A Gentleman of Courage: A Novel of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

Through the open door Peter had a glimpse of Josette's face looking out at him, so white and haggard that for a moment he thought it was an old woman's face. He cried out to her but in the same moment she was gone and there came no answer.

Then he spoke half defiantly to Pierre.

"I want to see Mona," he said. "I promised her I'd come if she was sick."

"Go!" said Pierre again, pointing sternly toward Simon McQuarrie's cabin. "You can come halfway to learn how Mona is, but if you come this near again I shall have you taken from Five Fingers!"

Peter drew slowly away, staring in horror at Pierre and the cabin behind him. He slumped down on the doorstep at Simon's place and did not feel the bitter cold. He saw Pierre enter the cabin, and then he watched the gray figures in the distant cemetery as they moved slowly about, piling the last of the frozen clods upon the burdens they had carried through the dawn a few minutes before. And Mona was down with that same sickness—which meant death!

In his torment he picked and twisted at his clothes until his thin fingers were blue with the cold. Pierre came out again and put up the red cloth, and then he went to intercept the three men who were on their way from the cemetery to their quarters in the barn. Father Albanel and Simon McQuarrie returned with Pierre and entered the cabin where Mona was sick. In a few minutes Simon came out and seeing Peter huddled on the doorstep, approached as near to him as he dared. He asked the same questions, and gave the same warnings, and assured Peter that Mona was only slightly ill, and that she would get over it very quickly. But there was in his face the same look that had been in Pierre's, and Peter knew he was lying.

"She is going to die," his heart kept crying, and he dragged himself into the cabin and flung himself upon Simon's bed, and when Joe Gourdon came in he was crying, his head buried in his arms. With his beloved Marie Antoinette keeping guard in Jeremie Poulin's house of death, Joe was making a courageous fight. "Tobina Poulin is past all danger, and if things go well Aunt Marie Antoinette will come home in a few days, and then you can come to us," he comforted Peter. "Meanwhile I'm going to stay with you."

But Joe's cheerfulness was mostly forced. News came early in the day that Adette Clamart was very close to death, and that Jame and Father Albanel were constantly at her bedside.