What a hushing of voices and cleansing of wits and disusing of oaths was there after my little lady came to our rough Habitation!

I mind the first Sunday M. Radisson led her out like a queen to the mess-room table.  When our voyageurs went upstream for M. Picot’s hidden furs, her story had got noised about the fort.  Officers, soldiers, and sailors had seated themselves at the long benches on either side the table; but M. Radisson’s place was empty and a sort of throne chair had been extemporized at the head of the table.  An angry question went from group to group to know if M. Radisson designed such place of honour for the two leaders of our prisoners—­under lock in the guard-room.  M. de Groseillers only laughed and bade the fellows contain their souls and stomachs in patience.  A moment later, the door to the quarters where Hortense lived was thrown open by a red-coated soldier, and out stepped M. Radisson leading Hortense by the tips of her dainty fingers, the ebon faces of the two blackamoors grinning delight behind.

You could have heard a pin fall among our fellows.  Then there was a noise of armour clanking to the floor.  Every man unconsciously took to throwing his pistol under the table, flinging sword-belt down and hiding daggers below benches.  Of a sudden, the surprise went to their heads.

“Gentlemen,” began M. Radisson.

But the fellows would have none of his grand speeches.  With a cheer that set the rafters ringing, they were on their feet; and to Mistress Hortense’s face came a look that does more for the making of men than all New England’s laws or my uncle’s blasphemy boxes or King Charles’s dragoons.  You ask what that look was?  Go to, with your teasings!  A lover is not to be asked his whys!  I ask you in return why you like the spire of a cathedral pointing up instead of down; or why the muses lift souls heavenward?  Indeed, of all the fine arts granted the human race to lead men’s thoughts above the sordid brutalities of living, methinks woman is the finest; for God’s own hand fashioned her, and she was the last crowning piece of all His week’s doings.  The finest arts are the easiest spoiled, as you know very well; and if you demand how Mistress Hortense could escape harm amid all the wickedness of that wilderness, I answer it is a thing that your townsfolk cannot know.

It is of the wilderness.

The wilderness is a foster-mother that teacheth hard, strange paradoxes.  The first is the sin of being weak; and the second is that death is the least of life’s harms.

Wrapped in those furs for which he had staked his life like many a gamester of the wilderness, M. Picot lay buried in that sandy stretch outside the cave door.  Turning to lead Hortense away before Le Borgne and the blackamoor began filling the grave, I found her stonily silent and tearless.

But it was she who led me.