“What a pity! It will be so much harder to get word to your people. Maybe Pierre can carry a message, or show you the road, once you are strong enough again.”
“Who’s Pierre?”
“Mother Ricord’s son. He’s a woodlander and wiser even than she is. He’s really more French than Indian, but uncle says the latter race is strongest in him. It often is in his type.”
“A-ah, indeed! So you study types up here, do you?”
“Yes. Uncle makes it so interesting. You see, he got used to teaching stupid people when he was a professor in his college. I’m dreadfully stupid about books, though I do my best. But I love living things; and the books about animals, and races, are charming. When they’re true, that is. Often they’re not. There’s one book on squirrels uncle keeps as a curiosity, to show how little the writer knew about them. And the pictures are no more like squirrels than—than they are like me.”
“A-ah,” said the listener, again. “That explains.”
“I don’t know what you mean. No matter. It’s the old stupidity, I suppose. How did you get lost?”
“The same prevailing stupidity,” he laughed. “Though I didn’t realize it for that quality. Just thought I was smart, you know—conceit. I—I—well, I didn’t get on so very well at the lumber camp I’d joined. I wasn’t used to work of that sort and there didn’t seem to be room, even in the woods, for a greenhorn. I thought it was easy enough. I could find my way anywhere, in any wilderness, with my outfit. I’d brought that along, or bought it after I left civilization; so one night I left, set out to paddle my own canoe. I paddled it into the rapids, what those fellows called rips, and they ripped me to ruin. Upset, lost all my kit, tried to find my way back, wandered and walked forever and ever, it seemed to me, and—you know the rest.”
“But I do not. Did you keep hallooing all that long time? or how did it happen we heard you?”
“I was in a rocky place when that tornado came and it was near the water. I had just sense enough left to know they could protect me and crept under them. Oh! that was awful—awful!”