

Life, color, and expression were all wiped off her listener’s face.

“ The Frenchwoman’s son! ” he repeated like a parrot. " But — and you told him ? ” His ready tongue had failed him,

“You said he couldn’t catch him, any more than the ghost-calling in the swamp.” She stood back, a little anxious. “ He — he can’t, can he ? ”

“ Not then ! Now”— He took her with both hands, and held her at his arms’ length, and the feel of his hands frightened her, like the strangeness in his voice. “ Did n’t you know Labrador was here looking for me ? That he found me last night, and told me a man from Sabean’s had seen me when I fooled over to speak to your father, and told him it was me you were going to marry; me, the Frenchwoman’s son! And now ” — The familiar shrug did not match the sound in his voice. “ Well — I should have told you. But I could n’t trust Welsh.”

“ You ain’t French.” She smiled disdainfully ; but as she saw what was in his face her legs shook under her, and she shrieked at him, “ Do you mean it ? Did I do — that ? ”

“ My mother was a Frenchwoman,” he said heavily ; he had no desire to swear, even to be angry with her ; the thing had gone too deep. “ But I’ve been coming here for so long I forgot you could n’t know.” He glanced through the open door to get the time from the westering sun, and saw, instead, that the young scarlet was gone from the world ; it was old, green, usual, — and the thought made his voice rough. “ Come, we ’ll get out of this ! ” If he left her behind he would lose her, and once at the head waters of the Sou’west, it would be a better man than McManus who should lay a claw on him. But his heart felt numb as he stooped to gather up the poor finery that had betrayed him.

As he bent, the girl’s miserable eyes fell on the window.

“ Keep down,” she whispered thickly. “ There’s a boat! There’s — it’s dad, and another man ! ”

The Frenchwoman’s son heard her without surprise. He did not even glance out, but as he stepped softly back into the shadow of the room he looked at her with a curious trick of the eyes that made them seem all pupil, and showed the whites above and below the irids.

“That is the sheriff,” he said evenly, “with your father. What would you like me to do? For I burned the mill because your father was cruel to you, and I disliked him.” He kept his strange gaze on her, standing motionless.

McManus’s daughter sobbed wordlessly as she sprang at him and ran him out the back door.

“ There’s the swamp ; you ain’t afraid of it,” — anguish and hate had killed her own terror of the place ; “ hide ! What’s an old mill ? Hide ! ”

“ You’d be afraid in it! ” he said uneasily ; and she laughed fiercely over her sobbing.

“ That would n’t make me stay. Hurry ; stoop down ! ”

There was dead silence abroad now. Through it the two slipped safely across Welsh’s inadequate clearing, into the thin green of its fringe of alders; and between them and the heavy screen of the swamp maples something moved. It was the man from Sabean’s, the dirty messenger of the morning; and the Frenchwoman’s son cut off his shout in the middle. But the half cry had done it. McManus was hot foot round the house with the sheriff after him, and Noel was dragging the girl through the binding maples, down into the bay bushes that stretched breast-high between green abysses and runnels of fathomless black water. When they reached his path they could drop and lie hidden, for not a man would dare follow them ; but for now they must be cat-footed over the deadly green that spurted to their every step. There was cover enough, and he put her behind him, without daring to take his eyes from the quaking ground under his feet.

“Walk in my steps,” he ordered, wondering if the next few yards would bear them ; and his heart stopped as she screamed, —

“ My dress — my dress with roses on it! ” Even as he wheeled to clutch her she had broken away from him and was running, leaping helter-skelter back to the house, with no heed to the careful way she had come.

The Frenchwoman’s son stood up straight in the afternoon light, his black head a clear mark against the young sun-filtered green of the thicket he was making for.

“ Lie down ! ” he yelled, “ lie down ! ”

He did not hear any answer. It was McManus who had fired, and the sheriff, who was half-hearted about the whole business, had been slow in knocking up his gun. Mary McManus had lain down in a very pretty patch of quaking grass. The Frenchwoman’s son knew she was dead as she crumpled forwards, but he was a white man who had been going to marry a white girl. He went back for her. He was heedless of the sheriff’s calling; he knew a path through the swamp, and he must carry her to it that he might bury her out in the clean ground of the Sou’west. But the weight across his shoulder had somehow confused him; and the dead girl’s hair kept brushing over his eyes, so that in the waving shadow of it he saw another shadow moving before him. To the dull anguish of his haste the very bushes were malignant; they kept him back, springing in his face with blow after blow, as though he followed too close a trail. But he was a white man, and he fought through them, making blindly for the sinking sun. It was on the edge of a bottomless black channel that he stumbled, and fell.

No sound came back out of the swamp; that which had been unquiet was perhaps fed; but in Welsh’s house a light air crept through the open back door and fluttered the dress with roses on it that lay half made on the floor.

S. Carleton.