from his blind eye was already fastened upon him. M’sieu Page had picked him up and carried him to the garden wall and thrown him over into the river. He had not lingered, either, to see how Pig’s Eye recovered himself. Oh, he could do it, M’sieu Page! What was strange about the proceeding was that he had not dismissed Pig’s Eye from his service. When the abashed voyageur presented himself a week later, M’sieu Page greeted him as usual. But Pig’s Eye never came drunk again to the island. On the contrary, he went up and down the St. Peters warning others not to do it.
“M’sieu Page, he handle’ me lak I was enfant. Dat true.”
Deedee longed to go to that house, but she was past twelve and still she had not been there. Jasper Page had been for two years at the Entry of the St. Peters. Major Boles’ wife had arrived, and it was a common sight to see M’sieu Page with Mrs. Boles cantering over the prairie which rippled away from the fort to the westward. Deedee had seen him often, a tall, smiling, handsome figure in buckskins. Once, at the steamboat landing, he had even addressed her.
“Have some sugar plums, little girl,” he had called to her in French.
“Yes, sir,” she called back in English. She came on a run and added when she got her breath, “I am much obliged to you, sir.”
French was the language in common use at the settlement. Jasper Page regarded her closely.
“Aren’t you Canayenne?” he asked, puzzled.
“Well, sir, half of me is.”
She returned his gaze eagerly with eyes of shining brown. She was a tall, thin, brown little girl, with long braids tied in red at the ends and long legs beneath tattered pantalettes. She had very long legs, but she seemed undepressed by them. She stood negligently erect. Something rakish in her pose stirred an amused recognition.
“Bless my soul,” said M’sieu Page, “it’s a little DuGay.”
He turned to Mrs. Boles who stood beside him, looking as dainty as the sprig of flower which rose stiffly from the crown of her big flaring bonnet. Broad ties of watered ribbon met beneath Mrs. Boles’ chin. Bunches of little yellow curls hung at her temples. Her flowered organdie dress swelled into sleeves as big as clouds, returned to a tiny waist, and fell straightly to slim ankles.
“You’ve heard me speak of the divil DuGays?” asked M’sieu Page.
Now Deedee was proud of being a divil DuGay. She knew it meant that her father, old Denis, could fiddle; that her big brothers, Narcisse and Amable and Hypo-lite, could drink more grog without getting tipsy than any other voyageurs on the river; that her little brothers, George and Lafe, jigged for the officers and visiting dignitaries; that her mother cooked stews which the soldiers came and paid two shillings for, and was summoned to the post in great haste and excitement whenever a baby was expected. Deedee was glad to be identified, and smiled at M’sieu Page.
But when Mrs. Boles said, “Really? I must ask her into my Sabbath school,” Deedee’s mood darkened. Not that she objected to the idea of the Sabbath school. She noted its existence with quick interest. It was something in the lady’s pretty eyes which regarded her curiously, as though a divil DuGay were a bear’s claw necklace. Deedee’s smile vanished, and her tongue shot out. She could shoot out her tongue until it looked like a snake’s tongue—regrettable accomplishment.
That had been the previous June, and she had not been invited into the Sabbath school. Neither had she had a chance to visit M’sieu Page’s house. Indeed, the chance seemed farther away than it ever had.
Book 1-Chapter 2
II
AT the meeting of the rivers were two worlds. In one of them the army made the best of a bad situation. It danced quadrilles and drank tea and went on buffalo hunts with its valued neighbor, Jasper Page. In the other the squatters, a tatterdemalion set, ran their sheep and dug in their gardens and gave thanks to the good God that they had a bit of this pleasant land for their own.
The squatters had come from far places to build their cabins at the Entry. Some had been lured from comfortable old-world homes by that Scotch Earl of Selkirk, who had done no more harm than well-intentioned people often do. He had offered free lands on the distant Red River. The settlers had arrived with high hearts, to find empty wastes that in winter were buried under snow, and in summer were scorched by sun and harried by locusts. Among them were excellent men like Abraham Perret, who had made clocks in Switzerland and suffered much hardship in a wild land where men told the time by the sun. He and his wife and little daughters with several other families had made their hazardous way down to the fort. There was much rejoicing when they heard their own tongue spoken among their fellow squatters. These were French Canadians, former voyageurs, many with sons who were still upon the river.
In those days, throughout that country, the voyageur was a figure of romance. His dress told you as much at your first sight of him. By the nodding feather he loved to wear, by the dagger in his sash, you knew him to be of no workaday world.
Nor was he. Not his a common dull routine in field or town. His the perilous task of serving to bind the civilized headquarters of the great fur companies with the trading posts, set down hundreds of leagues away in unmapped country. To these posts, in heat and cold, the voyageur bore supplies, and from them he returned with precious furs. He had no trail to follow; he asked none. He was a maker of trails on water or on land. With a ration of tallow and hulled corn, he went where white men had never gone before. He paddled and portaged from ocean to ocean and thought it worth only a ballad.
He was a fellow, the ancien voyageur! Winter storms might drive him to shelter beneath a snowdrift, but they could not turn him back. Not even the mosquitoes of summer, more terrible than any storm, could turn him back. As for the savages, he learned their tongue and ate their dogs and made love to their women—as faithless to the women as he was faithful to the distant employers he served.
For many years Denis DuGay had been a voyageur. But he had stayed the year round at the Entry since a riverman of a rival company had emptied a gun in his leg when he was bargaining for furs in an Indian tepee. He had three voyageur sons upon the St. Peters, however, and seven more growing up about him. The seven, with Deedee, were his children by Mme. DuGay. Denis had been the father of Narcisse and Amable and Hypolite—they were half-grown youngsters and already wild as hawks—when he married Tessie Marsh.
Tess, arriving at the St. Peters, had thought that she was the wife of Jimmie Marsh and had found herself his widow. He had come with that detachment of the Fifth United States Infantry which under Colonel Leavenworth broke the first ground for the fort. They toiled up the Mississippi in keel boats and bateaux, but the rigors of the trip were as nothing to the rigors of that first winter in the wilderness. They threw up inadequate log shelters on the right bank of the St. Peters, at that place which the Indians called M’dota, the Meeting of the Waters. Their provisions were moldy flour and pork, pork which had suffered from the enterprise of a St. Louis contractor who drew off the brine to make the barrels lighter, and later substituted river water. Scurvy attacked them. The Indians brought in roots of spikenard, and the handful of officers’ wives in the party nursed the sick faithfully. But forty soldiers died, young Jimmie Marsh among them. He went on sentry duty in boisterous health, and they found him dead. So it happened that when Tess arrived she found her husband only in the mound which marked his grave.
Tess was not permitted to prolong her mourning. Jimmie Marsh had been a favorite with his comrades, but it was something to see a red-cheeked girl out in the Indian country. She, however, would have nothing of the military. The uniform, it is well known, causes hearts to tremble, but what is the uniform to the outfit of a voyageur—the bright blue capote, confined at the waist by a knitted scarlet sash, the small scarlet stocking cap set at a slant, the pipe in the lips? To the chagrin of the Fifth Infantry, Tess took Denis DuGay.
Denis