The dogs had settled down into a jog-trot now, but were still well on in front.

“Is ‘mush’ their food?” asked the Boy.

“Mush? No, fish.”

“Why does your Indian go on like that about mush, then?”

“Oh, that’s the only word the dogs know, except—­a—­certain expressions we try to discourage the Indians from using.  In the old days the dog-drivers used to say ‘mahsh.’  Now you never hear anything but swearing and ‘mush,’ a corruption of the French-Canadian marche.”  He turned to the Colonel:  “You’ll get over trying to wear cheechalko boots here—­nothing like mucklucks with a wisp of straw inside for this country.”

“I agree wid ye.  I got me a pair in St. Michael’s,” says O’Flynn proudly, turning out his enormous feet.  “Never wore anything so comf’table in me life.”

“You ought to have drill parkis too, like this of mine, to keep out the wind.”

They were going up the slope now, obliquely to the cabin, close behind the dogs, who were pulling spasmodically between their little rests.

Father Wills stooped and gathered up some moss that the wind had swept almost bare of snow.  “You see that?” he said to O’Flynn, while the Boy stopped, and the Colonel hurried on.  “Wherever you find that growing no man need starve.”

The Colonel looked back before entering the cabin and saw that the Boy seemed to have forgotten not alone the Indian, but the dogs, and was walking behind with the Jesuit, face upturned, smiling, as friendly as you please.

Within a different picture.

Potts and Mac were having a row about something, and the Colonel struck in sharply on their growling comments upon each other’s character and probable destination.

“Got plenty to eat?  Two hungry men coming in.  One’s an Indian, and you know what that means, and the other’s a Catholic priest.”  It was this bomb that he had hurried on to get exploded and done with before the said priest should appear on the scene.

“A what?” Mac raised his heavy eyes with fight in every wooden feature.

“A Jesuit priest is what I said.”

“He won’t eat his dinner here.”

“That is exactly what he will do.”

“Not by—­” Whether it was the monstrous proposition that had unstrung Mac, he was obliged to steady himself against the table with a shaking hand.  But he set those square features of his like iron, and, says he, “No Jesuit sits down to the same table with me.”

“That means, then, that you’ll eat alone.”

“Not if I know it.”

The Colonel slid in place the heavy wooden bar that had never before been requisitioned to secure the door, and he came and stood in the middle of the cabin, where he could let out all his inches.  Just clearing the swing-shelf, he pulled his great figure up to its full height, and standing there like a second Goliath, he said quite softly in that lingo of his childhood that always came back to his tongue’s tip in times of excitement:  “Just as shuah as yo’ bohn that priest will eat his dinner to-day in my cabin, sah; and if yo’ going t’ make any trouble, just say so now, and we’ll get it ovah, and the place cleaned up again befoh our visitors arrive.”