Colin and Coombsie stared. The strange boy’s look flashed with such frank gladness, doubled and trebled by sharing sympathetically, in so far as he could, each bounding thrill that animated the wild, free life about him! They had often been moved by the liquid notes from a songster’s throat, but had not come enough into loving touch with Nature to hear music in a bird’s wings.
If Leon had heard it, his one idea would have been to silence it with a shot. He stood still in his tracks, bristling like his dog.
“Ughr-r! ‘Singing wings’!” he sneered. “Aw! take that talk home to Mamma.”
“Say that once again, and I’ll lick you!” The stranger’s gaze became, now, very straight and inviting from under his broad-brimmed hat.
The atmosphere felt highly charged—unpleasantly so for the other two boys. But at that critical moment an extraordinary sound of other singing—human singing—was borne to them in faint merriment upon the woodland breeze, so primitive, so unlike anything modern, that it might have been Robin Hood himself or one of his green-coated Merry Men singing a roundelay in the woods to the accompaniment of a woodchopper’s axe.
“Rond! Rond! Rond! peti’ pie pon’ ton’!
Rond! rond! rond! peti’ pie pon’ ton’!”
“What is it? Who is—it?” Nixon’s stiffening fists unclosed. His eye was bright with bewilderment.
“Houp-la! it’s Toiney—Toiney Leduc.” Colin broke into an exultant whoop. “Now we’ll have fun! Toiney is a funny one, for sure!”
“He’s more fun than a circus,” corroborated Coombsie. “We’re coming to a little farm-clearing in the woods now, Nix,” he explained, falling in by his cousin’s side as the four boys moved hastily ahead, challenges forgotten. “There’s a house on it, the last for miles. It’s owned by a man called Greer, and Toiney Leduc works for him during the summer an’ fall. Toiney is a French-Canadian who came here about a year ago; his brother is employed in one of the shipbuilding yards on the river.”
The merry, oft-repeated strain came to them more distinctly now, rolling among the trees:—