The Maid of the Whispering Hills | Page 7

rode up the hope that was ever in her.
"Yes," sighed Marie, "as the good God wills."
But she glanced wistfully around the new cabin, to be her own for the
length of the four seasons. And who should say what might not happen
in four seasons?
She wondered fretfully what fate had fashioned the glorious creature

beside her in the form of Love itself to put within the soul of the
restless conqueror. Never had she known Maren, though they two had
come from the same lap.
Presently Maren looked down at her, and the shimmering smile, like
light across dark waters, had again returned.
"Nay," she said gently, "fret not. It is spring-and you have at last a
home."
True, it was spring.
Did not each breath of the south wind tell it, each flute-like call from
the budding forest without the post, each burst of song from some
hot-blooded youth with his red cap perched on the back of his head, his
gay sash knotted jauntily?
It stirred the heart in the breast of Maren Le Moyne, but not with the
thought of love. It called to her as she stood at night alone under the
stars, with her head lifted as if to drink the keen, sweet darkness; called
to her from far-distant plains of blowing grass, virgin of man's foot;
from rushing rivers, bare of canoe and raft; from high hills, smiling,
sweet and fair, up to the cloudless sky--and always it called from the
West.
Spring was here and cast its largess at her feet,--fate held back her
eager hand.
A year she must wait, a year in which to win those necessaries of the
long trail, without which all would fail.
Travel, even by so primitive a method as canoe and foot, must demand
its toll of salvage.
At Rainy Lake they had been held by thieving Indians and a great part
of their provisions taken from them, leaving them to make their way in
comparative poverty to the next post of De Seviere.
Further progress that year was impossible. Therefore, the contract of
the trappers with the factor.
And Maren Le Moyne--venturer of the venturers, flame of fire among
them, urger, inspirer, and moral leader, a living pillar before them in
her eagerness--must needs curb her soul in bonds of patience and wait
at Fort de Seviere for another spring.
Close beside her in her visions and her high hope, her courage and her
eagerness, stood that leader of the little band, Prix Laroux. Fed by her
fire, touched by her enthusiasm, the man was the mouth piece for the

woman's force, the masculine expression of that undying hope of
conquest which had drawn the small party together and set it forth on
the perilous venture of pushing toward the unknown West to find for
itself an ideal holding.
Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood to
tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs and
trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the peace-
pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of woman
she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father, grimy
from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and watch
the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her hands for
that she was not born a man.
And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which slept
unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way of life
runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.
Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the head
of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.
Why not? She had asked herself in the starlit nights of those years, why
not? All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place
of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap
and stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through
the stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River
each season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams
where the call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him,--how
long none might know. And at last he had heeded, laid down the staid,
the sane, and followed the will-o'-the-wisp of