Heralds of Empire | Page 5

of a sudden from the
beach.

For an instant, Ben was taken aback.
Then the insolence that provokes its own punishment broke forth.
"Go play with your equals, jack-pudding! Jailbirds who ape their
betters are strangled up in Quebec," and he kicked down Rebecca's pile
too.
Rebecca's doll-blue eyes spilled over with tears, but Mistress Hortense
was the high-mettled, high-stepping little dame. She fairly stamped her
wrath, and to Jack's amaze took him by the hand and marched off with
the hauteur of an empress.
Then Ben must call out something about M. Picot, the French doctor,
not being what he ought, and little Hortense having no mother.
"Ben," said I quietly, "come out on the pier." The pier ran to deep water.
At the far end I spoke.
"Not another word against Hortense and Jack! Promise me!"
His back was to the water, mine to the shore. He would have promised
readily enough, I think, if the other monkeys had not
followed--Rebecca with big tear-drops on both cheeks, Hortense
quivering with wrath, Jack flushed, half shy and half shamed to be
championed by a girl.
"Come, Ben; 'fore I count three, promise----"
But he lugged at me. I dodged. With a splash that doused us four, Ben
went headlong into the sea. The uplift of the waves caught him. He
threw back his arms with a cry. Then he sank like lead.
The sailor son of the famous captain could not swim. Rebecca's eyes
nigh jumped from her head with fright. Hortense grew white to the lips
and shouted for that lout of a blackamoor sound asleep on the sand.
Before I could get my doublet off to dive, Jack Battle was cleaving air
like a leaping fish, and the waters closed over his heels.

Bethink you, who are not withered into forgetfulness of your own
merry youth, whether our hearts stopped beating then!
But up comes that water-dog of a Jack gripping Ben by the scruff of the
neck; and when by our united strength we had hauled them both on the
pier, little Mistress Hortense was the one to roll Gillam on his stomach
and bid us "Quick! Stand him on his head and pour the water out!"
From that day Hortense was Jack's slave, Jack was mine, and Ben was
a pampered hero because he never told and took the punishment like a
man. But there was never a word more slurring Hortense's unknown
origin and Jack's strange wrist marks.
[1] Young Stanhope's informant had evidently mixed tradition with fact.
Radisson was fined for going overland to Hudson Bay without the
governor's permission, the fine to build a fort at Three Rivers. Eli
Kirke's kinswoman was a daughter of Sir John Kirke, of the Hudson's
Bay Fur Company.--Author.
CHAPTER II
I RESCUE AND AM RESCUED
So the happy childhood days sped on, a swift stream past flowered
banks. Ben went off to sail the north sea in Captain Gillam's ship. M.
Picot, the French doctor, brought a governess from Paris for Hortense,
so that we saw little of our playmate, and Jack Battle continued to live
like a hunted rat at the docks.
My uncle and Rebecca's father, who were beginning to dabble in the
fur trade, had jointly hired a peripatetic dominie to give us youngsters
lessons in Bible history and the three R's. At noon hour I initiated
Rebecca into all the thrilling dangers of Indian warfare, and many a
time have we had wild escapes from imaginary savages by scaling a
rope ladder of my own making up to the high nursery window.
By-and-bye, when school was in and the dominie dozed, I would lower
that timid little whiffet of a Puritan maid out through the window to the
turnstile. Then I would ride her round till our heads whirled. If Jack

Battle came along, Rebecca would jump down primly and run in, for
Jack was unknown in the meeting-house, and the meeting-house was
Rebecca's measure of the whole world.
One day Jack lingered. He was carrying something tenderly in a red
cambric handkerchief.
"Where is Mistress Hortense?" he asked sheepishly.
"That silly French woman keeps her caged like a squirrel."
Little Jack began tittering and giggling.
"Why--that's what I have here," he explained, slipping a bundle of soft
fur in my hand.
"It's tame! It's for Hortense," said he.
"Why don't you take it to her, Jack?"
"Take it to her?" reiterated he in a daze. "As long as she gets it, what
does it matter who takes it?"
With that, he was off across the marshy commons, leaving the squirrel
in my hand.
Forgetting lessons, I ran to M. Picot's house. That governess answered
the knocker.
"From Jack Battle to Mistress Hortense!"
And I proffered the squirrel.
Though she smirked a world of thanks,