We hurried back to our log castle to see that pea soup and partridges and flapjacks and other delicacies were assured in force for the meal to come, and in an hour or two the meal did come, and I cannot recollect a gayer function. As with the San Francisco earthquake, there was not a dull moment from start to finish, and again and again I saw Morgan look at his wife triumphantly with the “Trust-me-to-bring-home-pleasant-people” expression of a man who has sometimes been less fortunate.
The dining-room was a moss-covered point; the water rippled about two sides of it, forest made its other walls, and a roof of birch bark its ceiling. This greenwood hall rang with laughter spontaneous as children’s, till the silver lake gleamed leaden through tree trunks, and purple hills turned black, and a rim of round moon rose into the twilight, big, over the shoulder of the lowest mountain. Then Godin, head guide and butler, lighted his lumières électriques—his candles arranged as a chandelier—and by their swinging light we finished a feast of the gods with maple sirup and delicate “mushi frite,” while the French-Canadian guides sat grouped in Rembrandt lights and shadows about the kitchen fire and laughed, too, to hear the peals which, at everything and nothing, rang across the lake to the lonely hills. Certainly in entertaining these strangers we had entertained angels unawares—angels of light-heartedness—for our sides ached when we slid from the board benches that were dining chairs and went down where the canoes lay beached, where guides evolved out of shadow to slip the boats into the water, to hold them steady, to direct our stumbling with deferential French syllables, as we embarked.
Two hundred yards down the lake, the “camp of the messieurs” stretched its log front of sixty feet. The lamplight shone ruddily through windows red-curtained, the door from the broad gallery stood open, the bare low room, as we entered, had the qualities which make a place attractive—space, brightness, order, and comfort. Many a time in a New York drawing-room I have thought of the charm of that big camp with its silver-brown bark of walls and ceiling, its scarlet cotton curtains, its rough floor, and rustic furniture; I have remembered how it breathed hospitality and the joy of life, and I have wondered what people wanted of more. Into this room we went, the three Morgans and Dr. Davidge and Mr. Esmond and I. Pipes and cigars were going in a moment, and soon young Bob was sent to find out the plans for the concert. He came back kicking his boyish long legs ecstatically. “It’s going to be a peach,” he announced. “Dr. Davidge’s guides sing, all four of them, and Henri, the old fellow, has a mouth-organ, and Zoëtique is going to whistle. It’ll be the pickles all right.”
“I didn’t know Zoëtique whistled,” said Walter Morgan. “I never heard him.”
Nor had I, but Bob hastened to enlighten us. “I have,” he said, “and it’s a wonder. Never heard anything like it. Godin says he’s the best whistler in Saint Raymond, and they always make him do it for parties, as a side show. Wait till you hear him—I’ll bet you’ll like it.”
Mr. Esmond looked up. “Really good whistling is rare,” he said, and then added as if to himself, “but of course this isn’t that sort.”
“How are they to arrange, Bob?” asked his sister. “Are they going out on the lake, or shall we?”
“Oh, they said just as the messieurs wished; so I settled it,” Bob answered in a lordly way. “It was such a whooping good night, I thought it would be the stunt to go out ourselves, and bum around in the canoes.”
So it was that in half an hour we drifted down the shore toward the point where the blaze from the guides’ camp shone and disappeared by glimpses, a star of orange fire in the trees above, an orange bar of fire in the water below. The men’s voices in excited conversation, as conversation is always with French Canadians, floated out to us; we caught words which showed the forest road of their thoughts—such words as “caribou,” and “carabine,” and “gros poisson de cinq livres,” and “un m’sieur qui tire b’en,” and there would be a hush while one deep voice told a story and then all together would break out in an abandonment of laughter. Suddenly some one, going outside the range of firelight, caught sight of the fleet on the lake, and there was a quick word—“les messieurs” and “les canots”—and then a silence.
Walter Morgan called from invisibility. “Godin,” he called—Godin was head guide.