"And I shall miss you," he sighed. "Je suis Canadien. I, too, was le beau seigneur. So I lak not to loose a gentilhomme from my troop.
"Now you call me old fool, eh? Go ron away—change you your clothes. Vite! An' to-morrow you report at orderly room to take your medicine."
So we shook hands, and for once in my wicked life I shed tears of remorse.
I had sinned against the discipline of the force, attacking the foundations of the public safety.
I had disturbed the serenity of the Blackfoot nation, the most formidable savages on earth, at a time when our weak settlements lay at their mercy.
While in the Canadian service, I had killed a subject of the United States, and nations have been embroiled in war by trifles less than that.
It was Superintendent Fourmet's duty to expel me from the service, and deport me from the country.
Oh, well for me if he had done his duty. With Rain my wife, we might have lived in honor, helping to save a dying people before it was too late.
I am an aristocrat for the same reason that a wolf is a wolf, and hold equality to be an illusion of the uncouth. And as a wolf will mate with wolf, Rain was my natural partner.
But we were held apart by an unnatural convention, that horrible fetish respectability, god of the Anglo-Saxons, enemy of Christ, forever forging chains for free and liberal spirits, parting honest lovers, selling virgins in marriage to beasts, and vending clean men to most unholy women. The temple is profaned by all who buy and sell their bodies in wedlock or without, but most of all by the respectable, who bind us with chains most grievous to be borne, and where Christ gave us the one commandment—Love, dare to forbid the banns.