Instantly we were in clinch like two bears; and we wrestled and strained and swayed there, panting and nigh stifled with our laughter, till we fell with a crash that shook the house and set the bottles clinking; and there thrashed like a pair o' pups till I got his shoulders flat.
But it was nothing—he being the younger—and he leaped up and fell to treading an Oneida battle-dance, while Penelope and I did beat upon the table, singing:
"Ha-wa-sa-say!
Hah!
Ha-wa-sa-say—"
till the door opened and there stands my Saguenay, bleary-eyed, sleep-muddled, but his benumbed brain responsive to the thumping cadence of the old scalp-song.
But I pushed him down stairs ere he had sniffed a lung-full of our punch, having no mind to face a drink-mad Indian that night or any other.
So I went below and piled the furs upon him and waited till he snored before I left him to his hibernation.
Such childishness! Who would believe it of us that were no longer children! And all alone there in a little house amid a vast and wintry wilderness, where no living thing stirred abroad save the white hare's ghost in the starlight, and the shadow of the lean, weird beast that tracked her.
Well, if we conducted like children we were as light-minded and as innocent. There was in our behaviour no lesser levity; in our mirth no grossness; in our jests and stories no license of the times nor any country coarseness in our speech.
Nor, in me, now remained aught of that sick-heart jealousy nor sentimental disorder which lately had seized me and upset my sense and reason.
My sentiments concerning Penelope seemed very clear to me now;—a warm liking; a chivalrous desire for her well-being and happiness; a pride that I had been, in some measure, the instrument which had awakened her to her own prerogatives in a world whose laws are made by men.