The Indians offered the boy “a cut from the joint,” and he refused sulkily—a deadly insult in normal circumstances. But the keen pangs of hunger and the delicious odor of the meat weakened him, and a later invitation to join the squatting diners found him ravenously responsive, though he felt he had bartered away his righteous indignation for a mess of pottage. During the meal his guests or his hosts (he knew not which they were) betrayed considerable interest in his mural decorations, which they evidently regarded as symptoms of a relapse from Christianity, and they were astonished, too, at his refusal to quaff more than a mouthful or two of their rum—the coarse concoction locally nicknamed “rot-gut.” While Matt, who had started last, was still eating from the birch-bark dish he had utilized for the purpose, Tommy’s father lit his after-dinner pipe, and, having taken a few whiffs, passed it on to his companion, who in turn held out to Matt the long, reedy stem with its feather ornaments.
The offer sent a thrill through the boy’s whole being. All his grievances ascended afresh from the red stone bowl and mingled with the fragrant smoke. How good, how obedient he had been! And all for what? A lump gathered in his throat, so that he could not swallow his bit of bear. He nodded assent, his heart throbbing with defiant manhood, and motioned to the Micmac to place the pipe beside his dish till he was ready for it. The two Indians then hauled the carcass athwart the sledge hastily, for night had come on as though shed from the starless sky, and they called to Matt to come along, but Matt shouted back that he did not intend to accompany them. He no longer craved to cast in his lot with the red man. Yet he went to the door of his tent to watch his fellow-hunters disappear among the sombre groves, and a deeper dusk seemed to fall on the landscape when the very rustle of their passage died away. But as he turned in again and fastened up the door, his heart leaped up afresh with the leaping flames. The sense of absolute solitude became exultation—a keen, bitter joy. Here was his home; he had no other. He had parted company with humanity forever.
He reseated himself on a little pile of fir boughs in his deserted home, that was naked but for the wall-pictures—the least comforting of all possible salvage, since they were the only things Tommy had not thought worth stealing. As Matt sat brooding, darker patches on the soil, and spots upon some of those pictures, caught his eye. He saw they were of blood. In one place there was quite a little pool which had not yet sunk into the earth or evaporated. He touched it curiously with his finger, and wiped away the stain against a leaf. Then with a sudden thought he curled a piece of bark and scooped up the blood into his birchen dish, as a possible color, murmuring, gleefully:
“ ‘Who caught his blood?’
‘I,’ said the fish,
‘With my little dish,
I caught his blood.’ ”
In moving the “little dish” he laid bare Tommy’s father’s calumet, forgotten. He took it up. How the universe had changed since last he held a pipe in his hand—only last night! Again he heard the howl of a wild-cat, and he looked round involuntarily, as if expecting to find Mad Peggy at his elbow. But he had no sense of awe just now—though he had barred his door inhospitably against further bears—only the voluptuousness of liberty and loneliness, the healthy after-glow of satisfied appetite, and the gayety born of flaming logs and a couple of mouthfuls of fire-water. The Water-Drinker’s prophecy seemed peculiarly inept in view of the pipe he held in his hand. With tremulous anticipation of more than mortal rapture he relit it. The sensation was unexpectedly pungent, but Matt puffed away steadily in hope and trust that this was merely the verdict of an unaccustomed palate, and he found a vast compensatory pleasure in his ability to make the thing work, to send the delicate wreaths into the air as ably as any Micmac or deacon of them all.
But soon even this pleasure began to be swamped by a wave of less agreeable sensation, and Matt, puzzled and chagrined, after a gallant stand, threw down the calumet, and hastened into the cold air with palpitating heart and splitting head, and there, in the maple wood, Bruin was avenged. That night, despite his vigil of the night before, Matt Strang vainly endeavored to close his eyes upon an unsatisfactory world.
CHAPTER VII
THE APPRENTICE
The long, endless years, crowded with petty episodes and uniformities, and moving like a cumbrous, creeping train that stops at every station, flash like an express past the eye of memory. Yet it is these unrecorded minutiæ of monotonous months that color the fabric of our future lives, eating into our souls like a slow acid. When, in after years, Matt Strang’s youth defiled before him, the panorama seemed more varied than when he was living the scenes in all their daily detail of dull routine, and when, whatever their superficial differences, they were all linked for him by an underlying unity of toil and aspiration.
First came his apprenticeship in Cattermole’s saw-mill, at the opposite outskirt of the forest, twenty miles from Cobequid. For, though he early tired of savagery, as a blind-alley on the road to picture-painting, he refused, in the dogged pride of his boyish heart, to return to his folks, contenting himself with informing them of his whereabouts and of his intention to apprentice himself (with or without their consent). Labor being so scarce that year, Deacon Hailey drove over in great haste to offer him a loving home. Matt, who happened to be in the house, which was only parted from the mill-stream by a large vegetable-garden, saw through a window the deacon’s buggy arrive at the garden-path, and the deacon himself alight to open the wooden gate. The boy’s resentment flamed afresh, and it was supplemented by dread of the deacon’s inarticulate conversation. He fled to Mrs. Cattermole in the kitchen.
She was a shrewish, angular person, economical of everything save angry breath. A black silk cap with prim bows and ribbons sat severely on her head, and a thread-net confined her hair. Cattermole, a simple, religious, hen-pecked creature, had gone to the village store to trade off butter.