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Updated: June 28, 2025
"And yet it is for yourself, your husband, your child, the garrison, to save all our lives, God willing." Odalie's color rose, her eyes grew bright. "I know I can trust you to make the risk as slight as it may be, to place me in no useless danger. I volunteer." The two men looked at her for one moment, their hearts in their eyes. Then Captain Stuart broke out with his reassuring raillery.
But, alas! for the sight of Odalie's home that she had loved and made so happy, and where he had been as cherished as Fifine herself, all grim, charred ashes; and poor Dill's cabin! he knew by this time that Dill was dead, very dead, or he would have come back to them. The fields, too, that they had sown, and that none would reap, trampled and torn, and singed and burnt!
He could tell all he knew, and more besides, in the somewhat limited English vocabulary at his command. "Parlez vous? Parlez, fou!" he was wont to exclaim, feeling very clever. How should he have dreamed that Odalie's little Vocabulaire Français would be more efficacious to save his life than his rifle and his deadly aim? He looked toward her once more in his despair.
They had not prospered since, nor multiplied, and Odalie was nearly the last of the family. A certain innate refinement in both, MacLeod's gravity and dignity of carriage and the distinction of Odalie's manner, notwithstanding its simplicity, marked their exceptional quality to a discerning judgment, despite their precarious plight.
With a lot of anxious, troubled, houseless women and querulous, distraught, frightened children, and difficult half-grown boys, and the commandant's general orders to quarter them all to their satisfaction and to furnish whatever was necessary, the strain might have proved too great for the old bustling sergeant, and like undue pressure on the boiler of one of our modern locomotives, which he much resembled, as he went back and forth puffingly, might have exploded his valuable faculties, but for Odalie's well-meant hints.
The chief, with his lordly impatience and superiority to domestic concerns, evidently fumed because of the delay they occasioned, and had he not supposed that the contents of the bales of goods were merchandise and trinkets to be bartered with the Indians for peltry, instead of Odalie's slim resources of housekeeping wares, sheets, and table-linen and garments, and frugal supplies of flax and seeds, he would not have suffered the slow progress.
Captain Demeré desisted from insistence after one or two well-meant efforts, and the man who had served the table waited in doubt and indecision. "It's a hard life for women on the frontier," the officer observed as if in polite excuse for Odalie's ill-mannered tears that she could not control.
Odalie's French chansonnettes acquired from her grand'maman, drifting out in a mellow contralto voice, and a big booming proclamation concerning the "Vaterland," by the drum-major, were the least queerly foreign. Mrs.
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