Montell himself became very friendly toward me. Bit by bit he drew from me the story of my wanderings, and shook his head over it, assuring me that Missouri river sternwheel men were a hard lot. Once he became reminiscent and spoke of his dead wife and her people with a poorly concealed pride in the alliance. His palpable satisfaction amused me. It seemed odd that a man of his rugged type, a hard-headed business buccaneer, should have that fatuous overestimation of wealth and so-called “blood.” But he had it to the n’th degree. I dare say it was his one weak spot. She was a Charbonne, of the old New Orleans Charbonnes, originally a Hugenot family, but for the last generation or two of St. Louis, he told me; and in the telling he shed his natural carelessness of speech, and spoke in the stilted, exactly-phrased English in which he might have addressed the aristocratic parent of his bride. I knew more or less of the St. Louis Charbonnes myself, and I wondered that I had never heard of Montell or his daughter. Barreau smiled when I spoke of this later.
“That’s Montell all over,” he drawled. “Marrying a Charbonne stands out as one of the big things he has accomplished. He can’t help boasting of it now and then. I imagine that if he were dying in a snowbank that thought would cheer him in his last hour. He regards it as a distinct achievement. He was a big, perfectly-formed, good-looking brute when he met her, and from all I know it was a case of two strong natures brushing aside all obstacles. I’ve heard that the Charbonnes were furious over what they considered the rankest sort of mesalliance—but they were married, and so far as I know she never discovered his very obvious clay feet. She died in child-birth—the second child. The family has kept up a desultory intercourse with him for the girl’s sake. They recognize her as their own blood, and tolerate him on that account.”
A day or two after this Barreau rigged up a dog-team and left the post, bound for a point down the river, where they had established two Frenchmen with some trading goods, on the chance of getting into touch with some few lodges that hunted in that territory. He took one man, and I tramped a few miles with them, for the sake of the snowshoe practice of which I was sadly in need. It looked easy to go stalking over the drifts on those webbed ovals, but it was trying work for a novice I discovered at my first attempt. There was a certain free, swinging stride, which I had yet to master. So it happened that I did not return to the post until that chill hour between sundown and dark.
I was aware that the fire in our cabin was long dead, and the room corresponding in temperature to an ice-box, but I was in no mood for the ultra-friendly conversation Montell had been favoring me with of late. For which reason I eschewed the blaze that I knew was crackling on the store hearth and made straight for my own quarters.
The day’s work was at an end. Besides myself not a soul moved within the frosty area of the stockade. The doors of every building were shut tight against the sharp-toothed cold. This I noted almost mechanically. I was beginning to develop the woodsman’s faculty of observing detail, without conscious purpose. With my mind busy about the prospect of getting a fire started in the shortest possible space of time my gaze for a moment rested on the Montell cabin, as I stopped at my own door. At that instant Jessie Montell stepped outside, a shawl thrown over her head, carrying in one hand some object covered with a white cloth.
The dogs must have been lying at the end of the cabin. The slam of the door had barely sounded when she was confronted by one wolf-like brute. He faced her boldly, his nose pointed inquisitively toward the thing she carried. She made a threatening gesture and spoke sharply to him, whereat the husky retreated a foot or two—and was instantly reinforced by half a dozen of his fellows. The girl lifted her hand a little higher and berated them, her clear voice reproaching them for their lack of manners. And then of a sudden one cock-eared brute sprang at the thing she carried. He missed, and one of the others had a try. She gave ground, holding above her head what I now saw was a plate; and immediately the snarling pack was snapping at her skirts and she was cut off from the door. I could hear the click of their white fangs as I ran. She backed against the wall, scolding them in a voice that betrayed some alarm.
I reached her on the double-quick, when I saw that the dogs meant mischief. The short-tempered devils turned on me in a body with the first blow I struck. One after the other I knocked galley-west and crooked with the barrel of my rifle, and shortly emerged victorious from the melee, but with my leggings ripped in divers places and the left sleeve of my parka slit as if with a knife. From this last the blood streamed forth merrily, flowing down over my mitten and dripping redly on the trampled snow. Prior to that my experience of vicious dogs had been with those which grabbed and held on. The slashing wolfish snap of the husky was new to me. I stood looking at my gashed arm in some astonishment.
“Why, they’ve bitten you,” the girl exclaimed, with a sharp intake of her breath. “Let me see?”
She spread apart the opening in my buckskin sleeve and frowned at sight of the torn flesh, meanwhile balancing on her other hand the plate of meat that had caused the onslaught. Most women, I found time to reflect, would have dropped it at the first intention, but she had clung to it as a miser clings to his gold.
“Come in and let me tie that up,” she commanded peremptorily, and flung open the door, giving me little chance to debate whether I would or no. And I followed her in, as much through a sudden desire to see a little more of this very capable and impulsive young lady, as to have the sharp sting of the wound allayed.