Impetuosity is peculiarly winning when it is backed by knowledge, and Morgan laughed and put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Surely,” he said. “It’s interesting to run into an adventure up here in the wilderness. The boy is a good guide and I like him, yet I would not stand in the way of making his fortune for anything. Bob—” But Master Bob’s long legs were already chasing each other out of the low doorway in a rush after Zoëtique. In three minutes he was back with the man in tow.
Zoëtique Vézina was perhaps twenty-two years old, a stocky, well-built chap of five feet ten or so, with deep, powerful shoulders and a small waist and a body that moved with the grace of efficient muscles. His face was roughly carved and of his class, but he held his head with an air that had pride and sensitiveness both in it, and when he spoke and smiled the commonplace modelling of his features lighted with a gentleness and a spirit which made you understand his whistling. There was character and shading back of this ordinary-looking block of humanity. He wore blackened bottes sauvages of caribou leather, laced with thongs of hide through huge brass eyelets; his trousers looked as if they might have been somebody’s dinner clothes five years before—somebody not particularly his shape; his coarse red and blue striped sweater was belted with a broad band of black leather around a waist as trim as a girl’s. He pulled a nondescript felt hat from a shock head of dark hair as he entered, and his blue eyes gazed about half startled and half friendly.
We sat and listened as if at a play, while Charles Esmond, the great theatrical manager, conspicuous on two continents, interviewed this unknown backwoodsman. He did it in fluent French, with his own charm of manner, but it took some time to make Zoëtique understand what he was offering, and when he did understand, to our astonishment he did not respond. Esmond mentioned a salary to begin with so large that I gasped, and to the guide, accustomed to two dollars a day in good times, it must have seemed fabulous. Morgan voiced my thought when he put in a quiet, reassuring word.
“The m’sieur will do what he says, Zoëtique. I know all about the m’sieur, and he is to be relied on.”
“Merci, m’sieur,” the man answered with ready French politeness, but his expression did not change.
His bright, light-blue eyes simply lifted a second to smile at Walter, and dropped to the floor again. All of us waited as he stared at one knot-hole—a minute, two minutes, three minutes we waited in silence while Zoëtique considered that knot-hole.
At last, “I don’t want to hurry you,” Esmond said, “yet I would like to know by to-morrow. It’s the chance of your life, you understand. You couldn’t make as much money here in forty years as you could make in a winter or two in New York. I do not see why you should hesitate five minutes. But think it over—talk it over with your friends. I will wait till you pass our camp with your messieurs to-morrow morning.” He smiled his sudden, fascinating smile at the guide, and the contrast between the two was sharp and picturesque—the finished, handsome man of the world and the awkward, ill-clothed child of the people. “I know it must be startling to you,” Esmond said kindly. “You will have to collect your ideas a bit. But you must answer as I wish. I will wait till morning.”
Then the guide lifted his clear, light eyes and met the other’s slightly pitying gaze with unexpected dignity. “The m’sieur need not wait,” he said serenely. “I know my answer at this time. The m’sieur is very good to me, and I am glad that he is content with my poor whistling. I would be happy to make all that great money—mais—oui!—but I cannot go to New York as the m’sieur wishes.”
“You cannot go?” Esmond repeated in surprise, and we all stared.
Zoëtique’s gentle tones went on firmly. “But no, m’sieur. I have the intention to marry myself in the spring, and this winter I build my house. Alixe, my fiancée, would be disappointed if I should not build our house this winter.”