Quatreaux’s cabane was situated on the edge of an extensive tract of marsh,—­lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,—­a splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake for miles.  Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in those dark, Novembry, October days, with “the low rain falling” half the time, and the yellow leaves all the time, and no snipe.  But whether we poled our log canoe up to some stunted old willow-tree that sat low in the horizontal marsh, and took shelter under it to smoke our pipes, or whether we mollified the privation of snipe in the cabane at night with mellow rum and tobacco brought by me, still was Walker the old voyageur’s favorite theme.

Old Quatreaux spoke English perfectly well, although his conservatism as a Canadian induced him to prefer his mother tongue as a vehicle for general conversation.  But I remarked that his anecdotes of Walker were always related in English, and on these occasions, therefore, for my benefit alone:  for but little of the Anglo-Saxon tongue appeared to be known to, or at least used by, any member of his numerous family.  Indeed, I can recall but two words of that language which I could positively aver to have heard in colloquial use among them,—­poodare and schotte.  And why should the old voyageur have thus reserved his experiences from those who were near and dear to him?  Simply because most of his adventures with Walker were not of the strictly mild character becoming a family-man.  But it was all the same to these good people; and when I laughed, they all took up the idea and laughed their best,—­the little hunch-backed girl generally going off into a kind of epilepsy by herself, over in the darkest corner of the room, among the tubs.

When divested of the strange Western expletives and imprecations with which the old man used to spice his reminiscences, some of them are enough.  I remember one, telling how Peter Walker “raised the wind” on a particular occasion, when he got short of money on his way to some distant trading-post, in a district strange to him.  It is before me, in short-hand, on the pages of an old, old pocket-book, and I will tell it with some slight improvements on the narrator’s style, such as suppressing his unnecessary combinations of the curse.

Mounted on a two-hundred-dollar buffalo-horse, for which he would not have taken double that amount, Peter Walker found himself, one afternoon, near the end of a long day’s ride.  He had but little baggage with him, that little consisting entirely of a bowie-knife and holster-pistols,—­for the revolver was a scarce piece of furniture then and there.  Of money he was entirely destitute, having expended his last dollar upon the purchase of his noble steed, and of the festive suit of clothes with which he calculated upon astonishing people who resided outside the limits of civilization.  The pantaloon division of that suit was particularly superb, consisting principally of a stripe by which the outer seam of each leg was made conducive to harmony of outline.  He was about three days’ journey from the trading-post to which he was bound.  The country was a frontier one, sparsely provided with inns.