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Meanwhile the professor slept long hours on the moss and took a much-needed rest; and by degrees they learned from Nichicun the story of his misfortune the story that forms a part of the chronicle of the expedition, which can be read at the Smithsonian Institution.
Thus they found Nichicun, without whom Bennie might never have accomplished the object of his quest. It took three days to nurse the half-dead and altogether starved Montagnais back to life, but he received the tenderest care. Marc shot a young caribou and gave him the blood to drink, and made a ragout to put the flesh back on his bones.
As he sat round the fire with Marc and Edouard on that last night, Nichicun spoke his mind of the Nascopees, and Marc translated freely for Bennie's edification. No, the injured Montagnais told them, the Nascopees were not nice; they were dirty. They ate decayed food and they never went to mass. Moreover, they were half-witted.
It appeared, moreover, that the Rassini River was near the Nascopee territory, and that it flowed into the Moisie only seven miles above the camp. All that night the marionettes danced in Bennie's brain. Next morning they propped Nichicun on his bed of moss, laid a rifle and a box of matches beside him, and bade him farewell. At the mouth of the Rassini River Prof.
They do not even wear civilized clothes, and their ways are not the ways of les bons sauvages. They have no priests; they do not come to the coast; and the Montagnais will not mingle with them. Thus it bespoke the hunger of Nichicun that he was willing to go into their country.
But it would never do to hint what this disclosure meant to him. Between puffs of his pipe he asked casual, careless questions of Nichicun. These Nascopees, for instance, how far off might their land be? And where did they assert this extraordinary serpent of iron to be? Were there rivers in the Nascopee country? Did white men ever go there? All these things the wounded Montagnais told him.
Bennie Hooker did Nichicun speak until the night before their departure, although the reason and manner of his speaking were natural enough. It happened as follows: but first it should be said that the Nascopees are an ignorant and barbarous tribe, dirty and treacherous, upon whom the Montagnais look down with contempt and scorn.
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