“'I knew God would not desert me entirely,' she said. 'When will he return?'
“'When le bon Dieu leads the way,' I said, and I told her about the pillar of cloud which had guided me to her.
“She pointed aloft, and I saw a lantern tied to the masthead. 'I have put it there to light every night until he returns,' she said. 'It will be lit many a night,' said I to myself; and I must have sighed aloud, for she looked curiously at me. 'I am cruel!' she exclaimed; 'I must show you your room.' She said it with almost a laugh, for it was a funny little bunk she led me to. Into it I crawled, and off to sleep I went, scarcely conscious that she washed the blood from my face and ministered to my other wounds. When I woke, it was the next day.
“And such a day as it was! one thick smother of snow coming up the great valley of the St. Lawrence on a bitter wind. And bitter cold it was, too, in the little cabin of our schooner, though the fire in the stove did its best. I was too sick, though, to know much what was going on. Several times I heard the chopping of a hatchet. Several times she came to me with hot food. And as the day passed, strength came back to my blood and I got up. I surprised her lighting the lantern and taking it out into the wild evening. I tried to stop that, fearing some accident to her in the roar and rush of the storm, but she said her brother must be lighted back, and so in the end it was I who had to haul the swaying lantern to the masthead.
“For three days the snow flew by and heaped an ever-increasing drift across the deck, around the cabin door. On the fourth day we looked out on a scene of desolation. The sun shone dimly in skies of pinching cold. There was no pillar of smoke, the pool having at last been frozen over. There was a wide river of ice, piled in fantastic floes, a wider plain, spotted here and there with thickets. And far off ran the dark line of forest, inhabited by wolves which would speedily become fiercer. In the forest far away stood my little cabin with its dead man keeping guard. It would be long before I should see it, if I ever did. Without snow-shoes, it would be impossible to cross the forest now; without food, we could live only a short time longer on the ship. And then I made the discovery that our stove fire was being maintained by schooner wood. That had accounted for her chopping and for her grave face as she carried in the wood. She had been breaking up a part of the ship each day to keep the fire going!
“The responsibilities upon me made me forget my sorrows, the death of ole Pierre, the lost time for trapping, the pinch of hunger. I made a makeshift pair of skees from two plankings of the schooner, and journeyed daily to some thicket by the shore wherein I had set my snares, and we lived on rabbit stew. With much labor I cut a hole in the ice, through which, with much patience, she fished. But days went by when it was too stormy either to hunt or to fish, and we sat huddled about the stove in which we burned as little wood as we could to keep from freezing.
“During such times we talked, but not of the future, only of the past. She told me how they, she and her brother, had set out on a rumor of gold in the Laurentians; how the crew had deserted in a body with most of the stores; how she and her brother had been unable to man the ship sufficiently to keep it from this disaster. A dozen times she described the scene where he had said farewell to her on the morning of the day he had found me. A hundred times she asked me to tell her of our meeting; and a thousand, I may well say, she wondered how soon he would return.
“Every evening she had me hang the lantern to the mast to guide him back. I could not prevent it, except by telling of his death, and that I could not do. I feared that the news, coupled with our desperate situation, would end her life. As it was, she was far too weak to travel now, even if I had had the snow-shoes for her.
“Thus passed the first days. Then I saw that something must be done or else we should soon have burned up the house that sheltered us, deck, mast, and hull, before Christmas. Even then we were beginning on the walls of the schooner, since she would not let me chop down the mast.
“'There will be no place to hang the lantern if you destroy that!' she cried, when she had rushed out on deck one morning, to find me half-way through the strong oak.