permitted him to trade in the Indian country and to inquire about the group of traders whom he had come out to superintend.
Especially was he detained by the ladies, more bored, even, than their husbands, who, after all, had unparalleled hunting at their doors. The ladies found him charming in his poised youthfulness and his politely veiled indifference to their arts. For he was unmistakably indifferent. Of course Eva Boles had not yet arrived.
He was not, however, unfriendly. With courtesy he told them all he could recollect of the fashions for women, of the appalling width of the leg-o’-mutton sleeves, of the enormousness of bonnets. His manner with women had the same unassuming, wholly genuine sympathy which marked his manner with men. Both sexes, of all ages and stations, aroused in Jasper Page this immediate interest.
So far as he was concerned, life offered no difficulties. He knew exactly what he wanted of it, and he had not the faintest doubt of his ability to get it. He had not the faintest doubt, either, of the rightness of his standards nor of the certainty of his abiding by them. But even that early he had noted that other people were less certain. Young as he was, he had come to expect to shoulder the woes of others. It was as if he recognized in his own splendid strength an obligation to help those less well armored for life.
He was just twenty-three at the time, although he had been for some years in the fur trade and had shown himself markedly capable. He had no thought to be other than modest; but the success he had had, as well as his unbounded confidence, showed its effect in his bearing. He carried his six feet of lean, hard-muscled body with a dignity which sometimes—but only in the hour of meeting—brought a smile to the lips of observers who were older and more chastened. For he was extremely young in every physical aspect. Quantities of sun-bleached yellow hair waved off his forehead and down his cheeks in the fashionable side whiskers. There was a youthful candor in his clear blue eyes, although they could sharpen, and a youthful brightness in the smile which cut engaging lines in his darkly tanned cheeks.
He was pleasantly democratic. He had no need to be otherwise. Was he not a Page of Boston? He had not followed the tradition of his family, which since before the Revolution had led in the affairs of government. Older brothers had taken that path, and even as a lad he had been drawn by the wilds. But he was a Page, for all that.
And the ladies were quick to discover that he was a young man of culture. He spoke easily in response to their questioning of Mrs. Duff’s new rôles, of Mme Malibran’s triumphs at the opera, while the officers observed approvingly that as soon as the ladies permitted, he turned to them with eager inquiries about the buffalo hunt. His gaze warmed when he mentioned double-barreled guns, his hunting dogs, his lucky shots at grouse and pigeons on the trip.
And shortly—within the year, that is—Jasper Page was all things to all men at the Entry of the St. Peters. To the Indian Agent he was the most satisfactory trader in all the Sioux country, anxious to suppress the traffic in liquor, willing to pay his Indian hunters a fair price. To the agents and clerks he was a just, kindly and energetic employer, able himself to endure all the hardships to which he subjected them. He was fatherly to the French Canadian boatmen as he talked with them in their own tongue, fatherly and yet firm enough to handle that turbulent, fire-eating lot. He turned a sympathetic ear to the problems of the humblest squatter on the reserve. It was not at all surprising that the building of his house was followed with such friendly interest.
He built it, as he had told Gamelle he would, upon the island, and not of logs, as the houses of the settlement were built, but of the native limestone. It had shutters and doorways of painted white wood, and no one would have guessed from its calm New England aspect with what marvels of ingenuity it had been constructed. Its joists and beams and the wooden pegs which held them had been hewn laboriously by hand; so had the timbers for the floors, and the clapboards which covered the roof. Its laths were willows from the river, woven with withes of twigs and grass, and its plaster was clay which the river had also yielded. The St. Peters gave so much that it seemed to Jasper Page to flow round the island with a special possessive music. He was fond of his stone house. So were the hundred Indian men and women, the fifty more of Canadian woodsmen and boatmen who, with much smoking and singing, with feasting at outdoor kettles and rubbing of bruised hands and tired shoulders with bear’s grease, had reared it in a summer.
In one great wing was the company store, with its blankets, traps and sleighbells, its scarlet cloth, blue strouds and gartering, its beads and silk handkerchiefs and ear-bobs. There, also, were sorted and packed for shipment to New York and London, the pelts of musk-rats, fishers, foxes, wolves, beavers, badgers, minks, the skins of deer and the hides of buffalo. Jasper Page’s house was also his trading post, but he did not find it necessary to surround it with a stockade. Indeed a stockade would have been absurd, even had the island not lain beneath the guns of Fort Snelling. He had no warmer friends in all the valley than the Indians.
Walking Wind, the Indians called him. He received the name from a young Sioux who, by reason of taking three Chippewa scalps, was inheriting an ancestral cognomen of special dignity and had the right to give away the one which had been his before. This Sioux had been among Jasper Page’s first Indian friends. He had come one night soon after the trader’s arrival, bringing a young woman of the family, a slender Indian girl who kept her head wrapped in a blanket throughout the interview. He had stated with dignity that a trader always wanted to buy an Indian wife, and that this girl knew well how to cook venison and to make moccasins and to embroider with porcupine quills.
Jasper Page had answered with great tact, thanking him for his kindness, presenting him with tobacco and red cloth. But he took no Indian woman; not by purchase in that ceremony so solemnly momentous to the girl, so quaintly diverting to the white man, nor in midnight excursions to the tepees. What is more astounding, his abstinence was not held against him by his neighbors. He hunted, fished, tramped and played chess with bachelors who were rearing half-breed families. He chaffed them about their domestic affairs and was chaffed in return for his lack of them. And after a time an indulgence on his part would have seriously shaken the community; shocked it, indeed.
Though the house on the island had no Indian mistress, the Indians felt at home there. Its owner had built an outside staircase leading to an attic which was always open to them. From half a dozen to half a hundred slept there on cold nights, each rolled in his blanket. If they overflowed the attic, they were permitted downstairs, even on the parlor floor. And this in spite of the fact that Jasper Page had fine things in his house: carpets, mirrors, sideboards of mahogany, damask curtains in red and green. The children of the settlement, the young DuGays and Angels and Perrets, watched the unloading of the infrequent steamboats with fascinated eyes to see what was coming for M’sieu Page’s house. There were always hunting dogs, or baskets of champagne, or brass andirons, or something. Once there had been a harpsichord.
More than one child felt with Deedee DuGay that no felicity could equal the felicity of seeing the inside of that house. M’sieu Page overswept Deedee’s life like the sky; he permeated it like sunshine. He gave employment to her father and brothers, advice and counsel to her mother; he sent medicines when they were sick, and food when supplies ran low. He was quoted, praised, described on every hand. And such rumors as Deedee heard of that house! M’sieu Page sat down to dinner, she heard, as though he had been in Boston. There was a linen cloth, there were knives and forks of silver, there were thin red goblets and dishes which pictured the battle of New Orleans. Mme. Elmire, his cook, had come up from St. Louis along with the furniture. She could cook buffalo rump so that it tasted like the finest rosbif. Mme. Elmire told great tales in the DuGay cabin, where she made occasional visits and where she was treated with the greatest respect.
Deedee listened and longed to go, but it seemed an impossible dream. Not that Jasper Page was inhospitable; far from it. There were always Canadians sunning themselves at the trading house door. But when they were asked into his parlor for a drink of wine, they went softly. They wiped their moccasins; they would not sit down; and they hardly dared to look about them. There was something about M’sieu Page, in spite of his friendliness, which made one treat him with respect.
Pig’s Eye Parrant had gone there one time when he was drunk, and M’sieu Page was entertaining Mrs. Boles and some others in the garden. Pig’s Eye had not