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I knew instinctively that we were safe now, as I knew also that this submission of Jean Pahusca's must be paid for later with heavy interest by somebody. "Here'th your horth; s'pothe you thkite," lisped Bud Anderson. Jean sprang upon his pony and dashed off. We watched him ride away down the long slope.
While our father yet lived I persuaded him to give all his estate it was large to the Holy Church. He did it. Not a penny of it can ever be touched." Mapleson caught his breath like a drowning man. "It spoiled a beautiful lawsuit, I know," Le Claire continued looking meaningly at him. "For that fortune in France, put into the hands of Jean Pahusca's attorneys here, would have been rich plucking.
"Ye'll 'scuse me," O'mie went on, "fur the embarrassin' statement; but I ain't big, I run mostly to brains, while Phil here, an' Bill, an' Dave, an' Bud, an' Possum Conlow runs mostly to beef; an' yet, bein' small, I ain't afraid none of your good Injun. But take this warnin' from me, an old friend that knew your grandmother in long clothes, that you kape wide of Jean Pahusca's trail.
"He is a fast young man; I have the evidence," Judson cried defiantly. "He's been followed and watched by them that know. I guess if you take Jean Pahusca's word about the goods you'll have to about the doings of Phil Baronet." "No doubt about Phil being followed and watched, but as to taking Jean Pahusca's word, I wouldn't take it on oath about anything, not a whit more than I would take yours.
I had my papers from Dodd. Le Claire long ago renounced the world. His life has proved it. The world includes the undivided north half of section 29, range 14. That's Jean Pahusca's. It's too late now for his father to try to get it away from him, Baronet. You know the courts won't stand for it." Adroit as he was, the Southern blood was beginning to show in Tell's nervous manner and flashing eyes.
"When are you going to leave?" It was Jean Pahusca's voice. "Not till I get ready." The tone had that rich softness I heard so often when Father Le Claire chatted with our gang of boys in Springvale, but there was an insolence in it impossible to the priest. O'mie squeezed my hand in the dark and rising quickly he followed them down the stream. The boy never did know what fear meant.
The chief had just risen from his skin couch, and a long band of black fur lay across his head. In the dim light it gave his receding forehead a sort of square-cut effect. He threw it off as I entered, but the impression it made I could not at once throw off. The face of the chief was for the moment as suggestive of Jean Pahusca's face as ever Father Le Claire's had been.
"I wonder I never tried to follow him there. But if he's down the river it is better for Springvale, anyhow." All this the priest told to the eager crowd on the veranda of the Cambridge House that morning. But regarding the light and his thought of it, he did not tell us then, nor how, through all and all, his great fear for Springvale was on account of Jean Pahusca's presence there.
He shivered a little, though still unconscious, and then I felt the hot fever begin to pulse throughout his body. Dave Mead was half way up the cliff to Father Le Claire. Out on the point John Anderson waved, to the crest above, the simple message, "We've found him." Bud dived into the cavern and brought out an empty jug, relic of Jean Pahusca's habitation there.
I lived through the hours of that night from the time young Tell Mapleson had told of Jean Pahusca's plan to seize Marjie, to the moment when I saw her safe in the shelter of her mother's doorway. Awful! And this sort of thing was going on now in the Saline Valley. How could God permit it?
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