Stefan continued to shave off curly bits from his plug, while the laughter turned against the engineer. Carcajou, like a good many other places, commonly favored the top-dog when it came to betting. The answering grin in Pat’s face was a rather sour one. If any other man had spoken to him thus there might have been a lively fight, but no one in Carcajou, and a good many miles around it, cared to engage in fisticuffs with the Swede. A story was current of how he had once manhandled four drunken lumberjacks, in spite of peavies and sticks of cordwood.
“Well, you’re getting to be a good deal of a lady’s man, Stefan,” said Aleck McIntosh, a fellow who was supposed to be a scion of 158 Scottish nobility receiving remittances from his country. The most evident part of his income, however, appeared to be contributed by his Cree wife, who took in the little washing Carcajou indulged in and made the finest moccasins in Ontario. “Going off with one and coming back with another. I dare say you prefer carrying females to lugging the mails around.”
“Mebbe I likes it better but it’s more hard on dem togs,” asserted Stefan, judicially.
“And––and ye left her at Hugo’s shack, did ye?” ventured Pat again, whereat Stefan nodded in assent and lighted his pipe.
“Did she say she was anyways related to him? His sister or something like that?” persisted the engineer.
“Well, I tank she say somethin’ about bein’ his grandmother,” retorted Stefan, “but I can tell you something, Pat. If you vant so much know all about it vhy you not put on your snowshoes an’ tak’ a run down there. It ban a real nice little valk.”
As Pat Kilrea suffered from the handicap of having been born with a club-foot, which didn’t prevent him from being an excellent man with machinery but made walking rather burdensome for him, the others guffawed again while the Swede opened the door and 159 walked off, the crusted snow crackling under his big feet.
“In course it’s none of my business, like enough,” said Pat, virtuously, as he scratched a match on his trousers’ leg, “but such goings on don’t seem right, nohow. ’Tain’t right an’ proper, because it gives a bad example. I’ve knowed folks rid on a rail or even tarred and feathered for the like of that.”
Carcajou’s sterling sense of propriety, as represented by half a dozen male gossips, immediately agreed with him. The matter, they decided, should be looked into.
“And––and what d’ye think about it, Miss Sophy?” asked Joe, desirous of opening conversation again with the young woman and redeeming himself.