“So droll, so droll, our Tarboe there!” they shouted, for already they began to look upon him as their Seigneur.
In time the cure forgave him also.
Tarboe seldom left Isle of Days, save when he went to visit his daughter, in St. Louis Street, Quebec, not far from the Parliament House, where Orvay Lafarge is a member of the Ministry. The ex-smuggler was a member of the Assembly for three months, but after defeating his own party on a question of tariff, he gave a portrait of himself to the Chamber, and threw his seat into the hands of his son-in-law. At the Belle Chatelaine, where he often goes, he sometimes asks Bissonnette to play “The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose.”
ROMANY OF THE SNOWS
I
When old Throng the trader, trembling with sickness and misery, got on his knees to Captain Halby and groaned, “She didn’t want to go; they dragged her off; you’ll fetch her back, won’t ye?—she always had a fancy for you, cap’n,” Pierre shrugged a shoulder and said:
“But you stole her when she was in her rock-a-by, my Throng—you and your Manette.”
“Like a match she was—no bigger,” continued the old man. “Lord, how that stepmother bully-ragged her, and her father didn’t care a darn. He’d half a dozen others—Manette and me hadn’t none. We took her and used her like as if she was an angel, and we brought her off up here. Haven’t we set store by her? Wasn’t it ‘cause we was lonely an’ loved her we took her? Hasn’t everybody stood up and said there wasn’t anyone like her in the North? Ain’t I done fair by her always—ain’t I? An’ now, when this cough ‘s eatin’ my life out, and Manette ‘s gone, and there ain’t a soul but Duc the trapper to put a blister on to me, them brutes ride up from over the border, call theirselves her brothers, an’ drag her off!”
He was still on his knees. Pierre reached over and lightly kicked a moccasined foot.