“I have been doing some thinking in the last few minutes, Father. I’ve decided to make my first call on you for assistance.”
“Very well, Captain.”
“It is about the maid. Have you noticed?”
“She seems of a sober mind.”
“Don’t you see why? It is her father’s losses, and this journey. She is taking it very 44 hard. She is afraid, Father, all the time; and she neither sleeps nor eats.”
“It is naturally hard for such a child as she is to take this journey. She has had no experience,––she does not comprehend the easy customs and the hard travelling of the frontier. I think that in time––”
Menard was puffing impatiently.
“Father,” he said, “do you remember when Major Gordeau was killed, and I was detailed to bring his wife and daughter down to Three Rivers? It was much like this. They fretted and could not sleep, and the coarse fare of the road was beneath their appetites. Do you remember? And when it came to taking the rapids, with the same days of hard work that lie before us now, they were too weak, and they sickened, the mother first, then the daughter. When I think of that, Father, of the last week of that journey, and of how I swore never again to take a woman in my care on the river, I––well, there is no use in going over it. If this goes on, we shall not get to Frontenac in time, that is all. And I cannot afford to take such a chance.”
The priest looked grave. The long struggle against the rapids from Montreal to La Gallette 45 had tried the hardihood of more than one strong man.
“It is probable, my son, that the sense of your responsibility makes you a little over-cautious. She is a strong enough child, I should say. Still, perhaps the food is not what she has been accustomed to. I have noticed that she eats little.”