"Yes." The man bestirred himself abruptly. He stood up from his lounging against the gatepost, and his great height and breadth of muscular shoulders seemed suddenly to have grown. "So I live. And you are glad. That's it. So I live. It's always that way—with you and Uncle Steve. It's for me. All the time for me. Not a thing for yourselves—ever."
The woman's eyes were suddenly filled with startled questioning and solicitude.
"Oh, yes? That so," she said simply. "Why not? You all Uncle Steve got. You all An-ina got. So."
"And aren't you both all—I've got?" The man's smile disarmed the sudden passionate force which had taken possession of his voice and manner. "Can't I act that way, too? Can't I sort of carry you and Uncle Steve on my back? Can't I come along and say, 'Here, you've done all this for me when I couldn't act for myself, now it's my turn? You sit around and look on, and act foolish, like I've done all the time, while I get busy.' Can't I say this, same as you've acted all these years? No. You two great creatures won't let me. And sometimes it makes me mad. And sometimes it makes me want to stretch out these fool arms of mine and hug you for the kindest, bravest, and best in the world."
An-ina laughed in her silent Indian fashion, and the delight in her eyes was a reflection of the joy in her soul.
"You say all those. It make no matter," she said.
"But it does make matter." The man's handsome face flushed, and his keen blue eyes shone with a half angry, half impatient light. With a curious gesture of suppressed feeling he passed a hand over his clean-shaven mouth, as though to smooth the whiskers that had never been permitted to disfigure it. "It makes me feel a darn selfish, useless hulk of a man. And I'm not," he cried. "I'm neither those things. Say An-ina," he went on, more calmly, and with a light of humour in his eyes, "Don't you dare to laff at me. Don't you dare deny the things I'm saying. I won't stand for it. For all you're my old nurse I'll just pick you up like nothing and throw you to the dogs back in the yard there. And maybe that'll let you see I can do the things I figure to. I'm a grown man, and Uncle Steve says 'no' every time I ask to take on the work of locating where the weed grows, which he hasn't found in fourteen years, and which my father was yearning to find before he died. 'No,' he says. 'This is for me. It's my work. It's the thing I set out to do—for you.' When I ask to do the trade at Seal Bay, it's the same. He guesses the 'sharps' would beat me. Me! who could break a dozen of their heads in as many minutes. So I'm left to the trail—the summer trail—to gather pelts, and learn a craft I know by heart. I keep the Sleeper boys busy, and in good heart. I'm the big hunter they like to follow. I'm the son of a great white chief they say, and, for me, they're sort of fool dolls I pull the strings of, while Uncle Steve does the big man's work. Can you beat it? It's all wrong. You and Uncle Steve are twice my age. You've crowded a life's work—for me. You both reckon to go on—always for me. While I sit around guessing I'm a man because I know a jack-rabbit from a bull-moose. It's got to alter. It's going to alter—after the summer. I want the big scrap, An-ina. The real scrap life can hand a feller that can write 'man' to his name. I'm out for it all. I want it all. And if Uncle Steve's right, and I'm wrong, and I go under, I'm ready to take the med'cine however it comes."
The smile of the woman was full of the mother. It was full of the Indian, too.
"Oh, yes," she said quickly. "What you call him, 'chance.' The 'big chance.' So it is. It good. So very, very good for the big man. Marcel the big man. I know. Oh, yes. I know. The chance it come. Maybe easy. Maybe not. It come. So it is always. It come, you take it. You not must look, or you find trouble. You take it. Always take it when it come. That how An-ina think."
Marcel laughed. His impatience had vanished before the sun of his happy temperament.