The Daredevil | Page 3

Henri of America?" he had made a muttering question to my father as his old eyes smouldered over me in the fire-light.
From the memory of the smoking room at the Chateau de Grez my mind suddenly returned to the rail of the ship and the Frenchman beside me, who was looking into my face with the same kindly question as to my future that had been in the eyes of my old godfather and which had stirred my father's heart to its American depths and made him send me back to his own country.
"Ah, yes, that courage is a good weapon with which to adventure in this America of the Grizzled Bear, Mademoiselle," I found the strange man saying to me with a nice amusement as well as interest.
"My father had shot seven grizzlies before his twenty-first birthday. We have the skins, four of them, in the great hall of the Chateau de Grez--or--or we did have them before--before--" My voice faltered and I could not continue speaking for the tears that rose in my throat and eyes.
Quickly the man at my side turned his broad shoulders so that he should shield me from the laughing and exclaiming groups of people upon the deck near us.
"Before Ypres, Mademoiselle?" he asked with tears also in the depths of his voice.
"Yes," I answered. "And I am now going into the great America with my crippled brother and his nurse--alone. It is the land of my father and I have his courage--I must have also that of a French woman. I have it, Monsieur," and as I spoke I drew myself to my full, broad-shouldered height, which was almost equal to that of the man beside me.
"Mademoiselle, I salute the courage born of an American who fought before the guns of the Marne and of a French woman who sent him there!" And as he spoke thus he removed from his head his silk deck cap and held it at his shoulder in a way that I knew was a salute from a French officer to the memory of a brother. "And also may I be permitted to present myself, as it is a sad necessity that you travel without one from whom I might request the introduction?" he asked of me with a beautiful reverence.
After a search in his pocket for a few seconds he at last discovered a case of leather and presented to me a card. As he handed it to me his color rose up under his black eyes and grave trouble looked from between their long black lashes. I glanced down at the card and read:
Capitaine, le Count Armond de Lasselles, Paris, France. 44th Chasseurs de le Republique Francaise.
"Monsieur le Count, I know, I know why it is that you go to America!" I made exclamation as I clasped to my breast my hands and my eyes shone with excitement. "I have read it in Le Matin just the day before yesterday. You go to buy grain against the winter of starvation in the Republique. No man is so great a financier as you and so brave a soldier, with your wound not healed from the trenches in the Vosges. Monsieur, I salute you!" and I bent my head and held out my hand to him.
"We're to expect nimble wits as well as courage of you young--shall I say American women?" he laughed as he bent over my hand. "Now shall I not be led for introduction to the small brother and the old nurse?" he asked with much friendly interest in his kind eyes.
It was a very wonderful thing to observe the wee Pierre listen to the narration of Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, concerning the actions of a small boy who had run out of a night of shot and shell into the heart of his regiment and who had now lived five months in the trenches with them. Pierre's small face is all of France and in his heart under his bent chest burns a soul all of France. It is as if in her death, at his birth, my beautiful mother had stamped her race upon him with the greater emphasis.
"Is it that the small Gaston is a daredevil like is my Bob?" he questioned as we all made a laughter at the story of the Count de Lasselles concerning the sortie of the small idol from the trenches in the dead of one peaceful night to return with a very wide thick flannel shirt of one of the Boches, which he had caught hanging upon a temporary laundry line back of the German trenches.
At that English "daredevil" word I was in my mind again back in the old Chateau de Grez and into my own childhood.
"You young daredevil, you, hold tight to that