“What offended her?”
“I know of nothing. You have been as good a husband as a voyageur could be. And Mackinac is so dull in winter she can amuse herself but little. It was hard for her to wait your return. Now she will not look at you. It is very silly.”
What would Madame Laboise advise him to do?
Madame would advise him to wait as if nothing had occurred. The curé would admonish 'Tite if she continued her sulking. In the mean time he must content himself with tenting or lodging among his fellow-voyageurs.
Of the two or three thousand voyageurs and clerks, one hundred lived in the agency house, five hundred were accommodated in barracks, but the majority found shelter in tents and in the houses of the villagers. Every night of the fur-trading month there was a ball in Mackinac, given either by the householders or their guests; and it often happened that a man spent in one month all he had earned by his year of tremendous and far-reaching toil. But he had society, and what was to him the cream of existence, while it lasted. He fitted himself out with new shirts and buckskins, sashes, caps, neips, and moccasins, and when he was not on duty showed himself like a hero, knife in sheath, a weather-browned and sinewy figure. To dance, sing, drink, and play the violin, and have the scant dozen white women, the half-breeds, and squaws of Mackinac admire him, was a voyageur's heaven—its brief duration being its charm. For he was a born woodsman and loved his life.
Charle' Charette did not care where he lodged. Neither had he any heart to dance, until he looked through the door of the house where festivities began that season and saw 'Tite Laboise footing it with Étienne St. Martin. Parbleu! With Étienne St. Martin, the squab little lard-eater whose brother, Alexis St. Martin, had been put into doctors' books on account of having his stomach partly shot away, and a valve forming over the rent so that his digestion could be watched. It was disgusting. 'Tite would not speak to her own husband, but she would come out before all Mackinac and dance with any other voyageurs who crowded about her. Charle' sprang into the house himself, and without looking at his wife, hilariously led other women to the best places, and danced with every sinuous and graceful curve of his body. 'Tite did not look at him. From the corner of his eye he noted how perfect she was, the fiend! and how well she had dressed herself on his money. All the brigades knew his trouble by that time, and an easy breath was drawn by his entertainers when he left the house with knife still sheathed. In the wilderness the will of a brigade commander was law; but when the voyageur was out of the Fur Company's yard in Mackinac his own will was law.
One of the cautious clerks suggested that Charle and Étienne be separated in their work, since it was likely the husband might quarrel with 'Tite Laboise's dancing partner.
“Turn 'em in together, man,” chuckled the Scotch agent, Robert Stuart, who had charge of the outside work. “Let 'em fight. Man Gurdon, I havena had any sport with these wild lads since the boats came in.”
But the combatants he hoped to see worked steadily until afternoon without coming to the grip. They had no brute Anglo-Saxon antagonism, and being occupied with different bales, did not face each other.
The triple row of Indian lodges basked on the incurved beach, where a thousand Indians had gathered to celebrate that vivid month. Night and day the thump of their drums and the monotonous chant of their dances could be heard above the rush and whisper of blue water breaking on pebbles.