"I pay back this gold to you and Mélisse a hundred times!" he cried tensely. "I swear it, an' I swear that Jan Thoreau mak' no lie!"
Unconsciously, with the buckskin bag clutched in one hand, he had stretched out his other arm to the violin hanging against the wall. Cummins turned to look. When he faced him again the boy's arm had fallen to his side and his cheeks were white.
The next day he left. No one heard his last words to Mélisse, or witnessed his final leave-taking of her, for Cummins sympathized with the boy's grief and went out of the cabin an hour before Mukee was ready with his pack. The last that he heard was Jan's violin playing low, sweet music to the child. Three weeks later, when Mukee returned to Lac Bain, he said that Jan had traveled to Churchill like one who had lost his tongue, and that far into the nights he had played lonely dirges upon his violin.
CHAPTER XII
A RUMOR FROM THE SOUTH
It was a long winter for Cummins and Mélisse. It was a longer one for Jan. He had taken with him a letter from the factor at Lac Bain to the factor at Churchill, and he found quarters with the chief clerk's assistant at the post—a young, red-faced man who had come over on the ship from England. He was a cheerful, good-natured young fellow, and when he learned that his new associate had tramped all the way from the Barren Lands to attend the new public school, he at once invested himself with the responsibilities of a private tutor.
He taught Jan, first of all, to say "is" in place of "ees." It was a tremendous lesson for Jan, but he struggled with it manfully, and a week after his arrival, when one evening he was tuning his violin to play for young MacDonald, he said with eager gravity:
"Ah, I have it now, Mr. MacDonald. It ees not 'EES,' it ees 'EES!'"
MacDonald roared, but persisted, and in time Jan began to get the twist out of his tongue.
The school opened in November, and Jan found himself one of twenty or so, gathered there from forty thousand square miles of wilderness. Two white youths and a half-breed had come from the Etawney; the factor at Nelson House sent up his son, and from the upper waters of the Little Churchill there came three others.