At the words a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of eyes, wide, clear, and tired with looking out on a century of the world's time. His movements, as he laid one side his axe and passed a great, gnarled hand across his forehead, were angular and slow. We knew instinctively the quality of his work--a deliberate pause, a mighty blow, another pause, a painful recovery--labour compounded of infinite slow patience, but wonderfully effective in the week's result. It would go on without haste, without pause, inevitable as the years slowly closing about the toiler. His mental processes would be of the same fibre. The apparent hesitation might seem to waste the precious hours remaining, but in the end, when the engine started, it would move surely and unswervingly along the appointed grooves. In his wealth of hair; in his wide eyes, like the mysterious blanks of a marble statue; in his huge frame, gnarled and wasted to the strange, impressive, powerful age-quality of Phidias's old men, he seemed to us to deserve a wreath and a marble seat with strange inscriptions and the graceful half-draperies of another time and a group of old Greeks like himself with whom to exchange slow sentences on the body politic. Indeed, the fact that his seat was of fallen pine, and his draperies of butternut brown, and his audience two half-breed children, an artist, and a writer, and his body politic two hundred acres in the wilderness, did not filch from him the impressiveness of his estate. He was a Patriarch. It did not need the park of birch trees, the grass beneath them sloping down to the water, the wooded knoll fairly insisting on a spacious mansion, to substantiate Dick's fancy that he had discovered an ancestor.
Neat piles of brush, equally neat piles of cord-wood, knee-high stumps as cleanly cut as by a saw, attested the old man's efficiency. We conversed.
Yes, said he, the soil was good. It is laborious to clear away the forest. Still, one arrives. M'sieu has but to look. In the memory of his oldest grandson, even, all this was a forest. Le bon Dieu had blessed him. His family was large. Yes, it was as M'sieu said, eighty-seven--that is, counting himself. The soil was not wonderful. It is indeed a large family and much labour, but somehow there was always food for all. For his part he had a great pity for those whom God had not blessed. It must be very lonesome without children.
We spared a private thought that this old man was certainly in no danger of loneliness.
Yes, he went on, he was old--eighty-five. He was not as quick as he used to be; he left that for the young ones. Still, he could do a day's work. He was most proud to have made these gentlemen's acquaintance. He wished us good-day.
We left him seated on the pine log, his axe between his knees, his great, gnarled brown hands hanging idly. After a time we heard the whack of his implement; then after another long time we heard it whack again. We knew that those two blows had gone straight and true and forceful to the mark. So old a man had no energy to expend in the indirections of haste.
Our elfish guides led us back along the trail to the farmhouse. A girl of thirteen had just arrived from school. In the summer the little ones divided the educational advantages among themselves, turn and turn about.
The newcomer had been out into the world, and was dressed accordingly. A neat dark-blue cloth dress, plainly made, a dull red and blue checked apron; a broad, round hat, shoes and stockings, all in the best and quietest taste--marked contrast to the usual garish Sunday best of the Anglo-Saxon. She herself exemplified the most striking type of beauty to be found in the mixed bloods. Her hair was thick and glossy and black in the mode that throws deep purple shadows under the rolls and coils. Her face was a regular oval, like the opening in a wishbone. Her skin was dark, but rich and dusky with life and red blood that ebbed and flowed with her shyness. Her lips were full, and of a dark cherry red. Her eyes were deep, rather musing, and furnished with the most gloriously tangling of eyelashes. Dick went into ecstasies, took several photographs which did not turn out well, and made one sketch which did. Perpetually did he bewail the absence of oils. The type is not uncommon, but its beauty rarely remains perfect after the fifteenth year.
We made our ceremonious adieus to the Madame, and started back to town under the guidance of one of the boys, who promised us a short cut.
This youth proved to be filled with the old, wandering spirit that lures so many of his race into the wilderness life. He confided to us as we walked that he liked to tramp extended distances, and that the days were really not made long enough for those who had to return home at night.