It was with little reminiscences like the one just narrated that old Quatreaux used to wile away the time, as we threaded the intricate ditches of the marsh in his canoe, so hedged in by the tall reeds that our horizon was within paddle's length of us. With that presumptive clairvoyance which appears to be an essential property of the French raconteur, he did not confine himself to external fact in his narratives, but always professed to report minutely the thoughts that flashed through the mind of such and such a person, on the particular occasion referred to. He was a master of dialects,—Yankee, Pennsylvanian Dutch, and Irish.
"Where did you get your English, old man?" I asked him, as we scudded across the lake in our canoe, with a small sail up, one red October evening.
"In Pennsylvania," replied he. "I went there on my own hook, when I was about twelve year old, and worked in an oil-mill for four year."
"In an oil-mill? Perhaps that accounts for the glibness with which language slips off your tongue."
"'Guess it do," said the old voyageur, with ready assent.
We nearly got foul of a raft coming down the lake, manned with a rugged set of half-breeds, who had a cask of whiskey on board, and were very drunk and boisterous.
"Ugly customers to deal with, those brûlés," remarked I, when we had got clear away from them.
"Some on 'em is," replied the old voyageur. "Did you notice the one with the queer eye,—him in the Scotch cap and shupac moccasons?"
I had noticed him, and an ill-looking thief he was. One of his eyes, either from natural deformity or the effect of hostile operation, was dragged down from its proper parallel, and planted in a remote socket near the corner of his mouth, whence it glared and winked with super-natural ferocity.
"That's Rupe Falardeau," continued my companion. "His father, old Rupe, got his eye taken down in a deck-fight with a Mississippi boatman; and this boy was born with the same mark,—only the eye's lower down still. If that's to go on in the family, I guess there'll be a Falardeau with his eye in his knee, some time."