“I can imagine, knowing Hurons, how that Huron enjoyed his success,” I said.  “It’s in their blood to be swift and silent and adventurous.  But they’re superstitious; they’re afraid of anything supernatural.”  I hesitated, with a laugh in my mind at a memory.  “It’s not fitting that I should swap stories with a hero of the Great War, yet—­I believe you might be amused with an adventure of one of my guides.”  The Frenchman, all civil interest, disclaimed his heroism with hands and shoulders, but smiling too—­for he had small chance at disclaiming with those two crosses on his breast.

“I shall be enchanted to hear m’sieur’s tale of his guide.  For the rest I am myself quite mad over the ‘sport.’  I love to insanity the out of doors and shooting and fishing.  It is a regret that the service has given me no opportunity these four years for a breathing spell in the woods.  M’sieur will tell me the tale of his guide’s superstition?”

A scheme began to form in my brain at that instant too delightful, it seemed, to come true.  I put it aside and went on with my story.  “I have one guide, a Huron half-breed,” I said, “whom I particularly like.  He’s an old fellow—­sixty—­but light and quick and powerful as a boy.  More interesting than a boy, because he’s full of experiences.  Two years ago a bear swam across the lake where my camp is, and I went out in a canoe with this Rafael and got him.”

Colonel Raffre made of this fact an event larger than—­I am sure—­he would have made of his winning of the war cross.

“You shame me, colonel,” I said, and went on hurriedly.  “Rafael, the guide, was pleased about the bear.  ’When gentlemens kill t’ings, guides is more happy,’ he explained to me, and he proceeded to tell an anecdote.  He prefaced it by informing me that one time he hunt bear and he see devil.  He had been hunting, it seemed, two or three winters before with his brother-in-law at the headwaters of the St. Maurice River, up north there,” I elucidated, pointing through the window toward the “long white street of Beauport,” across the St. Lawrence.  “It’s very lonely country, entirely wild, Indian hunting-ground yet.  These two Hurons, Rafael and his brother-in-law, were on a two months’ trip to hunt and trap, having their meagre belongings and provisions on sleds which they dragged across the snow.  They depended for food mostly on what they could trap or shoot—­moose, caribou, beaver, and small animals.  But they had bad luck.  They set many traps but caught nothing, and they saw no game to shoot.  So that in a month they were hard pressed.  One cold day they went two miles to visit a beaver trap, where they had seen signs.  They hoped to find an animal caught and to feast on beaver tail, which is good eating.”

Here I had to stop and explain much about beaver tails, and the rest of beavers, to the Frenchman, who was interested like a boy in this new, almost unheard-of beast.  At length: