"Sure I do."
"As long as you live?"
"As long as I live."
With a little gesture of gladness and satisfaction Mona Guyon held up the prettiest mouth in all Five Fingers, and Peter kissed it.
[CHAPTER XIV]
In the weeks and months following the plague at Five Fingers Father Albanel did not forget his promise to Peter, and back in the shelter of the woods, where their secret was safe between them, he taught the boy "how to fight like a gentleman—if he had to fight at all." It was then Peter learned there was something more helpful than brute strength, and as his skill increased and he mastered one after another what the little missioner called "the tricks of the fighting game," his enthusiasm rose to a point where he could scarcely keep his secret from Mona. Their boxing-gloves, which Father Albanel had smuggled from the settlement, they kept securely hidden, and not until years later did Peter know that the holy man who was teaching him had at one time been regarded by fighting men as the handiest man with his fists between Fort William and Hudson Bay.
What he had learned he did not fully realize until early in June, when Aleck Curry and his father and the hateful black tug returned to the settlement. Using the influence of a brother who had been successful in politics, Izaak Curry had obtained timber concessions in several directions about Five Fingers, and now built himself a cabin near the shore, but hidden back in the spruce. This he tenanted with a third brother and his wife, and with them Aleck lived while the tug was making its trips between Five Fingers and Fort William.
Aleck had grown still bigger, and in spite of Peter's resolution to make friends with him he would have none of it. His hatred for Peter was like some deadly thing that had poisoned every drop of blood in his veins, and Mona's growing beauty, and her quite open affection for his rival, stirred something that was more than hatred—more than brooding vindictiveness—in Aleck's heart. His father was rich, and he knew what that meant back in town; and his uncle was a power in politics, and had recently become Commissioner of Provincial Police. It enraged him that these facts carried no weight in Five Fingers. His own importance as the son of a rich man and the nephew of a Commissioner was utterly unrecognized here, while in town it had given him a position of first rank in spite of his bullying nature. This lack of appreciation, as he thought of it, he laid entirely at Peter's door, for it was Peter who had robbed him of his chances with Mona in the first place, and it was Peter who was keeping her away from him now.