Michel enjoyed the windigo.  Though he strummed on his lip and mourned aloud whenever Madame Cadotte was by, he felt so comfortably full of food and horror, and so important with his story, that life threatened him with nothing worse than satiety.

While parties went up the river and down the river, and talked about the chutes in the rapids where a victim could be sucked down to death in an instant, or about tracing the windigo’s secret camp, Archange hid herself in the attic.  She lay upon Michel’s bed and wept, or walked the plank floor.  It was no place for her.  At noon the bark roof heated her almost to fever.  The dormer windows gave her little air, and there was dust as well as something like an individual sediment of the poverty from which the boy had come.  Yet she could endure the loft dungeon better than the face of the Chippewa mother who blamed her, or the bluff excitement of Monsieur Cadotte.  She could hear his voice from time to time, as he ran in for spirits or provisions for parties of searchers.  And Archange had aversion, like the instinct of a maid, to betraying fondness for her husband.  She was furious with him, also, for causing her pain.  When she thought of the windigo, of the rapids, of any peril which might be working his limitless absence, she set clenched hands in her loosened hair and trembled with hysterical anguish.  But the enormity of his behavior if he were alive made her hiss at the rafters.  “Good, monsieur!  Next time I will have four officers.  I will have the entire garrison sitting along the gallery!  Yes, and they shall be English, too.  And there is one thing you will never know, besides.”  She laughed through her weeping.  “You will never know I made eyes at a windigo.”

The preenings and posings of a creature whose perfections he once thought were the result of a happy chance had made Louizon roar.  She remembered all their life together, and moaned, “I will say this:  he was the best husband that any girl ever had.  We scarcely had a disagreement.  But to be the widow of a man who is eaten up—­O Ste. Marie!”

In the clear August weather the wide river seemed to bring its opposite shores nearer.  Islands within a stone’s throw of the settlement, rocky drops in a boiling current, vividly showed their rich foliage of pines.  On one of these islands Father Dablon and Father Marquette had built their first mission chapel; and though they afterwards removed it to the mainland, the old tracery of foundation stones could still be seen.  The mountains of Lake Superior showed like a cloud.  On the ridge above fort and houses the Chippewa lodges were pleasant in the sunlight, sending ribbons of smoke from their camp fires far above the serrated edge of the woods.  Naked Indian children and their playmates of the settlement shouted to one another, as they ran along the river margin, threats of instant seizure by the windigo.  The Chippewa widow, holding her husband in her arms,