"Who was he?"
"I didn't ask his name." Simon turned his back to Peter as he prepared for bed. "Queer I didn't ask his name—but I didn't."
On the third day after this night Five Fingers received a stupendous shock. Simon McQuarrie and Father Albanel, in seeking lost net buoys under the Big Cliff, had found the body of a dead man. It was Aleck Curry. He was terribly broken and almost unrecognizable by the pounding of his body in the surf that washed in and out among the rocks. The story of his end was quite clear. He had evidently stumbled over the edge of the cliff while drunk, inasmuch as Simon had seen him staggering in its direction on the night he had disappeared.
"We'll take him to the nearest railroad settlement and let his friends have him," Simon said to the men of Five Fingers.
But to Father Albanel he added, in a voice which others did not hear, "It would be unpleasant, mon père, to have him always in our own little cemetery where only those we love are at rest."
And so, on that same day, all that was left of Aleck Curry was borne northward through the hills and ridges to his people.
Three weeks later Mona and Peter were married. Five Fingers will never forget that day. It was in the full glory of June, and the robins and thrushes were singing outside the little church. In spite of Peter's protest Mona teased him by insisting that she would not tell him where she wanted to spend her honeymoon until the little missioner had said the last words, and they were man and wife. And then, putting her soft mouth to Peter's ear, she whispered, "I want to stay in the new cabin which Simon is giving us."
So there, from the beginning, they found their new happiness, and Pierre Gourdon and Josette would walk in the twilights of summer evenings, lovers still, and never grow tired of painting for each other the beautiful and unforgetable pictures of many years ago when they had come through the pathless wilderness to make this paradise in which God, in His great goodness, had made the last of their dreams come true.
It was on an afternoon in August that Adette Clamart came to Mona's home with her cousin, Adele, who had come from the French country of Quebec to live with her, and announced that a stranger had arrived in Five Fingers and was talking with Simon in his cabin.