It was the Lajimonières who gave the two boys the warmest welcome and made the Swiss lad forget his homesickness. They were old friends of the Brabant family, and Louis called Madame Lajimonière “marraine.” She had acted as his godmother when Père Provencher baptized him. Indeed she was godmother to so many of the Canadian children at St. Boniface and Pembina that the younger members of the two settlements seldom called her by any other name. There was no Indian blood in Marie Lajimonière, and she had lived in the valley of the Red River longer than any other white woman. Several years before the first band of Selkirk settlers had reached the forks of the Assiniboine and the Red, she had come with her husband to the Red River country from Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. When, in 1818, the Roman Catholic missionaries, Father Provencher and Father Dumoulin, had arrived in the Selkirk Colony, Madame Lajimonière had received them with warmth and enthusiasm. She was a devout member of their church, and she gladly stood sponsor for the Canadian and bois brulé children brought to the priests for baptism. Louis had a warm affection for his marraine, and Walter took an immediate liking to her and her family.
One of the Lajimonière children was a girl of about Elise Perier’s age, a slender, black-haired, red-cheeked girl named Reine. When Reine, somewhat shyly, questioned the Swiss boy about his long journey from Fort York, he told her of Elise and Max and Mr. Perier, and how anxious he was about their welfare.
“Oh, we will all help to make them comfortable and happy when they come to Pembina,” Reine eagerly assured him. “It will be delightful to have a new girl, just my age, who speaks French. The Scotch girls are so hard to talk to, when you don’t know their language or they yours. I shall like your sister I know, and I hope she will like me.”
At Louis’ urging, Jean Baptiste Lajimonière told Walter of the greatest adventure of his adventurous life. In the winter of 1815 and ’16 he had gone alone from Red River to Montreal. He carried letters to Lord Selkirk,—who had come over from England,—telling how the Northwesters had driven away his colonists. All alone, the plucky voyageur faced the perils and hardships of the long wilderness journey. He came through safely, to give the letters into Lord Selkirk’s own hands and relate to his own ears the story of the settlers’ troubles. Lajimonière told his tale well, and the boy forgot his own perplexities as he listened. Not until the story was finished did Walter realize how late the hour was, long past time to seek his blanket. Madame Lajimonière and the children had already disappeared under their buffalo skin shelter, Louis had stolen quietly away, and the whole camp was wrapped in silence.
Walter thanked the guide, said good night, and hurried back to his own camping place. The horses and cattle had been brought within the circle and picketed or tied to cart wheels. The settlers were taking no chance of Indian horse thieves making away with their beasts. Everyone in the camp, except the guards stationed outside the barricade, was sleeping, and the fires were burning low. The night was dark, without moon or stars. How lonely and insignificant was this little circle of carts, with the prairie stretching around it and the vast arch of the sky overhead! The flickering light of the fires, only partly revealing picketed beasts, clumsy carts, and rude shelters, seemed merely to intensify the darkness, the vastness, the loneliness beyond.
Not a wild animal, except a few gophers, had been seen all day; the cart train was too noisy. But now the wind that swept the prairie brought a chorus of voices, the high-pitched barking of the small prairie wolves, and the long-drawn howling of the big, gray timber ones. The dogs answered, until their masters, waking, belabored them into silence. The camps along the rivers and the shores of Lake Winnipeg had seemed remote enough from civilization, but not one had impressed the mountain-bred lad with such an overwhelming sense of loneliness as did this circle of carts on the prairie.
He found Louis already asleep, and crawled in beside him. There he lay, listening to the wolves and, when their howlings ceased for a time, to the faint and far-away cries of a flock of migrating birds passing high overhead. Then he drifted away into sleep.
The approach of dawn was beginning to gray the blackness in the east when every dog in the camp suddenly began to growl. The horses grew restive, neighing and moving about. Startled wide awake, Walter, thrilling at the thought of a Sioux attack, asked his comrade what the matter was. Louis did not know. He had thrown aside his blanket and was crawling out from under the cart. As Walter followed, he heard the guide calling to the watchers beyond the barricade. The guards replied that all was quiet on the prairie. They could see nothing wrong, discern no moving form.
For a few minutes everyone in the camp was awake, anxious, excited, but nothing happened, no war whoop came out of the darkness. The dogs ceased growling, the ponies neighing, and soon all was silence again. What had caused the alarm, whether prowling wild beast or skulking man, or the mere restlessness of some sleepless dog or nervous horse, no one could tell.
The camp was astir before the sun was up, and the first task was to water the horses and cattle. Louis remained behind to get breakfast while Walter rode the pony to the river.