A Gentleman of Courage: A Novel of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

When his thoughts came to Mona a bit of comfort crept into Peter's soul. It wasn't so bad, with Mona near him. She had come into his life in a most unexpected and beautiful way, and had helped him whip the beast of a boy who had kicked her dog. He could still feel the warm thrill of her little hand as she led him through the woods and slashings into Five Fingers and he could see her eyes glowing at him in the dusk as she said:

"Your father is alive and he can come back. But mine can't, Peter. He is dead. And so is my mother."

Peter could almost hear her speaking those words now, whispering them, as if she realized in that instant the sacredness of the trust he had put in her. And she was right. His father was alive, and could come back, while hers....

The distant murmuring of the lake came to him faintly. It made him shiver. Out there, somewhere, her father and mother had been drowned. He wondered if Mona was awake and was also listening to that sound, so faint at times that it was like a breath of air. It must haunt her, he thought. It was always telling her about what had happened, just as she had told it to him, coming down the slope into Five Fingers, and probably it made her cry when she was alone nights. It was terrible to remember one's father and mother dying like that, both at once, and Peter shuddered.

It made him a little ashamed, too. The sense of manhood which his father had planted and nurtured in him began to rise above his own hopelessness and heartache, and he leaned out of the window to look at the cabin of Pierre and Josette Gourdon, where Mona lived. That was dark, too. But Mona might be awake. He hoped so. Next to his father she was the biggest thing that had ever come into his life, and thought of her, and of her nearness, and of her lying awake thinking about him, sent a warm and comforting feeling through him, just as her gentle hands and soft eyes had brought him a mothering consolation in the earlier darkness of the forest that night.

It seemed to him, now that the reaction had come in his mind, that everything about the night was assuming a new aspect.

It was the kind of night he and his father loved, and its stillness, its shadows and floods of yellow moonlight brought him a new message. Their moon, they had always called it.

"You were born on a night with the moon shining like that," his father had told him. "It came in at the window to look at you, and it was mighty pleased."

So the moon had always been a personal thing to Peter, just as it had been to his father. And the Man in the Moon, Peter observed, was in a friendly humor tonight. There was a sly look in his eyes and an odd twist to his mouth, as if he were winking at Peter and telling him how beautifully everything was coming out, both for his father and for himself. Between Mona and the moon the sickness grew less in his heart, and remembering he had not said the prayer which his father had never let him forget, he bowed his face on the windowsill and whispered the words to himself.

When he raised his head a big gray shadow was floating silently in the air just outside his window. It was one of the huge owls which turn snow-white in winter. He could hear the soft flutter of its wings as it twisted and turned and disappeared, more like a ghost than a living thing. And then a swift patter of little feet came on the roof of the cabin. It was another of the night folk, a flying squirrel. A few yards away was the big tree in which it must hide itself during the day. He wondered if the owl and the winged squirrel were among Mona's pets.