United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But McElroy's breast had heaved with a great breath, sweet as the wind over a harvest field to a tired man, and he looked up at Rette with eyes that seemed to be suddenly flooded with life. "Done?" he whispered; "done, Rette? The child has given me salvation!" And then he held out a shaking, thin hand. "Come here," he said softly; "come here."
An aged Indian of the Assiniboines squatted at the water's edge mending the broken bottom of a skin canoe, and two voyageurs, gay in the matter of sash and crimson cap, lay lazily beneath a drowsing tree. To the northward there flashed into McElroy's vision one of those pictures a man sees but few times and never forgets, a picture startling in its clear-cut strength.
A leader born himself, he was looking for a leader among McElroy's men; but, with that intrepid factor himself gone and Edmonton Ridgar also, there was nowhere a man with the signs of leadership upon him. Through Prix's mind this went while they stood listening to the death-wail that was beginning to rise from the tepees without. Then he quietly took command, knowing himself to be best fitted.
You know, M'sieu, you comprehend?" She leaned forward looking earnestly into McElroy's eyes, and a surge of painful ecstasy shot to the man's heart, so near she seemed in the suddenly created sympathy of the moment, so near and gracious, so strong in her pure passion, so infinitely sweet.
They drew back and looked on with wonder, and then smiles of amusement, but Maren, gazing into the tragic little face, saw deeper. "Why, little one," she said gently, unconsciously falling into McElroy's words after a trick she had, "I I understand. You need not give up the dog, I know what you would say." "No!" cried Francette fiercely. "No! Take him! Take him! I will make you take him! I will!"
In all tenderness she stooped from her fair height and laid her arm around the shoulders of the youth, drew his head against the beadwork of McElroy's gift, and kissed him upon the lips, once, twice, yearningly, as a mother kisses a weakling child. At that moment there came, borne on a waking breeze of the night, the sound of the tom-toms, the yapping of many throats.
With no more words she flung herself upon the gate and tore at the chains, her strong hands able as a man's. As the sight of her in peril had worked for both weakness and strength in Dupre, so had McElroy's plight affected her. That helpless moment was the one defection of her dauntless life.
Yuagh!" called the sachem, and two young men stepped forward, toe on the line, glanced each at a framed picture, drew up an arm, and, "Whut-t-t t-e-e-p," whined two knives that flittered through the light and struck quivering, one with its cool kiss on McElroy's cheek, the other just in the edge of the slab at De Courtenay's shoulder.
To add to the small resentment against him which began to rankle in McElroy's heart, and which had never really left it since that evening in De Seviere when Maren Le Moyne had passed behind the cabin of the Savilles with some voyageur's tot on her shoulder and the handsome gallant from Montreal had lost his manners staring, one day in this same week a Bois-Brules came to the post gates and asked for one Maren Le Moyne.
Dazed in all the regions of her being, enshadowed in every vista of hope and scarce-tasted joy, she went quietly about the cabin, her mind a dark space in which there flashed sudden, reiterated visions, now McElroy's blue eyes, anxious and eager as he held up the doeskin dress at the door-sill, burning with fire and truth and passion in the glade in the forest, again tender and diffident what time they walked together to the gate to meet De Courtenay's messenger, and again it was that scene at the factory steps that haunted her, McElroy with his arms about Francette Moline, the grey husky crouching in the twilight.
Word Of The Day