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Updated: June 27, 2025
It was a dagger thrust, and it found its mark even as the girl glanced slily at her victim. Maren's full mouth twitched and she looked dully away to the fort gate. Dupre gave Francette an ungallant push. "Begone!" he cried angrily; "you little cat!" With a ringing laugh the maid danced away in the sunshine, and Dupre faced Maren. "It is that imp of le diable, Francette?" he asked.
But, when Prix had lounged away into the dusk and the girl had stepped into the soft dust of the roadway, she fell to wondering how it was that mention of the year's wait brought no longer its impatience, its old dissatisfaction. She was thinking of this as she neared the factory, her light tread muffled in the dust. "Foolish Francette! What should I do with a gay little girl like you?
Aloud he said, "Francette, children should keep from where they are not wanted. Get you back to your mother." "Children, you say, M'sieu Dupre? Is eighteen so far behind twenty-two? Grow a beard on your cheek before you give yourself the airs of a man. And, anyway, grown men of twice eighteen have been known to love children of that age."
Francette looked after her, with small hands clinched and breast heaving with, anger, and there had the stranger made her second enemy in Fort de Seviere within the first fortnight. Along the northern wall there was much bustle and scurry, the noise of voices and of preparation, for the men were busy with the raising of the first new cabin.
"Tessa," she said one day, sidling up to that Tessa Bibye who had cast a taunt in her teeth, "know you the charm which that doctress of the Crees gave to Marci Varendree when she sickened for love of that half-breed, Tohi Stannard?" "Oho!" cried Tessa gleefully, "a man again! Who lacks one now, Francette?"
Down on her knees little Francette had lifted the heavy head with its dull eyes and pitiful hanging tongue, lifted it to her breast, weeping and smoothing the short ears deaf to her soft words, and sat rocking to and fro in an ecstasy of grief.
"M'sieu," said Francette timidly, and the tone was new to that audacious slip of impudence; "M'sieu." "What is it, little one?" said McElroy gently, his own disgust of his morning's quickness softening his voice that he might not again play the hasty fool, and Francette crept nearer until she stood close to the log step.
"And now " he started to admonish, when she threw her arms about his neck, stiffling the words in her garments. At the corner of the factory Maren Le Moyne stood looking through the twilight at the scene. When Francette released him there were only they two and he had heard no step nor seen the silent beholder.
"Mercy!" shrieked little Francette, her red-rose face aghast, "he will begin before I can bring the help!" Like a flash of flame the maid in her crimson skirt shot up the main way of Fort de Seviere to where the factory lay asleep in the warm spring sun. On its log step, pipe in mouth, young Anders McElroy leaned against the jamb and looked smilingly out upon his settlement.
Silence of the young day hung in the palisade, a silence that cut the soul with its tragic portent. Even little Francette Moline, weeping openly, pressed close in the mass and jerked with unconscious savagery of spirit the short ears of the husky at her heels, that Loup whom no man dared to touch save only the master his fierce spirit must needs acknowledge. It had been DesCaut by brutality.
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