NANON’S LOVERS.
MARRIAGEABLE women were at a premium in the colony. Nanon in her comeliness, activity, and audacity had since her arrival in New France attracted many lovers. Most of these followed her for a while, then, discouraged by her disdain, fell away from their allegiance and married some meeker damsel. The two who had remained most persistently faithful to her charms, patiently enduring her tempers and caprices year after year, were Jean the valet and Baptiste Leroux, familiarly known as Bras de Fer.
Baptiste was an enormous man, over six feet two in height, and stout in proportion. His round face expressed an exaggeration of simplicity. His beard was black, but the long hair he wore floating on his shoulders was a warm auburn. His eyes, which were nearly always half closed, gave him the appearance of stupidity; but when moved by any unusual emotion they opened wide, their keen brightness changing the whole character of his countenance. The extreme slowness of his movements imparted an air of apathetic indolence to the massive frame. He wore a striped blue shirt and grey trousers, with a red sash knotted around his waist, its fringed ends hanging down on the left side. On his head, winter and summer, was a beaver cap. His feet were protected by Indian boots, the upper part, of sheepskin, drawn up over the trousers, and fastened under the knee by narrow strips of sealskin. The sleeves of his jacket were turned up at the elbows, displaying a pair of huge muscular arms tattooed curiously. Malicious people sometimes insinuated that all the good fellow’s force lay in his physical powers, and that his intellectual faculties were not of the brightest.
The eldest of a family of nineteen children born to a poor colonist, Baptiste had been obliged from early childhood to make his way through the world as best he could. When still a very young lad he had entered Le Ber’s service, where later he had shared the games and escapades of du Chesne and his cousins, the young le Moynes, teaching the boys the secrets of woodcraft and the delights of forest life. Afterwards he became a noted coureur de bois, wandering at will through the trackless woods of Canada, the great North-West and Louisiana, camping, hunting, fishing, fighting, everywhere renowned among white men and Indians for his unerring skill as a marksman and his extraordinary strength and courage. When severe laws were enacted against the bushrangers, prohibiting that lawless, delightful freedom of the wilderness to which his heart ever clung, Leroux again took service with the Le Ber family, for whom he felt an unswerving devotion. Among the colonists many marvellous tales concerning Bras de Fer’s adventures were told. Even allowing for the exaggeration of national pride, it must be admitted that many of these stories had a substantial foundation in fact.
Once it happened that on the shores of Lake Champlain Baptiste and a younger brother were taken prisoners by the Iroquois. The Indians, in triumph at having secured so redoubtable an adversary, fastened their captives to two oaken stakes planted firmly in the ground. Fancying that Bras de Fer, who was much the stronger of the two, would endure torture the longer, they selected the brother as their first victim. A savage heated his hatchet red hot and applied it to the boy’s naked breast. Baptiste, resigned to his fate, had prepared to chant his death-song with a stoicism borrowed from his Iroquois foes, but the sight of his brother’s torture roused him to superhuman effort.
“Forty thousand tribes of demons!” he shouted, bending himself double, and by a supreme effort bursting the bonds that held him; then tearing the stake out of the earth, with it he struck down four of the Iroquois in quick succession. The assault was so unexpected, and his attitude so terrifying, that the remainder of the party, believing in their consternation that they were attacked by a species of avenging Manitou, swiftly fled, leaving Baptiste and his brother to make their way home undisturbed.
All Bras de Fer’s brave exploits, his renown, or the friendly consideration with which his employers treated him, seemed unavailing to give him advantage over his voluble rival. Baptiste was far too modest to boast of his own merits, and Jean was only too ready to vaunt imaginary virtues which he liberally attributed to himself. Nanon accepted the homage of both in a sharp, imperious, scornful way, never directly favoring either. Through all Baptiste endured the most hopeless jealousy of Jean’s fluent, deceiving tongue.
“Aye,” Jean declared easily and lightly, “It is the taste of Nanon, as of all women, to coquette. It is their privilege, and I for one would not deny it to them.”
His charmer was never without a ready retort.
“Aye, as it is the wont of all men to be fools and heartless apes, to run to death after any proud turkey, and never to perceive those of real worth.”