Then the family, except John Conrad, were asleep; as Conrad lifted the curtain of skins which hung across the door, his father rose from beside the dying fire and led him outside. In the starlight he walked up and down with his hand on his boy's shoulder.
"Conrad, I have an offer to set before you. I have kept you with me, both because I could not find any opening for you and because I could not bear to let you go. This Indian Quagnant has asked me to let you go with him to his village, there 'to learn to be a man,' as he puts it. He means that they will teach you how to hunt and trap and how to make a home in the wilderness. Would you like to enter on this strange apprenticeship?"
Conrad's full heart breathed a great sigh.
"You cannot come back until spring. The training in Indian ways may be very irksome."
For an hour father and son talked, entering once more upon the future with a tender recalling of the past. Then they went to bed.
In the misty morning Conrad started away, a little bundle on his back. He kissed the sleeping Barbara, he put both arms about his father's neck, then he followed the tall Indian who walked before him, silent, mysterious, his tall figure dim in the fog.
They crossed the wet meadow and walked for an hour by the stream-side, then Quagnant turned into the forest. They ascended a rocky hill, they followed a narrow valley, they climbed another hill. When the sun was high in the sky, they ate a lunch of corn bread and dried fish from Quagnant's pack. Then, already footsore and stiff, Conrad followed doggedly the long stride which led farther and farther into the wilderness.
At nightfall the travelers camped in the shelter of a huge boulder. Quagnant made a fire by rubbing two sticks together; then he spread the embers about and started other fires close to the face of the rock. When they had burned themselves out, he bade Conrad lie down on the warmed ground. Faintly aware that Quagnant went on with some other device for making him comfortable, Conrad slept.
In the morning he found that he lay in a tent formed by the boughs of evergreens and that he was still comfortably warm. Quagnant had shot a bird which he was roasting over the fire. When it was eaten and the fire was tramped out, Quagnant shouldered his pack. He looked up at the sky, shook his head, and started briskly away.