There was a pause. Gaston seemed brooding, and Lady Belward said:
“Go on, please.”
“There isn’t so very much to tell. The life was the only one I had known, and it was all right. But my father had told me of this life. He taught me himself—he and Father Decluse and a Moravian missionary for awhile. I knew some Latin and history, a bit of mathematics, a good deal of astronomy, some French poets, and Shakespere. Shakespere is wonderful. ... My father wanted me to come here at once after he died, but I knew better—I wanted to get sense first. So I took a place in the Company. It wasn’t all fun.
“I had to keep my wits sharp. I was only a youngster, and I had to do with men as crafty and as silly as old Polonius. I was sent to Labrador. That was not a life for a Christian. Once a year a ship comes to the port, bringing the year’s mail and news from the world. When you watch that ship go out again, and you turn round and see the filthy Esquimaux and Indians, and know that you’ve got to live for another year with them, sit in their dirty tepees, eat their raw frozen meat, with an occasional glut of pemmican, and the thermometer 70 degrees below zero, you get a lump in your throat.
“Then came one winter. I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an Indian with me. There was darkness day after day, and because the Esquimaux and Indians hadn’t come up to the fort that winter, it was lonely as a tomb. One by one the men got melancholy and then went mad, and I had to tie them up, and care for them and feed them. The Indian was all right, but he got afraid, and wanted to start to a mission station three hundred miles on. It was a bad look-out for me, but I told him to go. I was left alone. I was only twenty-one, but I was steel to my toes—good for wear and tear. Well, I had one solid month all alone with my madmen. Their jabbering made me sea-sick some times. At last one day I felt I’d go staring mad myself if I didn’t do something exciting to lift me, as it were. I got a revolver, sat at the opposite end of the room from the three lunatics, and practised shooting at them. I had got it into my head that they ought to die, but it was only fair, I thought, to give them a chance. I would try hard to shoot all round them—make a halo of bullets for the head of every one, draw them in silhouettes of solid lead on the wall.
“I talked to them first, and told them what I was going to do. They seemed to understand, and didn’t object. I began with the silhouettes, of course. I had a box of bullets beside me. They never squealed. I sent the bullets round them as pretty as the pattern of a milliner. Then I began with their heads. I did two all right. They sat and never stirred. But when I came to the last something happened. It was Jock Lawson.”
Sir William interposed:
“Jock Lawson—Jock Lawson from here?”
“Yes. His mother keeps ‘The Whisk o’ Barley.’”
“So, that is where Jock Lawson went? He followed your father?”