“My house!” said Jouaneaux, looking up with reviving spirit. “Little Sister, you would walk over the roof of my house and not perceive it.”
“In midwinter?”
“No, now, when young grass springs. I could endure to risk my store of crops where the Iroquois might set torch to them, but this pretty fellow, this outer man of me, I took no risks with him. I chooses me a stump, a nice hollow stump.”
“And squeezed into it like a bear?”
“Jouaneaux is a fox, little Sister. Call your clumsy La Mouche the bear. No: I burrows me out a house beneath the stump; a good house, a sizable hole. Over there is my fire-place, and the stump furnishes me a chimney. Any Iroquois seeing my stump smoking would merely say to himself, ‘It is afire.’ Let a canoe spring out on the river or a cry ring in the forest—down went Jouaneaux into his house, and, as you may say, pulled the earth over his head. I also kept my canoe dragged within there, for there was no telling what might happen to it elsewhere.”
Massawippa regarded him with animation. “You had also a boat?”
“Indeed, yes!” the nuns’ man affirmed, kindled higher by such interest. “A good birch craft it was, and large enough for two people.” Another groaning sigh paid tribute to this lost instrument of happiness.
“But your house may be all crumbled in now.”
“Not that house, little Sister. Look you! it had ceiling and walls of timbers well fastened together and covered with cement. Was not that a snug house? It will endure like rock, and some day I must go and see it once more.”
“Perhaps you could not find it now.”