“As fine a lad as you will find anywhere, Monsieur,” Hugh answered promptly. “When I first received his letter, I was prejudiced against him, I admit.” He flushed and hesitated.
Dubois nodded understandingly. “But now?” he questioned.
“Now I love him as if he were my whole brother,” Hugh said warmly. “We went through much together, he saved me from a horrible fate, and I learned to know him well. A finer, truer-hearted fellow than Blaise never existed.”
Again Dubois nodded, apparently well satisfied. “And his mother?”
“I was surprised at his mother,” Hugh replied with equal frankness. “She is Indian, of course, but without doubt a superior sort of Indian. For one thing she was clean and neatly dressed. She is very good-looking too, her voice is sweet, her manner quiet, and she certainly treated me kindly. She loves Blaise dearly, and,—I think—she really loved my father.”
Once more Monsieur Dubois nodded, a light of pleasure in his dark eyes. “I asked,” he said abruptly, “because, you see, she is my daughter.”
“Your daughter? But she is an Indian!”
“Only half Indian, but no wonder you are surprised. I will explain.”
Monsieur Dubois then told the wondering boy how, about thirty-eight years before, when he was still a young man, he had taken to the woods. It was in the period between the conquest of Canada by the English and the outbreak of the American Revolution, long before the formation of the Northwest Fur Company, when the fur traders in the Upper Lakes region were practically all French Canadians and free lances, each doing business for himself. In due time, René Dubois, like most of the others, had married an Indian girl. A daughter was born to them, a pretty baby who had found a very warm spot in the heart of her adventurous father. Before she was two years old, however, he lost her. He had left his wife and child at an Indian village near the south shore of Lake Superior, while he went on one of his trading trips. On his return he found the place deserted, the signs plain that it had been raided by some unfriendly band. There was no law in the Indian country, and in that period, shortly after the so-called French and Indian War, when the Algonquin Indians had sided with the French and the Iroquoian with the English, conditions were more than usually unstable. For years Dubois tried to trace his wife and daughter or learn their fate, but never succeeded.
“And now,” he concluded, his voice again trembling with feeling, “you bring me proof that my daughter still lives, that she was the wife of my friend, and that in his son and hers I have a grandson and an heir.” Monsieur Dubois took up the gold coin and handed it to Hugh. One face had been filed smooth and on it, cut with some crude tool, were the outlines of a coat-of-arms. “I did that myself,” Dubois explained. “It is the arms of my family. When the child was born, I made that and hung it about her neck on a sinew cord.”