The Bishop went swiftly among them, where already mothers were drawing family groups aside and parcelling out the doles of food. Already these mothers were erecting the invisible roof-tree and drawing around them and theirs the circle of the hearth, even though it was a circle drawn only in hot, drifting ashes. The Bishop was an inquisitor kindly of eye and understanding of heart, but by no means to be evaded. Unsuspected stores of bread and beans and tinned meats came forth from nondescript bundles of clothing and were laid under his eye. It appeared that Arsene LaComb had stayed in his little provision store until the last moment portioning out what was his with even hand, to each one as much as could be carried. The Bishop saw that it was all pitifully little for those who had lived in the village and for those refugees who had been driven in from the surrounding hills. But, he thought, it would do. These were people born to frugality, inured to scanty living.
The thing now was to give them work for their hands, to put something before them that was to be accomplished. For even in the ruin of all things it is not well for men to sit down in the ashes and merely wait. They had no tools left but the axes which they had carried in their hands to the rafts, but with these they could hew some sort of shelter out of the loose logs in the lake. A rough shack of any kind would cover at least 199 the weaker ones until lumber could be brought up or until a saw could be had for the ruined mill at the outlet of the lake. It would be slow work and hard and a makeshift at the best. But it would put heart into them to see at least something, anything, begin to rise from the hopeless level of the ashes.
Three of the hill men had managed to keep their horses by holding desperately to them all through the day before and swimming and wading them through the night in the lake. These the Bishop despatched to what, as near as he could judge, were the nearest points from which messages could be gotten to the world outside the burnt district. They bore orders to dealers in the nearest towns for all the things that were immediately necessary for the life and rebuilding of the little village. With the orders went the notes of hand of all the men gathered here who had had a standing of credit or whose names would mean anything to the dealers. And, since the world outside would well know that these men had now nothing that would make the notes worth while, each note bore the endorsement of the Bishop of Alden. For the Bishop knew that there was no time to wait for charity and its tardy relief. Credit, that intangible, indefinable thing that alone makes the life of the world go on, must be established at once. And it was characteristic of Joseph Winthrop that, in endorsing the notes of 200 penniless, broken men, he did not feel that he was signing obligations upon himself and his diocese. He was simply writing down his gospel of his unbounded, unafraid faith in all true men. And it is a commentary upon that faith of his that he was never presented with a single one of the notes he signed that day.
All the day long men toiled with heart and will, dragging logs and driftwood from the lake and cutting, splitting, shaping planks and joists for a shanty, while the women picked burnt nails and spikes from the ruins of what had been their homes. So that when night came down over the hills there was an actual shelter over the heads of women and children. And the light spirited, sanguine people raised cheer after cheer as their imagination leaped ahead to the new French Village that would rise glorious out of the ashes of the old. Then Father Ponfret, catching their mood, raised for them the hymn to the Good Saint Anne. They were all men from below Beaupre and from far Chicothomi where the Good Saint holds the hearts of all. That hymn had never been out of their childhood hearing. They sang it now, old and young, good and bad, their eyes filling with the quick-welling tears, their hearts rising high in hope and love and confidence on the lilt of the air. Even the Bishop, whose singing voice approached a scandal and whose 201 French has been spoken of before, joined in loud and unashamed.
Then mothers clucking softly to their offspring in the twilight brooded them in to shelter from the night damp of the lake, and men, sharing odd pieces and wisps of tobacco, lay down to talk and plan and dropped dead asleep with the hot pipes still clenched in their teeth.
Also, a bishop, a very tired, weary man, a very old man to-night, laid his head upon a saddle and a folded blanket and considered the Mysteries of God and His world, as the beads slipped through his fingers and unfolded their story to him.
Two men were stumbling fearfully down through the ashes of the far slope to the lake. All day long they had lain on their faces in the grass just beyond the highest line of the fire. The fire had gone on past them leaving them safe. But behind them rose tier upon tier of barren rocks, and behind those lay a hundred miles nearly of unknown country. They could not go that way. They were not, in fact, fit for travel in any direction. For all the day before they had run, dodging like hunted rats, between a line of fire––of their own making––before them, and a line of armed men behind them. They had outrun the fire and gotten beyond its edge. They had outrun the men and escaped them. They were free of those two enemies. But a third enemy had 202 run with them all through the day yesterday and had stayed with them through all the horror of last night and it had lain with them through all the blistering heat of to-day, thirst. Thirst, intolerable, scorching thirst, drying their bones, splitting their lips, bulging their eyes. And all day long, down there before their very eyes, taunting them, torturing them by its nearness, lay a lake cool and sweet and deep and wide. It was worse than the mirage of any desert, for they knew that it was real. It was not merely the illusion of the sense of sight. They could perhaps have stood the torture of one sense. But this lake came up to them through all their senses. They could feel the air from it cool upon their brows. The wind brought the smell of water up to taunt their nostrils. And, so near did it seem, they could even fancy that they heard the lapping of the little waves against the rocks. This last they knew was an illusion. But, for the matter of that, all might as well have been an illusion. Armed men, their enemies who had yesterday chased them with death in their hearts, were scattered around the shore of the lake, alert and watching for any one who might come out of the fringe of shrub and grass beyond the line of the burnt ground. No living thing could move down that bare and whitened hillside toward the lake without being marked by those armed men. And, for these two men, to be seen meant to die.
So they had lain all day on their faces and raved in their torture. Now when they saw the fires on the shore where French Village had been beginning to die down they were stumbling painfully and crazily down to the water.