fighting the Indians, felling trees, building homes and churches and pushing on again, had reached this point and halted. It had paused for a few years to look behind it at a lengthening chain of hamlets, villages and towns which grew ever less rude as they went eastward until they reached those cities on the seaboard, as fine to Yankee eyes as London herself. It had paused, out of breath and full of pride, to look behind and perhaps to look ahead, to dream of the prairies, the painted desert, the Stony Mountains, the Pacific. And where it had paused it had put up this fort, as one puts a slip of paper in a book to keep the place.
With its stone walls enclosing a diamond, its stone turrets crowning each point, its spirited position overlooking the two rivers, the fort was impressive. Jasper ordered the canoe beached and camp made. Then he struck up the wagon road which climbed the chalky cliff, observing the swallows going in and out of their holes with the same preoccupation he had noted in swallows back in Boston.
Jasper Page was received at the fort from that first moment with liking and enthusiasm. Newcomers were always welcome at this outpost of civilization, held by homesick soldiers and a bored command. He was quartered with the commandant and his lady; he was given tea; he was pressed for news of the outside world. It was a full day before he was able to report at the Indian Agency to make application for the license which 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
