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 yet been forbidden the Indian country, but he was a good-for-nothing fellow; the scornful nickname derived 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
