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"She's my old nurse," sez Barbie. "I told her a story just a little one an' she wouldn't whip me for it, so Daddy told her to clear out until she was willin' to do her duty. He thinks she's gone for good, but I know where she is." "Melisse, Melisse," muttered Monody. "Well, after all, it might be. The' ain't nothin' too strange to happen."
Very quietly he went from his room down into the deserted store. Without striking a light he found a new pack, a few articles of food, and ammunition. The envelope, addressed to Melisse, he left where Croisset or the factor would find it in the morning. His dogs were housed in a shack behind the store, and he called out their names softly and warningly as he went among them.
The cabin was half filled with strange things, for all who came gave something to Melisse.
He was before her in an instant, his cap fallen to the floor, his eyes blazing as he caught her by the arms. "Yes, the heart of Jan Thoreau is broken!" he cried. "But it has been broken by nothing that lives on the Nelson House trail. It is broken because of YOU!" "I!" Melisse drew back from him with a breathless cry. "I I have broken " "I did not say that," interrupted Jean.
From this hour of their first kneeling before the little life in the cabin, something sprang up between Jan Thoreau and John Cummins which it would have been hard for man to break. Looking up after many moments' contemplation of the little Melisse, Jan gazed straight into Cummins' face, and whispered softly the word which in Cree means "father." This was Jan's first word for Melisse.
Melisse laughed merrily as Ledoq continued to bow before her, rattling away in a delighted torrent of French. "Ah, thes ees wan gr-r-reat compleeman, M'selle Melisse," he finished at last, breaking for an instant into English. He straightened like a spring and turned, to Jan. "Did you meet the strange team?" "We met no team." Ledoq looked puzzled.
A hundred "Meleeses" will bear her memory in name for all who speak her name call her "Meleese," and not Melisse. The wilderness itself may never forget, as it has never forgotten beautiful Jeanne D'Arcambal, who lived and died on the shore of the great bay more than one hundred and sixty years ago.
"I pay back this gold to you and Melisse a hundred times!" he cried tensely. "I swear it, an' I swear that Jan Thoreau mak' no lie!" Unconsciously, with the buckskin bag clutched in one hand, he had stretched out his other arm to the violin hanging against the wall. Cummins turned to look. When he faced him again the boy's arm had fallen to his side and his cheeks were white.
"She ees not papoose! She mus' be lak HER!" His great eyes shone, and Cummins felt a thickening in his throat as he looked into them and saw what the boy meant. "Maballa mak papoose out of Melisse. She grow know not'ing, lak papoose, talk lak papoose " Jan's feelings overwhelmed his tongue.
I could understand, now, why Melisse Cummins was the heroine of a hundred true tales of the wilderness, and I could understand as well why there was scarcely a cabin or an Indian hut in that ten thousand square miles of wilderness in which she had not, at one time or another, been spoken of as "L'ange Meleese."
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