Marc looked at him reflectively. “Is it worth while?” he asked. “Life is short at best. We are forgotten there; we may as well not stir up dead embers from which no fire can again be kindled. Who lives now that would care? I advise you to remain and live out the life you have begun here; it is a good life.”
“If I live, I will go back, but first I wish to know that Victor Le Roux no longer lives. I wish first to kill him.”
“And return with the stain upon your hands of which they were clean when you left?” Marc continued.
Antoine fell back upon his uncouth bed. “One does not expect moralizing from you, Marc Lenoir,” he said.
Marc smiled. “No, I profess nothing. I am become a coureur de bois; I do not belie my character. I do not pretend to be anything else than a lawless runner of the woods, a man who cares for neither God, man, nor the devil. I have no wish to vaunt a claim to respectability, even, grant you, a right to do so is accorded me. I escaped the country after a charge of robbery, a political robbery at that.” He laughed. “As if that were an uncommon thing. Ma foi! if every political robber were transported to the colonies, what an immense increase there would be in the population! I never wronged a man in my life, unless the sending of a half-dozen Iroquois to the Happy Hunting-Grounds be considered a wrong to them. I do not go now to France for justice; I work it out for myself here, and I say that Victor Le Roux must die. I constitute myself judge, and I shall not find it hard to discover the executioner.” He turned and left the room, closing the door very gently.
It was days before he returned, and then it was to find that for Father Bisset had been made a grave in a sheltered spot in the forest, and that by his side lay Antoine Crepin, who never again saw France, but who hugged to himself the promise of his return even up to the last moment. “We will go in the spring, Jeanne,” he said over and over. “In the spring, when I am well and strong, and the leaves are coming out. We will take the child to Manhatte, and will sail from there.” But it was to an eternal spring that he went home.
In these years Jeanne Crepin, always cheerful, humorous, vivacious, had enlarged these qualities by adding a devil-may-care manner. Spontaneously free and easy by nature, she had found no curb necessary in this life of unrestrained wildness, and it suited her. Her husband’s bitterness of spirit caused him to grow taciturn and grim, making him look a much older man than he was, and, to offset this, Jeanne, at first in desperation, and later in natural response to her limitless environment, was always ready with jest, with smile, with song. The coquetries of her girlhood were exchanged for a certain audacity which stood her in good stead with the rough voyageurs, who were about her only friends, unless one excepted the Indian squaws and their braves. Deeply as she loved her brother and her husband, and faithfully as she mourned them, hers was not a nature to brood, and she simply checked off her grief as one more wrong to lay to the charge of France, and accounted it no treachery to say that she abjured her country.
“For me what has France done? Sent us here, Antoine and I. Not so bad, you say? No, but one suffers before one gets used to it, and now Jacques lies there in the forest. God knows I am thankful he had not more to endure, yet, for all that, I lay his death to the charge of those who haled him out of his quiet corner. And Antoine, was he not hounded and pursued by vindictive wretches who took on hearsay his guilt when he was innocent? Do I forgive France the bitterness of his life, the putting out of the light of his youth? No, long ago Antoine and I decided that we owed France nothing.”
She was talking to Petit Marc, who had stopped to tell her the news from the settlements and to ask how the boy fared. He had just returned from a long journey. What he had accomplished he did not tell, save that Victor Le Roux had come to his end at the hands of two Indians. “He deserved what he got,” Marc said, laconically, and Jeanne did not question further.
“The boy?” Jeanne in her half-mannish attire stood in the doorway of her lodge; she looked quizzically at Petit Marc. “The boy is well enough.” She laughed softly. “I shall keep him here till the snows are gone.”