“That’s a noble story,” he said. “I didn’t suppose this new land had any legends. It all gives me the impression of being just old enough to be big.”
“Isn’t that the conceit of the Anglo-Saxon? He calls this a new land because he’s lived here only about a half-century. Things did happen before you were born, my dear boy,” said Dick.
“Indeed! What things?” Norris asked placidly.
“Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old coureurs du bois who used to stumble through these woods when they were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux.” Dick threw a pebble at Norris’ face. “Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead men rotting in its mire. I don’t wonder they thought the rough life more fascinating than kings and courts. I’d like to have seen sun-dances and maiden-tests; I’d like to have eaten food strange enough to be picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts. It’s as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers, half-tramp, half-martyr,—they were great old fellows.”
“And the Frenchman—where is he?” said Madeline. “Gone, and left a few names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people, fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It’s a thrilling story.”
“You love it all and its legends, don’t you?” Ellery looked from one to the other.
“Don’t you?” Madeline asked.
“By Jove, I do!” he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred with genuine feeling. “I love it without its legends. It does not seem to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future, too.”
“Do you know what’s happened to you?” Dick laughed exultantly. “Gitche Manito the Mighty has got you—the spirit of the West—which, being interpreted, is Ozone.”
“Something has got me, I admit,” Norris cried. “What is it? What is it that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before in all my life.”