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Updated: May 19, 2025
Turrif lay upon a bed in one corner. The baby's cradle, a brown box on rockers, was close to the bed, and when the child stirred the father put out his hand and rocked it. The child's head was quite covered with the clothes, so that Trenholme wondered how it could breathe. He sat by the foot of the bed, and Turrif talked to him in his slow English.
"We sink," said Turrif, with his deliberate smile, "it will be best; for if you have not been wandering in your mind, some one else's body has been wandering." Trenholme went back to his station in the not unpleasant company of two sturdy farmers, one young and vivacious, the other old and slow. They found the place just as he had left it.
He bent his steps to the largest house in the neighbourhood, the house of the family called Turrifs; whose present head, being the second of his generation on the same farm, held a position of loosely acknowledged pre-eminence. Turrif was a Frenchman, who had had one Scotch forefather through whom his name had come. This, indeed, was the case with many of his neighbours.
Its wooden and weather-greyed walls glimmered but faintly in the night; it was only by following the line of log fences through the flat treeless fields that he found himself at last full in the feeble rays of the candle-light that peeped from its largest window. Trenholme knocked. Turrif himself opened the door.
Bates scorned the idea, which Turrif had always held, that Cameron had never really died; he vowed, as before, that the box he had sent in Saul's cart had contained nothing but a dead body; he would hear no description of the old man who, it would seem, had usurped Cameron's name; he repeated stolidly that Saul had put his charge into some shallow grave in the forest, and hoaxed Trenholme, with the help of an accomplice; and he did not scruple to hint that if Trenholme had not been a coward he would have seized the culprit, and so obviated further mystery and after difficulties.
"And buried him on the road, because he was heavy and useless, and let some friend of yours play with the box?" continued Turrif, with an insinuating smile. Saul swore loudly that this was not the case, at which the men shrugged their shoulders and looked at Trenholme. To him the scene and the circumstances were very curious. The house into which they had come was much smaller than Turrif's.
You think I've been more alone than's good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage. He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter's lumbering for want of a man. Now, there's a fix, if you will, where I say a man is to be pitied." "Yes," said Turrif, gravely, "it is sad; but sat is hees trouble."
At the far end a large table, that held the candle, had a meal spread upon it, and also some open dog's-eared primers, at which small children were spelling audibly. When the conference, which had taken place near the door, was over, the wife went back to her children and her lighted table, and Trenholme made as if to open the door, supposing that Turrif would walk away with him.
"Se mirácle to make dis genteel-man, M. Saul, fetch se box." Trenholme then saw that Saul's shudderings had come, upon him again at the mere suggestion. "What am I to do, then?" he asked. At this the men had a good deal of talk, and Turrif interpreted the decision. "We sink it is for M. Bates to say what shall be done wit se box.
Trenholme could not speak French, but he knew that Turrif could understand enough English to comprehend his errand if he told it slowly and distinctly.
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