Joy in the Morning Part 8

wik. Ze rod is ready take feesh, I see feesh jump by ole log. Not much room to cast, but m'sieur can do it. Shall I carry rod down to river for m'sieur?"

In not so many words as I have written, but in clear pictures which comprehended the words, Memory, that temperamental G.o.ddess of moods, had, at the p.r.i.c.k of the word "Huron," shaken out this soft-colored tapestry of the forest, and held it before my eyes. And as she withdrew this one, others took its place and at length I was musing profoundly, as I put more of something on my plate and tucked it away into my anatomy. I mused about Rafael, the guide of sixty, who had begun a life of continued labor at eight years; I considered the undying Indian in him; how with the father who was "French of Picardy"--the white blood being a pride to Rafael--he himself, yes, and the father also, for he had married a "_sauvagess_," a Huron woman--had belonged to the tribe and were accounted Hurons; I considered Rafael's proud carriage, his cla.s.sic head and carved features, his Indian austerity and his French mirth weaving in and out of each other; I considered the fineness and the fearlessness of his spirit, which long hards.h.i.+p had not blunted; I reflected on the tales he had told me of a youth forced to fight the world. "_On a vu de le misere_," Rafael had said: "One has seen trouble"--shaking his head, with lines of old suffering emerging from the reserve of his face like writing in sympathetic ink under heat. And I marvelled that through such fire, out of such neglect, out of lack of opportunity and bitter pressure, the steel of a character should have been tempered to gentleness and bravery and honor.

For it was a very splendid old boy who was cooking for me and greasing my boots and going off with me after moose; putting his keen ancestral instincts of three thousand years at my service for three dollars a day. With my chances would not Rafael have been a bigger man than I? At least never could I achieve that grand air, that austere repose of manner which he had got with no trouble at all from a line of unwashed but courageous old bucks, thinking highly of themselves for untold generations, and killing everything which thought otherwise. I laughed all but aloud at this spot in my meditations, as a special vision of Rafael rose suddenly, when he had stated, on a day, his views of the great war. He talked plain language about the Germans. He specified why he considered the nation a disgrace to humanity--most people, not German, agree on the thesis and its specifications. Then the fire of his ancient fighting blood blazed through restraint of manner. He drew up his tall figure, slim-waisted, deep-shouldered, every inch sliding muscle. "I am too old to go on first call to army," said Rafael. "Zey will not take me. Yes, and on second call. Maybe zird time. But if time come when army take me--I go. If I may kill four Germans I will be content," stated Rafael concisely. And his warrior forebears would have been proud of him as he stated it.

My reflections were disturbed here by the American general at the next table. He was spoken to by his waiter and shot up and left the room, carrying, however, his napkin in his hand, so that I knew he was due to come back. A half sentence suggested a telephone. I watched the soldierly back with plenty of patriotic pride; this was the sort of warrior my country turned out now by tens of thousands. With that he returned, and as I looked up into his face, behold it was Fitzhugh.

My chair went banging as I sprang toward him. "Jim!"

And the general's calm dignity suddenly was the radiant grin of the boy who had played and gone to school and stolen apples with me for a long bright childhood--the boy lost sight of these last years of his in the army. "Dave!" he cried out. "Old Davy Cram!" And his arm went around my shoulder regardless of the public. "My word, but I'm glad!" he sputtered. And then: "Come and have dinner--finish having it. Come to our table." He slewed me about and presented me to the three others.

In a minute I was installed, to the pride of my friend the head waiter, at military headquarters, next to Fitzhugh and the Frenchman. A campact resume of personal history between Fitzhugh and myself over, I turned to the blue figure on my left hand, Colonel Raffre, of the French, army. On his broad chest hung thrilling bits of color, not only the bronze war cross, with its green watered ribbon striped with red, but the blood-red ribbon of the "Great Cross" itself--the cross of the Legion of Honor. I spoke to him in French, which happens to be my second mother tongue, and he met the sound with a beaming welcome.

"I don't do English as one should," he explained in beautiful Parisian.

"No gift of tongues in my kit, I fear; also I'm a bit embarra.s.sed at practising on my friends. It's a relief to meet some one who speaks perfectly French, as m'sieur."

M'sieur was gratified not to have lost his facility. "But my ear is getting slower," I said. "For instance, I eavesdropped a while ago when you were talking about your Huron soldiers, and I got most of what you said because you spoke English. I doubt if I could if you'd been speaking French."

The colonel shrugged ma.s.sive shoulders. "My English is defective but distinct," he explained. "One is forced to speak slowly when one speaks badly. Also the Colonel Chichely"--the Britisher--"it is he at whom I talk carefully. The English ear, it is not imaginative. One must make things clear. You know the Hurons, then?"

I specified how.

"Ah!" he breathed out. "The men in my command had been, some of them, what you call guides. They got across to France in charge of troop horses on the s.h.i.+ps; then they stayed and enlisted. Fine soldier stuff.

Hardy, and of resource and of finesse. Quick and fearless as wildcats.

They fit into one niche of the war better than any other material. You heard the story of my rescue?"

I had not. At that point food had interfered, and I asked if it was too much that the colonel should repeat.

"By no means," agreed the polite colonel, ready, moreover, I guessed, for any amount of talk in his native tongue. He launched an epic episode. "I was. .h.i.t leading, in a charge, two battalions. I need not have done that," another shrug--"but what will you? It was snowing; it was going to be bad work; one could perhaps put courage into the men by being at their head. It is often the duty of an officer to do more than, his duty--_n'est-ce-pas?_ So that I was. .h.i.t in the right knee and the left shoulder _par exemple_, and fell about six yards from the German trenches. A place unhealthy, and one sees I could not run away, being shot on the bias. I shammed dead. An alive French officer would have been too interesting in that scenery. I a.s.sure m'sieur that the _entr'actes_ are far too long in No Man's Land. I became more and more displeased with the management of that play as I lay, very badly amused with my wounds, and afraid to blink an eye, being a corpse. The Huns demand a high state of immobility in corpses. But I fell happily sidewise, and out of the extreme corner of the left eye I caught a glimpse of our sand-bags. One blessed that twist, though it became enough _ennuyant_, and one would have given a year of good life to turn over. Merely to turn over. Am I fatiguing m'sieur?" the colonel broke in.

I prodded him back eagerly into his tale.

"M'sieur is amiable. The long and short of it is that when it became dark my good lads began to try to rescue my body. Four or five times that one-twentieth of eye saw a wriggling form work through sand-bags and start slowly, flat to the earth, toward me. But the ground was snow-covered and the Germans saw too the dark uniform. Each time a fusillade of shots broke out, and the moving figure dropped hastily behind the sand-bags. And each time--" the colonel stopped to light a cigarette, his face ruddy in the glare of the match. "Each time I was--disappointed. I became disgusted with the management of that theatre, till at last the affair seemed beyond hope, and I had about determined to turn over and draw up my bad leg with my good hand for a bit of eas.e.m.e.nt and be shot comfortably, when I was aware that the surface of the ground near by was heaving--the white, snowy ground heaving. I was close enough to madness between cold and pain, and I regarded the phenomenon as a dream. But with that hands came out of the heaving ground, eyes gleamed. A rope was lashed about my middle and I was drawn toward our trenches." The cigarette puffed vigorously at this point. "M'sieur sees?"

I did not.

The colonel laughed. "One of my Hurons had the inspiration to run to a farmhouse not far away and requisition a sheet. He wrapped himself in it, head and all, and, being Indian, it was a bagatelle to him to crawl out on his stomach. They were pleased enough, my good fellows, when they found they had got not only my body but also me in it."

"I can imagine, knowing Hurons, how that Huron enjoyed his success," I said. "It's in their blood to be swift and silent and adventurous. But they're superst.i.tious; they're afraid of anything supernatural." I hesitated, with a laugh in my mind at a memory. "It's not fitting that I should swap stories with a hero of the Great War, yet--I believe you might be amused with an adventure of one of my guides." The Frenchman, all civil interest, disclaimed his heroism with hands and shoulders, but smiling too--for he had small chance at disclaiming with those two crosses on his breast.

"I shall be enchanted to hear m'sieur's tale of his guide. For the rest I am myself quite mad over the 'sport.' I love to insanity the out of doors and shooting and fis.h.i.+ng. It is a regret that the service has given me no opportunity these four years for a breathing spell in the woods. M'sieur will tell me the tale of his guide's superst.i.tion?"

A scheme began to form in my brain at that instant too delightful, it seemed, to come true. I put it aside and went on with my story. "I have one guide, a Huron half-breed," I said, "whom I particularly like. He's an old fellow--sixty--but light and quick and powerful as a boy. More interesting than a boy, because he's full of experiences. Two years ago a bear swam across the lake where my camp is, and I went out in a canoe with this Rafael and got him."

Colonel Raffre made of this fact an event larger than--I am sure--he would have made of his winning of the war cross.

"You shame me, colonel," I said, and went on hurriedly. "Rafael, the guide, was pleased about the bear. 'When gentlemens kill t'ings, guides is more happy,' he explained to me, and he proceeded to tell an anecdote. He prefaced it by informing me that one time he hunt bear and he see devil. He had been hunting, it seemed, two or three winters before with his brother-in-law at the headwaters of the St. Maurice River, up north there," I elucidated, pointing through the window toward the "long white street of Beauport," across the St. Lawrence. "It's very lonely country, entirely wild, Indian hunting-ground yet. These two Hurons, Rafael and his brother-in-law, were on a two months' trip to hunt and trap, having their meagre belongings and provisions on sleds which they dragged across the snow. They depended for food mostly on what they could trap or shoot--moose, caribou, beaver, and small animals. But they had bad luck. They set many traps but caught nothing, and they saw no game to shoot. So that in a month they were hard pressed. One cold day they went two miles to visit a beaver trap, where they had seen signs. They hoped to find an animal caught and to feast on beaver tail, which is good eating."

Here I had to stop and explain much about beaver tails, and the rest of beavers, to the Frenchman, who was interested like a boy in this new, almost unheard-of beast. At length:

"Rafael and his brother-in-law were disappointed. A beaver had been close and eaten the bark off a birch stick which the men had left, but nothing was in the trap. They turned and began a weary walk through the desolate country back to their little tent. Small comfort waited for them there, as their provisions were low, only flour and bacon left.

And they dared not expend much of that. They were down-hearted, and to add to it a snow-storm came on and they lost their way. Almost a hopeless situation--an uninhabited country, winter, snow, hunger. And they were lost. '_Egare. Perdu_,' Rafael said. But the Huron was far from giving up. He peered through the falling snow, not thick yet, and spied a mountain across a valley. He knew that mountain. He had worked near it for two years, logging--the '_chantier_,' they call it. He knew there was a good camp on a river near the mountain, and he knew there would be a stove in the camp and, as Rafael said, 'Mebbe we haf a luck and somebody done gone and lef' somet'ing to eat,' Rafael prefers to talk English to me. He told me all this in broken English.

"It was three miles to the hypothetical camp, but the two tired, hungry men in their rather wretched clothes started hopefully. And after a hard tramp through unbroken forest they came in sight of a log shanty and their spirits rose. 'Pretty tired work,' Rafael said it was. When they got close to the shanty they h.o.a.rd a noise inside. They halted and looked at each other. Rafael knew there were no loggers in these parts now, and you'll remember it was absolutely wild country. Then something came to the window and looked out."

"_Something_?" repeated the Frenchman in italics. His eyes were wide and he was as intent on Rafael's story as heart could desire.

"They couldn't tell what it was," I went on. "A formless apparition, not exactly white or black, and huge and unknown of likeness. The Indians were frightened by a manner of unearthliness about the thing, and the brother-in-law fell on his knees and began to pray. 'It is the devil,'

he murmured to Rafael. 'He will eat us, or carry us to h.e.l.l.' And he prayed more.

"But old Rafael, scared to death, too, because the thing seemed not to be of this world, yet had his courage with him. 'Mebbe it devil,' he said--such was his report to me--'anyhow I'm cold and hungry, me. I want dat camp. I go shoot dat devil.'

"He crept up to the camp alone, the brother still praying in the bush.

Rafael was rather convinced, mind you, that he was going to face the powers of darkness, but he had his rifle loaded and was ready for business. The door was open and he stepped inside. Something--'great beeg somet'ing' he put it--rose up and came at him, and he fired. And down fell the devil."

"In the name of a sacred pig, what was it?" demanded my Frenchman.

"That was what I asked. It was a bear. The men who had been logging in the camp two months back had left a keg of maple-syrup and a half barrel of flour, and the bear broke into both--successively--and alternately.

He probably thought he was in bear-heaven for a while, but it must have gotten irksome. For his head was eighteen inches wide when they found him, white, with black touches. They soaked him in the river two days, and sold his skin for twenty dollars. 'Pretty good for devil skin,'

Rafael said."

The Frenchman stared at me a moment and then leaned back in his chair and shouted laughter. The greedy bear's finish had hit his funny-bone.

And the three others stopped talking and demanded the story told over, which I did, condensing.

"I like zat Hurong for my soldier," Colonel Raffre stated heartily. "Ze man what are not afraid of man _or_ of devil--zat is ze man to fight ze Boches." He was talking English now because Colonel Chichely was listening. He went on. "Zere is human devils--oh, but plentee--what we fight in France. I haf not heard of ozzers. But I believe well ze man who pull me out in sheet would be as your guide Rafael--he also would crip up wiz his rifle on real devil out of h.e.l.l. But yes. I haf not told you how my Indian soldier bring in prisoners--no?"

We all agreed no, and put in a request.

"He brings zem in not one by one always--not always." The colonel grinned. He went on to tell this tale, which I s.h.i.+ft into the vernacular from his laborious English.

It appears that he had discerned the apt.i.tude of his Hurons for reconnaissance work. If he needed information out of the dangerous country lying in front, if he needed a prisoner to question, these men were eager to go and get either, get anything. The more hazardous the job the better, and for a long time they came out of it untouched. In the group one man--nicknamed by the poilus, his comrades--Hirondelle--the Swallow--supposedly because of his lightness and swiftness, was easily chief. He had a fault, however, his dislike to bring in prisoners alive. Four times he had haled a German corpse before the colonel, seeming not rightly to understand that a dead enemy was useless for information.

"The Boches are good killing," he had elucidated to his officer. And finally: "It is well, m'sieur, the colonel. One failed to understand that the colonel prefers a live Boche to a dead one. Me, I am otherwise.

It appears a pity to let live such vermin. Has the colonel, by chance, heard the things these savages did in Belgium? Yes? But then--Yet I will bring to m'sieur, the colonel, all there is to be desired of German prisoners alive--_en vie_; fat ones; _en ma.s.se_."

That night Hirondelle was sent out with four of his fellow Hurons to get, if possible, a prisoner. Pretty soon he was separated from the others; all but himself returning empty-handed in a couple of hours. No Germans seemed to be abroad. But Hirondelle did not return.

"He risks too far," grumbled his captain. "He has been captured at last.

I always knew they would get him, one night."

But that was not the night. At one o'clock there was suddenly a sound of lamentation in the front trench of the French on that sector. The soldiers who were sleeping crawled out of their holes in the sides of the trench walls, and crowded around the zigzag, narrow way and rubbed their eyes and listened to the laughter of officers and soldiers on duty. There was Hirondelle, solemn as a church, yet with a dancing light in his eyes. There, around him, crowded as sheep to a shepherd, twenty figures in German uniform stood with hands up and wet tears running down pasty cheeks. And they were fat, it was noticeable that all of them were bulging of figure beyond even the German average. They wailed "Kamerad!

Gut Kamerad!" in a chorus that was sickening to the plucky poilu make-up. Hirondelle, interrogated of many, kept his lips shut till the first excitement quieted. Then: "I report to my colonel," he stated, and finally he and his twenty were led back to the winding trench and the colonel was waked to receive them. This was what had happened: Hirondelle had wandered about, mostly on his stomach, through the darkness and peril of No Man's Land, enjoying himself heartily; when suddenly he missed his companions and realized that he had had no sign of them for some time. That did not trouble him. He explained to the colonel that he felt "more free." Also that if he pulled off a success he would have "more glory." After two hours of this midnight amus.e.m.e.nt, in deadly danger every second, Hirondelle heard steps. He froze to the earth, as he had learned from wild things in North American forests. The steps came nearer. A star-sh.e.l.l away down the line lighted the scene so that Hirondelle, motionless on the ground, all keen eyes, saw two Germans coming toward him. Instantly he had a scheme. In a subdued growl, yet distinctly, he threw over his shoulder an order that eight men should go to the right and eight to the left. Then, on his feet, he sent into the darkness a stern "Halt!" Instantly there was a sputter, arms thrown up, the inevitable "Kamerad!" and Hirondelle ordered the first German to pa.s.s him, then a second. Out of the darkness emerged a third. Hirondelle waved him on, and with that there was a fourth. And a fifth. Behold a sixth. About then Hirondelle judged it wise to give more orders to his imaginary squad of sixteen. But such a panic had seized this German mob; that little acting was necessary. Dark figure followed dark figure out of the darker night--arms up. They whimpered as they came, and on and on they came out of shadows. Hirondelle stated that he began to think the Crown Prince's army was surrendering to him. At last, when the procession stopped, he--and his mythical sixteen--marched the entire covey, without any objection from them, only abject obedience, to the French trenches.

The colonel, with this whining crowd weeping about him, with Hirondelle's erect figure confronting him, his black eyes regarding the cowards with scorn as he made his report--the colonel simply could not understand the situation. All these men! "What are you--soldiers?" he flung at the wretched group. And one answered, "No, my officer. We are not soldiers, we are the cooks." At that there was a wail. "Ach! Who, then, will the breakfast cook for my general? He will _schrecklich_ angry be for his sausage and his sauerkraut."

By degrees the colonel got the story. A number of cooks had combined to protest against new regulations, and the general, to punish this astounding insubordination, had sent them out unarmed, petrified with, terror, into No Man's Land for an hour. They had there encountered Hirondelle. Hirondelle drew the attention of the colonel to the fact that he had promised prisoners, fat ones. "Will my colonel regard the shape of these pigs," suggested Hirondelle. "And also that they are twenty in number. Enough _en ma.s.se_ for one man to take, is it not, my colonel?"

The little dinner-party at the Frontenac discussed this episode. "Almost too good to be true, colonel," I objected. "You're sure it _is_ true?

Bring out your Hirondelle. He ought to be home wounded, with a war cross on his breast, by now."