“'Courage,' I said, 'it is His sign.' I fixed my torn pack, bound up my cheek and scalp, and made over the glassy surface of the plain straight where the pillar led me. On and on I stumbled. I would never have reached my errand's end but for that pillar of smoke. And if I had not reached it.—” Again there was a pause. Then, “I will tell some other time,” he said, “c'est une longue histoire.”
Not another word could we get from him, and we soon turned in. The last thing I remember was the Lad's voice coming to me from his bed, “Don't forget, Lucky, we'll get his pillar of fire out of him, too.”
PART II
THE PILLAR OF FIRE BY NIGHT
By next morning our storm of sleet had turned into a half-blizzard of snow and we put another great birch log on the fire, got out a new can of Prunier's favorite pipe tobacco, and generally made ready to extract the rest of his story from him when he had finished straightening up the kitchen.
“Yaas,” he said, “the next day to the day I was telling you about was just such another as this. All that morning I walked toward le bon Dieu's pillar of smoke, and in the afternoon I reached it, rising from the great whirling pool of steaming water into the gray sky that was thickening for a great snow—the real beginning of winter.
“Not far from the Smoky Pool, just as the dead man had said it would be, rode the schooner in the ice-locked cove where she had been wrecked. All was as still as a scared mouse. Behind me rose that white wavering pillar; and in front the vessel leaned a little, as if to subside into a wave-trough that would never receive her. But silence covered all, and I dreaded to enter that ship for fear of what I should see.
“But the dead man had been a better brother than he had been a ship-pilot, for he had left his sister most of the food; and when my foot-falls sounded uncannily loud upon the deck, she came running out of the cabin, a thin-cheeked, pale, slim woman. How she smiled! How the smile died from her face when she saw it was not her brother, but a stranger, torn, bloody-bandaged, ready to drop for fatigue!
“'Tell me, tell me quickly, what has happened. Who are you?' She steadied herself against the cabin doorway. 'Is my brother—not living?'
“I had not the heart or the words to tell her at that moment that I had left her brother closing his eyes in death in my little cabin so far away. I think I asked le bon Dieu to put words in my mouth that would not cause her to faint. Anyway, the words came from me: 'Your brother sent me. I left him—happy.'