The men drew a long sigh of relief now that the task was quite finished.
"It is very good of you to take so much trouble for me," replied Lafond, for the sake of politeness.
"I like you," explained the old man simply, "because you speak French and because there is something in your face that shows that you too have been wronged, and that perhaps, like myself, in your youth you have been light-hearted and were loved by maid and man with the love that is given the reckless--and foolish," he concluded with a little bitterness.
Inexplicably this appealed to Lafond, so that he almost wept with the sheer joy of it.
"It is true, and you are my brother to have seen it thus," he cried, lapsing unconsciously into the idiom of the Sioux.
They washed their hands and went into the other cabin, where they sat in the chairs made of barrels, and Lafond talked, talked, talked, until the dusk of twilight descended upon them and stole away even the white butterfly cases.
He spoke swiftly and animatedly and with much gesticulation. Men will tell you to-day that his speech was deliberate, scant, reserved.
It was all of his youth. He described with abandon and fire the tall pines, the still darkling river running beneath the cedars and birches; the cabins, antler crowned, and the little gardens of their dooryard. He related tenderly the life of those old days--the dance in winter to the music of a single fiddle, and the snow shoe journey homeward under the white stars, with mayhap a kiss upon a rosy cheek and a slap from a mittened hand at the end of it; the wild exhilarating dangers of log running in the spring; the canoe journey, the camping, the fishing, through all that watered north country of the fir-girdled lakes and trout-haunted streams in summer; the calling of the moose under the round harvest moon, the stalking of the white-tailed deer, the corn frolics whereat were more of the full-blossomed low-voiced chatterers not unwilling to be wooed under that same great moon, through whose shower of silver light the bull moose called to his mate, also not unwilling. These things the half-breed told in that marvellous musical voice which, with his expressive eyes, was now his greatest charm. He told also more personally of his own youth. There had been a time when Michaïl Lafond had been straight and clear-eyed and handsome. At the dances and the corn frolics the fairest of the maidens was not so very coy to him. In the log running Michaïl Lafond was the man always called upon to skim over the bobbing logs under the very imminence of the jam; his was the peavy that moved the bit of timber which locked the whole; his the merry laugh as he had lightly escaped the plunging foaming death. On and still on the voice rolled, until suddenly the room was silent and dark, and the man in the corner had arisen abruptly and gone out, and the white-haired naturalist was left alone, one hand on each arm of his chair, looking straight before him, beyond the cabin walls, beyond the years.