"And it may be this is the answer to my prayers," Pierre said to himself. "For Joe's children will be of our own flesh and blood, and we shall love Marie Antoinette as our own. And as Joe is younger and stronger than Dominique, who is growing fat, I do not see why he should fall behind him in the matter of family."
Few changes came to Five Fingers as the years rolled on. The little mill continued to hum and the axes to ring farther and farther back in the forest, and twice or three times in a season the boat came up with loads of supplies and carried away the lumber.
Not a single year did the stork fail to build his nest somewhere about the sawdust piles. Twice he visited Aleck Clamart, who married Anne Croisset; two little Dutchmen he brought to Geertruda Poulin, and there were nine pairs of feet to shoe in the home of Dominique and Marie when young Joe Gourdon brought Marie Antoinette to Five Fingers as his wife.
The mill did not run that day, for it was a day of feasting and rejoicing, and all the world held no prouder monarch than Joe. Marie Antoinette, tall and slim, with her great dark eyes, her glad smile and her outreaching arms of love for the people who had now become her own, was as sweet and beautiful as his mother had been in the days of her youth. And Pierre, in his joy, found in her a rival, for the children gathered round her in dumb worship, and in her pretty arms Marie Antoinette gathered every one, kissing each in turn, even to bashful Louis, the eldest son of Dominique. And when, in their cabin, she flung those same pretty arms around Josette's neck and called her Mother, Pierre winked hard and went outside to puff at his pipe, for he felt like a boy who wanted to cry.
God had been good to him. God had blessed Five Fingers. In the going down of the sun his eyes rested upon a green slope where no plow had touched and no cabin had been built. Religiously that sacred little plot had been held for the time when death might find its way among them. And death had not come. Gratitude welled up in Pierre's heart and choked him—gratitude and pride and faith, for all this was the handiwork of the great and good God he believed in, the God of his forests, the open, the sun and the sky. And the thought came to him that when at last there was a break in the little green slope it was only right that he should be the first to go, for God had filled his measure to the brim, and it seemed to him he could hear the whisper of a message from the violets and red roses of that little knoll in the setting of the sun.
Marie Antoinette, coming to him so quietly he did not hear, put her little hand in his and whispered, "It is beautiful here, my father!"