CHAPTER IV THE STRANGER FROM CIVILISATION
“How goes it, little one, with Loup?”
The factor stopped a moment in the sunshine before the cabin of old France Moline.
Clad in a red skirt, brilliant in its adornment of stained quills of the porcupine got from the Indians, Francette paced daintily here and there in the clean-swept yard, now snapping her small fingers, now coaxing with soft noises in her round throat, her sparkling eyes fixed on the gaunt grey skeleton that stood on its four feet braced wide apart, wavering dizzily.
For a time she did not answer, as if he who spoke was no more than any youth of the settlement, so exaggeratedly absorbed was she.
Then, pushing back the curls from her face, a pretty motion that always wakened a look of admiration in masculine eyes beholding,—
“If he would only try, M'sieu,” she said, frowning, “but he does nothing save stand and look at me like that. The strength is gone from his legs.”
It seemed even as the little maid protested. Massive, silent, contemptuous, his small eyes under the wolfish skull cold and alight with a look that sent shuddering from him the timid,—thus he had been in his hard-fought and hard-won supremacy, a great, mysterious beast brought full-grown from the snowbound wilderness of the forest one famine-time by old Aquamis and sold to Bois DesCaut for a tie of tobacco.
Now he stood, a pitiable shadow, and begged mutely of the only tender hand he had known for understanding of this strange weakness that took his limbs and sent the heavens whirling.