The Cursed Patois | Page 3

lumbering a week down by St.
Ignace. No use to work more than two days a week," he explained,
jocosely. "That gives us enough to live on; and everybody around here
owes us from fifty to a hundred dollars back pay for work, anyhow. I've
bought this ground, twenty acres of it, and another year I'm going to
turn it into a garden."
"Oh, a garden, M'sieu' Brownee! Me, I love some garden! I plant
honion once, salade also."
"But I want to get my fences built before I put in improvements. You
know what the silver rule is, don't you?"
"No, m'sieu'," answered Françoise, vaguely. She knew little of any rule.

"The silver rule is different from the golden rule. It's 'Do your
neighbors, or your neighbors will do you.' If I don't protect myself, all
the loose cattle around Brevoort will graze over me. Every fellow for
himself. We can't keep the golden rule. We'd never get rich if we did."
"You are rich mans?" interrogated Françoise, focussing her curiosity on
that invisible power of wealth.
"Millionaires," brazenly claimed the young man, as he put an
earthen-ware pitcher on the table. "Set there, you thousand-dollar dish!
We don't have a yacht on the lake because we prefer small boats, and
we go out as guides to have fun with the greenhorns. The cooking at
the hotels is good enough for common hunters and fishermen who
come here from the cities to spend their money, but it isn't good enough
for me. You've come to the right place, you may make your mind easy
on that."
Françoise smiled because he told her to make her mind easy, not
because she understood the irony of his poverty. To have secure shelter,
and such a table as he spread, and the prowess to achieve continual
abundant sustenance from the world, made wealth in her eyes. She was
as happy as Gougou when this strange family, gathered from three or
four nations, sat down to their first meal.
The sun went low like a scarlet eggy probing the mother-of-pearl lake
with a long red line of shadow, until it wasted into grayness and so
disappeared. Then home-returning sails became spiritualized, and
moved in mist as in a dream--foggy lake and sky, as one body, seeming
to push in upon the land.
Françoise slept the sleep of a healthy woman, with her child on her arm,
until at dawn the closed flap of the tent yielded to a bounding shape.
She opened her startled eyes to see Jim the blood-hound at the foot of
the bed, jerking the mosquito-netting. He growled at the interlopers, not
being able in his canine mind to reconcile their presence with his
customary duty of waking his masters in that tent. A call and a whistle
at the other side of the camp drew him away doubting. But in a day
both he and Jess had adopted the new members of the family and

walked at Gougou's heels.
Gougou existed in wonderland. He regarded the men as great and
amiable powers, who could do what they pleased with the elements and
with the creatures of the earth. They had a fawn, which had followed
Brown home along the beach, feeding on leaves from his hand. They
had built it a sylvan home of cedar boughs behind the camp, from
which it wandered at will. And though at first shy of Gougou, the pretty
thing was soon induced to stand upon its hind feet and dance for bits of
cake. His Indian blood vearned towards the fawn; but Me-thuselah, the
mighty turtle, was more exciting. Methuselah lived a prisoner in one
side of the bait-tank, from which he was lifted by a rope around his tail.
He was so enormous that it required both Brown and Puttany to carry
him up the bank, and as he hung from the pole the sudden projection of
his snapping head was a danger. When he fastened his teeth into a stick,
the stick was hopelessly his as long as he chose to keep it. He was like
an elephant cased in mottled shell, and the serrated ridge on his tail
resembled a row of huge brown teeth. Methuselah was a
many-wrinkled turtle. When he contracted, imbedding head in
shoulders and legs in body, revealing all his claws and showing wicked
little eyes near the point of his nose, his helpless rage stirred all the
Indian; he was the most deliciously devilish thing that Gougou had ever
seen.
Then there was the joy of wintergreen, which both men brought to the
child, and he learned to forage for it himself. The fleshy dark green
leaves and red berries clustered thickly in the woods. He and his mother
went in the boat when the day was