_ CHAPTER III. NEW HOMES
The work of raising the new cabins went forward merrily. Every one lent a hand, and by the end of May the new families were installed and living happily. In that last house near the northeast corner of the post dwelt Henri and Marie Baptiste and Maren Le Moyne.
A goodly place it was, divided into two rooms and already the hands of the two sisters had fashioned of such scant things as they possessed and dared buy from the factory on the year's debt, a semblance of comfort.
In the other cabins the rest of the party managed to double, each family taking one of the two rooms in each, and the women at least drew a sigh of content that the long trail had at last found an end, however unstable of tenure.
"Ah, Maren," said Marie Baptiste, sitting on the shining new log step of her domicile, "what it is to have a home! Does it not clutch at your heart sometimes, ma cherie, the desire for a home, and that which goes with it, the love of a man?"
She raised her eyes to the face of Maren leaning above her against the lintel, and they were full of a puzzled question.
Maren answered the look with a swift smile, toying lightly with a fold of the faded sleeve rolled above her elbow.
"Home for me, Marie, is the wide blue sky above, the wind in the tossing trees, the ripple of soft waters on the bow of a canoe. For me,--I grieve that we have stopped. Not this year do we reach the Land of the Whispering Hills."
A swift change had fallen into the depth of her golden voice, a subtle wistfulness that sang with weird pathos, and the eyes raised toward the western rim of the forest were suddenly far and sombre.
"Forgive!" said her sister gently; "I had forgot. I know the dream, but is it not better that we rest and gain new strength for another season? Here might well be home, here on this pretty river. We have come a mighty length already. What could be fairer, cherie,--even though we leave another to win to the untracked West."
A small spasm drew across the features of Maren, a twitching of the full lips.
"Faint heart of you," she said sadly. "Oh, Marie, 'tis your voice has ever held us back. They would prod faster but for you. Is there no glory within you, no daring, no dreams of conquest? Bien! But I could go alone. This dallying stiffles the breath in me!"
She put up a hand and tore open the garment at her throat, taking a deep breath of the sunlit air.
"But it is poverty that must be reckoned with. By spring again we may be better equipped than ever."
So rode up the hope that was ever in her.
"Yes," sighed Marie, "as the good God wills."
But she glanced wistfully around the new cabin, to be her own for the length of the four seasons. And who should say what might not happen in four seasons?
She wondered fretfully what fate had fashioned the glorious creature beside her in the form of Love itself to put within the soul of the restless conqueror. Never had she known Maren, though they two had come from the same lap.
Presently Maren looked down at her, and the shimmering smile, like light across dark waters, had again returned.
"Nay," she said gently, "fret not. It is spring-and you have at last a home."
True, it was spring.
Did not each breath of the south wind tell it, each flute-like call from the budding forest without the post, each burst of song from some hot-blooded youth with his red cap perched on the back of his head, his gay sash knotted jauntily?
It stirred the heart in the breast of Maren Le Moyne, but not with the thought of love. It called to her as she stood at night alone under the stars, with her head lifted as if to drink the keen, sweet darkness; called to her from far-distant plains of blowing grass, virgin of man's foot; from rushing rivers, bare of canoe and raft; from high hills, smiling, sweet and fair, up to the cloudless sky--and always it called from the West.
Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,--fate held back her eager hand.
A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the long trail, without which all would fail.
Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand its toll of salvage.
At Rainy Lake they had been held by thieving Indians and a great part of their provisions taken from them, leaving them to make their way in comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.
Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of the trappers with the factor.
And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among them, urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in her eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait at Fort de Seviere for another spring.
Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by her fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for the woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of conquest which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on the perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for itself an ideal holding.
Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood to tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs and trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the peace-pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of woman she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father, grimy from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and watch the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her hands for that she was not born a man.
And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.
Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the head of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.
Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years, why not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap and stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through the stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River each season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams where the call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him,--how long none might know. And at last he had heeded, laid down the staid, the sane, and followed the will-o'-the-wisp of conquest and adventure that took the current by his door.
Never had Maren chided him,--never for one moment held against him the desertion of his children. For that, they were well provided for since he had left with Jacques Baptiste the savings of his life, not much, but enough to bring both of them to the marriage age.
And well and tenderly had old Jacques and his wife fulfilled the trust,--Maren's dark eyes were often misty as she recalled the parting at Grand Portage.
So tenderly had the two maids grown in the love of the family that Marie had, but at the start of the great journey, married young Henri Baptiste.
Marie was all for a home and some black-eyed babies, but she clung to Maren as she had ever done,--and now, in her twenty-sixth year, Maren had risen to the call as her father had done before her, and lifted her face, rapt as some pagan Priestess', toward that mystic West,--bound for the Land of the Whispering Hills, whence had come that old, vague rumour, lured alike by love of the unknown and shy, unspoken longing for the father whose heart must be the pattern of her own.
And in her train, swept together by that fire within her, touched into flame by her ever-mounting hope, her courage, and her magnetism, went that small band of men and women, all young, all of adventurous blood, all daring the odds that let reluctantly a woman into the wilderness.
Yet it has been ever women who have conquered the wilderness, for until they trod the trace the men had cut it still remained a wilderness.
So she leaned in the door of Marie's new home, this taut-strung Maren Le Moyne, and gazed away above the rim of the budding forest, and her spirit was as a chaffing steed held into quiet by a hand it knows its master.
For a year she must endure the strain,--then, as the good God willed, the leap forward, the wild breath in her nostrils, the forging into the unknown.
"Ah, yes!" she said again, "it is the spring."
"Bon jour," she nodded, unsmiling, as a slim youth swung jauntily up the hard-beaten way between the cabins.
"Eh!" said Marie, alert, "and who is that lord-high-mighty, with his red cheeks and his airs, Maren? You know, as it is always, every man in the post already. It is not so with the women, I'll wager. For instance, who lives in the tiny house there by the south bastion?"
"I know not," answered Maren, as though she humoured a child, and taking the last question first; "as for the youth, 'tis young Marc Dupre, and one of a sturdy nature. I like his spirit, though all I know of it is what sparkles from his roguish eyes. A fighter,--one to dare for love of chance."
Marie looked quickly up, ever ready to pounce on the first gleam of aught that might ripen into a love interest, but she saw Maren's eyes, cool and shining, watching the swaggering figure with a look that measured its slim strength, its suggestion of reserve, its gay joy of life, and naught else.
"A pretty fellow," she said, with a touch of disappointment.
Each and every man went by Maren just so,--eliciting only that interest which had to do apart from the personal.
But the black eyes of Marc Dupre had softened a bit under their daring as he approached the factory.
"Holy Mother!" he whispered to himself; "what a woman! No maid, but a WOMAN--for whose word one would fillip the face of Satan. She is fire--and, if I am sure, all men are tow." _