The zigzag track of the boat represented a rift widening between me and my past. I sat up and took the oars, feeling older and stronger.
It was primitive man, riding between the highlands, uncumbered, free to grasp what was before him.
De Chaumont did not believe in and was indifferent to the waif whom his position of great seigneur obliged him to protect. What did I care? I had been hidden among the Indians by kindred or guardians humane enough not to leave me destitute. They should not trouble my thoughts, and neither—I told myself like an Indian—should the imaginings of women.
A boy minds no labor in following his caprices. The long starlit pull I reckoned as nothing; and slipped to my room when daylight was beginning to surprise the dancers.
It was so easy to avoid people in the spaciousness of De Chaumont's manor that I did not again see the young Bonaparte nor any of the guests except Croghan. They slept all the following day, and the third day separated. Croghan found my room before leaving with his party, and we talked as well as we could, and shook hands at parting.
The impressions of that first year stay in my mind as I have heard the impressions of childhood remain. It was perhaps a kind of brief childhood, swift in its changes, and running parallel with the development of youth.
My measure being sent to New York by De Chaumont, I had a complete new outfit in clothes; coat, waistcoat, and small-clothes, neckwear, ruffles, and shirts, buckle shoes, stockings of mild yarn for cold weather, and thread stockings. Like most of the things for which we yearn, when I got them I did not like them as well as the Indian garments they obliged me to shed.
Skenedonk came to see me nearly every day, and sat still as long as he could while I toiled at books. I did not tell him how nearly I had disgraced us both by running secretly away to camp. So I was able to go back and pay visits with dignity and be taken seriously, instead of encountering the ridicule that falls upon retreat.
My father was neither pleased nor displeased. He paid my accounts exactly, before the camp broke up for the winter, making Skenedonk his agent. My mother Marianne offered me food as she would have offered it to Count de Chaumont; and I ate it, sitting on a mat as a guest. Our children, particularly the elder ones, looked me over with gravity, and refrained from saying anything about my clothes.
Our Iroquois went north before snow flew, and the cabins stood empty, leaves drifting through fire-holes in the bark thatch.