“And Blaise’s mother still had it?” exclaimed Hugh.
“No, she had lost it, but your father recovered it. Read the letter yourself.” He handed Hugh the bark sheets.
It was an amazing letter. Jean Beaupré merely mentioned how he had found the Indian girl a captive among the Sioux, had bought her, taken her away and married her. No doubt he had told all this to Dubois before. Beaupré had not had the slightest suspicion that his wife was other than she believed herself to be, a full-blooded Ojibwa. She had been brought up by an Ojibwa couple, but in a Sioux raid her supposed father and mother had been killed and she had been captured. Nearly two years before the writing of the letter, Beaupré had happened to receive a gold coin for some service rendered an official of the Northwest Company. His wife had examined the coin with interest, and had said that she herself had once had one nearly like it, the same on one side, she said, but different on the other. She had always worn it on a cord around her neck, but when she was captured, a Sioux squaw had taken it from her. At first Beaupré thought that the thing she had possessed had been one of the little medals sometimes given by a priest to a baptized child, but she had insisted that one side of her medal had been like the coin. Then he remembered that his old comrade Dubois had told of the coin, bearing his coat-of-arms, worn by his baby daughter. Jean Beaupré said nothing of his suspicions to his wife, but he resolved to find out, if he could, whether she was really the daughter of René Dubois. On this quest, he twice visited the Sioux country west of the Mississippi. The autumn before the opening of this story, he learned of the whereabouts of the very band that had held his wife a captive. After sending, by an Indian messenger, a letter to Hugh at the Sault, asking the boy to wait there until his father joined him in the spring, Beaupré left at once for the interior. He was fortunate enough to find the Sioux band and the chief from whom he had bought the captive more than fifteen years before. The chief, judiciously bribed and threatened, had sought for the medal and had found it in the possession of a young girl who said her mother had given it to her. When Beaupré questioned the old squaw, she admitted that she had taken the coin from the neck of an Ojibwa captive years before. How the Ojibwa couple who had brought the girl up had come by her, Beaupré was unable to find out, but he had no doubt that she was really the daughter of René Dubois. He resolved to send the proof of his wife’s parentage to Montreal by his elder son, if Hugh had really come to the Sault and had waited there. If Hugh was not there, the elder Beaupré would go to the city himself. It was plain that he had not received either of the letters Hugh had sent after him, nor had Hugh ever got the one his father had written him. Fearing that if any accident should happen to him, the coin and the story might never reach his old comrade, Beaupré had written down the tale and prepared the packet. Even in his dying condition he remembered it and told Blaise to go get it. Evidently, when he discovered he was in danger of falling into Ohrante’s hands, he had feared to keep the packet with him, so had hidden it with the furs. If he escaped the giant, he could return for both furs and packet, but if the coin came into Ohrante’s possession it would be lost forever. The letter, however, said nothing of all that. It had undoubtedly been written before Beaupré set out on his home journey.
With deep emotion Hugh deciphered the fine, faint writing on the bark sheets. He was glad from the bottom of his heart that he and Blaise had been able to recover the packet and deliver it to the man to whom it meant so much. If Hugh had had any dreams of some strange fortune coming to himself through the packet, he forgot them when Monsieur Dubois began to speak again.
“I shall go to the Kaministikwia at once, if I can find means of reaching there this autumn. At least I shall go as far as I can and finish the journey in the spring. Wherever my daughter and my grandson are, I will seek them out. I have no other heirs and Blaise, my grandson, shall take the place of a son. I will bring them back to Montreal, or, if that does not seem best, I will remain in the upper country with them. Whether my grandson chooses to live his life in civilization or in the wilderness, I can provide him with the means to make that life both successful and useful.”
The elder brother’s heart was glowing with happiness. He knew that his own mother’s people would help him to a start in life, and now his younger brother, his half-breed,—no, quarter-breed—brother Blaise would have a chance too. Hugh had no doubt that Blaise Beaupré would make the most of his opportunities.
It only remains to say that when René Dubois saw the mother of Blaise, her resemblance to himself and to her own mother thoroughly convinced him that there had been no mistake. He more than fulfilled to both his daughter and his grandson the promises Hugh had heard him make.
THE END
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