“Bah!” answered the blacksmith. “I’m only old Lajeunesse the blacksmith, though she’s my girl, dear lads. I was Joe Lajeunesse yesterday, and I’ll be Joe Lajeunesse to-morrow, and I’ll die Joe Lajeunesse the forgeron—bagosh! So you take me as you find me. M’sieu’ Racine doesn’t marry me. And Madelinette doesn’t take me to Paris and lead me round the stage and say, ‘This is M’sieu’ Lajeunesse, my father.’ No. I’m myself, and a damn good blacksmith and nothing else am I!”
“Tut, tut, old leather-belly,” said Gingras the shoemaker, whose liquor had mounted high, “you’ll not need to work now. Madelinette’s got double fortune. She gets thousands for a song, and she’s lady of the Manor here. What’s too good for you, tell me that, my forgeron?”
“Not working between meals—that’s too good for me, Gingras. I’m here to earn my bread with the hands I was born with, and to eat what they earn, and live by it. Let a man live according to his gifts—bagosh! Till I’m sent for, that’s what I’ll do; and when time’s up I’ll take my hand off the bellows, and my leather apron can go to you, Gingras, for boots for a bigger fool than me.”
“There’s only one,” said Benolt, the ne’er-do-weel, who had been to college as a boy.
“Who’s that?” said Muroc.
“You wouldn’t know his name. He’s trying to find eggs in last year’s nest,” answered Benolt with a leer.
“He means the Seigneur,” said Muroc. “Look to your son-in-law, Lajeunesse. He’s kicking up a dust that’ll choke Pontiac yet. It’s as if there was an imp in him driving him on.”
“We’ve had enough of the devil’s dust here,” said Lajeunesse. “Has he been talking to you, Muroc?”
Muroc nodded. “Treason, or thereabouts. Once, with him that’s dead in the graveyard yonder, it was France we were to save and bring back the Napoleons—I have my sword yet. Now it’s save Quebec. It’s stand alone and have our own flag, and shout, and fight, maybe, to be free of England. Independence—that’s it! One by one the English have had to go from Pontiac. Now it’s M’sieu’ Medallion.”
“There’s Shandon the Irishman gone too. M’sieu’ sold him up and shipped him off,” said Gingras the shoemaker.