“Now I remember—ho! was that another?”
“No, it was not,” answered his matter-of-fact helpmate.
“Where is our child?” asked the father, with that wayward wandering of mind which is a not uncommon characteristic of genius.
“Smoking in the tent,” answered the mother.
“And with my pipe, no doubt,” said the father, laying down his rod and searching in the bag in which he was wont to carry, among other things, his pipe and tobacco.
A cry of pain from the tent in question—which was close behind the pair—apprised the parents that something was wrong. Immediately their first and only one issued with a tobacco pipe in one hand and a burnt finger on the other. It came to the father for sympathy, and got it. That is to say, La Certe put the burnt finger in his mouth for a moment, and uttered some guttural expressions of sympathy. Having thus fulfilled duty and relieved conscience, he exchanged the finger for the pipe-stem, and began to smoke. The spoiled, as well as despoiled, child uttered a howl of indignation, and staggered off to its mother; but she received it with a smile of affectionate indifference, whereupon the injured creature went back to the tent, howling, and, apparently, howled itself to sleep.
Again La Certe broke the piscatorial spell that had settled down on them, and, taking up the thread of discourse where he had dropped it, repeated his statement that he had been wondering for a long time why Cloudbrow, alias young Duncan McKay, was so sharp and fierce in denying that he knew anything about the murder of Henri Perrin.
“Hee! hee!” was Slowfoot’s significant reply.
“Can Slowfoot not guess?” he asked, after attending to a hopeful nibble, which came to nothing.
“Slowfoot need not guess; she knows,” said the woman with an air of great mystery.