"You have an excellent accent, better than the Canadians."
The stranger laughed and addressed his companion in pure and fluent French.
"Then you're a Frenchman?" said the elder man, surprised.
"Not I, but my people were. They came from New Orleans and went up the river and settled in St. Louis. My grandfather couldn't speak a sentence in English when he first went there."
When the doctor told his daughter this he was a little triumphant. They had talked over Courant and his antecedents, and had some argument about them, the doctor maintaining that the strange man was a gentleman, Susan quite sure that he was not. Dr. Gillespie used the word in its old-fashioned sense, as a term having reference as much to birth and breeding as to manners and certain, ineradicable instincts. The gentleman adventurer was not unknown on the plains. Sometimes he had fled from a dark past, sometimes taken to the wild because the restraints of civilization pressed too hard upon the elbows of his liberty.
"He's evidently of French Creole blood," said the doctor. "Many of those people who came up from New Orleans and settled in St. Louis were of high family and station."
"Then why should he be out here, dressed like an Indian and wandering round with all sorts of waifs and strays? I believe he's just the same kind of person as old Joe, only younger. Or, if he does come from educated people, there's something wrong about him, and he's had to come out here and hide."
"Oh, what a suspicious little Missy! Nothing would make me believe that. He may be rough, but he's not crooked. Those steady, straight-looking eyes never belonged to any but an honest man. No, my dear, there's no discreditable past behind him, and he's a gentleman."
"Rubbish!" she said pettishly. "You'll be saying Leff's a gentleman next."
From which it will be seen that Low Courant had not been communicative about himself. Such broken scraps of information as he had dropped, when pieced together made a scanty narrative. His grandfather had been one of the early French settlers of St. Louis, and his father a prosperous fur trader there. But why he had cut loose from them he did not vouchsafe to explain. Though he was still young—thirty perhaps—it was evident that he had wandered far and for many years. He knew the Indian trails of the distant Northwest, and spoke the language of the Black Feet and Crows. He had passed a winter in the old Spanish town of Santa Fé, and from there joined a regiment of United States troops and done his share of fighting in the Mexican War. Now the wanderlust was on him, he was going to California.