The learned and loquacious Abbé Ferland, in his dainty little volume of "Opuscules," which I hold in my hand, tells us about this wonderful Gamache, that, according to popular rumour, he had been seen to stand upright upon the thwarts of his sloop, and command the demon to bring him a capful of wind. Instantly his sails were filled, though the sea around him was in a glassy calm, and away he went, while all about him were vessels powerless to move.
During a trip to Rimouski he gave a grand supper to the devil, not to a devil of the second class, but to the veritable old gentleman himself. Aided by invisible assistants, he had massacred whole crews, and appropriated to himself the rich cargoes of their vessels. When hotly pursued by a government boat sent to capture him, and just about being overtaken, both sloop and Gamache suddenly disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a blue flame that went dancing over the waves in mocking defiance of the disappointed minions of the law.
Upon such thrilling legends as these was founded the reputation of the "Wizard of Anticosti," and so generally were they believed that the genial abbé assures us that the majority of the mariners in the gulf would rather have attempted to scale the citadel of Quebec than to approach by night the bay where Gamache was known to have his stronghold.
We can put plenty of confidence in the abbé, for in the year 1852 he had the courage to pay the wizard a visit, and I am sorry that I have not room to give the full particulars of that visit as they are brightly presented by this ever-entertaining writer.
He found the terror-inspiring Gamache to be a tall, erect, and vigorous old man, with snow-white hair but piercing eyes, who came forward to meet his visitors with an easy, dignified bearing that betrayed no concern or troubled conscience.
His house appeared to be a perfect arsenal of deadly weapons. No fewer than a dozen guns, many of them double-barrelled, grimly adorned the walls of the first room they entered, and every other room up to the very garret had at least two or three more, loaded and capped; they hung upon racks, surrounded by powder-flasks, shot-bags, swords, sabres, daggers, bayonets, and pistols, in most imposing profusion.
The house itself was something of a fortress. Every possible precaution had been taken to prevent persons entering it without the permission of its master. All the doors and windows were strongly barred and shuttered, and so complete were the defences that one man inside might have defied twenty outside. In the sheds, arranged in the most orderly manner, were long rows of barrels, bales, casks, and other gifts of the sea.
Such was the den of the dreaded wrecker, a man not one tithe so bad as wild rumour made him, but who, nevertheless, took pains to intensify the public feeling about himself, in order that he might be the more undisturbed in the solitude he had chosen for himself in that strange, wild place.
He had not always been alone, either. Twice had a woman been found willing to brave the rigours of his life for love of him, and in both cases they had succumbed to the terrible loneliness and desolation. His second wife died suddenly, while he was off on a hunting-trip in mid-winter; and he returned, after a fortnight's absence, to find her frozen form clasping to its icy breast the bodies of their two little children, the one five and the other six years old.
"That is how they will find me some day. Each one in their turn. Ah! well—since she is dead we can only bury her."