The Westerners Part 17

"I was wondering," he replied with equal simplicity, "whether you had always lived with him."

"No," she replied, without pretending not to understand the purport of his question. Then, in the same little voice, in which was a trace, just a trace, of an infinite dreariness: "I have lived all my life at an Indian agency. He came and took me away a little while ago. He is good to me," she said doubtfully, "and I am glad to be away. The agent was good to me, but there were only a few people, and I only read and read and read, or rode and rode and rode, and knew nothing at all of people. I got tired of it. n.o.body cared for me there. n.o.body cares for me anywhere, I reckon, except Mike, and his caring for people doesn't count so very much."

She turned upon him again that vaguely troubled gaze, which seemed to see him, and yet to look beyond him.

"Poor little girl," said Graham, on a sudden deeply moved.

"Poor little girl!" he repeated with infinite tenderness, and took her idle hand in both of his.

"Poor little girl!" he said for the third time. She put her other hand before her eyes; then, releasing herself gently, she rose and glided through the door without a word.

Once inside the portal her eyes cleared with a snap. She laughed.

XVII

BLACK MIKE MEETS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE AND STARTS A COLLECTION

In the course of this same morning, Lafond had discovered an old acquaintance.

He arose early, and spent some time after breakfast investigating and criticising the premises. Frosty's administration had, it must be confessed, been rather slack, and there were many loose ends. These Black Mike gathered into a cat o' nine tails with which to lash his subordinate. After he had done more for Frosty's character in sixty minutes than that young man, unaided, could have accomplished in as many months, he left the scene of his reorganizations behind, and strolled about in the one narrow street of the village.

He soon saw all there was to be seen there. With a vague idea of finding his way to the famous Great Snake Mine, he rambled out from the double row of log cabins, around the bend, and into the lower gulch.

He had defined to himself two things very clearly--that Billy Knapp was now easily the most important figure in the community, and that a continuance of this importance depended entirely on his effecting a combination of his group of claims with Eastern capital. In the Black Hills nearly all of the promising leads are of quartz, requiring in their development more expensive machinery than any ordinary man is able to afford. Until the good angel arrives, they are so much crumbling red rock or white crystal; but with the erection of a stamp mill, within wagon distance, they become valuable. Mike had set himself to the task of depriving Billy Knapp at once of his property and of his prestige; but since he could not hold him up at the point of a pistol, as might have been done had it been the question of a watch or a scarf-pin, he did not at present see just how it was to be accomplished. Ruminating these matters, he found himself all at once in a canon much grown with underbrush, full of birds, and possessing a general air of the gentler aspects of nature.

Immediately before him stood a double cabin, its two parts connected by a pa.s.sage way. The foundations of its timbers were encircled by broad bands of red geraniums. Behind the buildings, chained to posts, he perceived three wild animals. One was a short, comical, and s.h.a.ggy bear; the second, an equally furry but more eager-looking racc.o.o.n; the third, a bobcat with ta.s.selled ears.

Mike paused and surveyed them with amus.e.m.e.nt. As he stood there the door of the cabin opened and the owner stepped out into the suns.h.i.+ne.

The half-breed never forgot a face which a vital incident had impressed on his memory; and though this old, white-haired, mild-eyed man had pa.s.sed in and out of his life in the s.p.a.ce of one evening fifteen years ago, Lafond recognized without difficulty the stranger whose words had given him so powerful an impetus toward his new way of life. It was Durand, the b.u.t.terfly hunter.

He was little changed. And again the coa.r.s.er man felt, as fifteen years before, the air of gentle and quaint courtesy, which a keener observer would have a.s.sociated with an old-fas.h.i.+oned society now quite pa.s.sed away. It should have gone with ruffles and silken hose, with powdered hair and silver shoe buckles.

The naturalist caught sight of the newcomer and approached.

"They are quite gentle," he a.s.sured, explaining the beasts. He rubbed the heavy fur of the racc.o.o.n the wrong way. "Ah, Jacques," he said to the little animal, relapsing quaintly into a sort of old-time speech, "thy hair doth resemble in stiffness of texture the bristles of thine own curry brush."

The racc.o.o.n uttered his high, purring over-note, and seized the man's fingers with his little black hands, almost human. The bear waved his paws appealingly. The bobcat danced back and forth at the end of its leash. "Peace, my children," chided the old man, bestowing on each a pat. "It is not yet the hour of noon." He stooped to unsnap the racc.o.o.n's chain; and then, as though recalling the half-breed's presence, he turned with an air of apology.

"You are a stranger here?" he asked. "Yes? And you walk this morning for your pleasure? Yes? That happens not often in these parts." He went on, conversing shyly but easily, with the obvious desire of pleasing the half-breed rather than himself. Lafond had opportunity to observe the great solidity of the logs composing the cabin walls, and to recognize that the structure must belong to the earlier period of the primitive architecture of the Hills--for there are such periods.

"You have lived here long," he suggested, following out this inference.

"Yes," laughed the old man softly, "very long. The camp there came to me. I was an old timer when the first house was built."

After a little, they entered the cabin together, and Lafond found himself in a sheet-ceiled room, strewn with all sorts of literary and scientific junk. The imagination could discover much food for speculation in the curiosities literally heaped about the apartment, but most wonderful of all, seizing the eye, holding it from all else, were the scores of shallow gla.s.s-fronted boxes hanging everywhere on the wall. They were lined with white paper pasted over a layer of cork. In them, row after row, were impaled b.u.t.terflies of many colors.

Thousands of the pretty insects were there outspread, varying in size from the tiny blue _Lycaena_ to the great _Troilus_ or the gorgeous yellow and black _Turnus_. They were exquisitely prepared, with just the right lift on the wings, just the proper balance of the long antennae, until it seemed that they must be on the point of flight, and one almost expected that in another moment the air would be filled with a fluttering, many-hued splendor.

The men seated themselves in two home-made chairs. The racc.o.o.n, evidently from old winter-time habit, waddled in a dignified fas.h.i.+on to the fireless stove, where he curled up like a door-mat with keen, bright eyes. Mike's gaze roamed about the apartment.

"You are a great scientist," he observed, intending the remark for a compliment.

"In a way, in a way," replied the old man humbly. "One must occupy the mind when one is alone, and what task more fitting to our highest faculties than that of investigating, with all due reverence, the workings of G.o.d's mechanism?"

He said it with a simple piety which could not provoke a smile.

Michal Lafond caught himself wondering what he did there. Surely there was nothing to interest him in stuffed insects and a garrulous old man, especially as the conversation insisted on retaining its formal footing.

"You are not a miner?" the entomologist inquired, after a moment's pause.

"No," replied Mike.

"I am glad to hear it. I like not this eager scrambling for what does so little good. I too once---- But now I am content; yes, content.

There is always good if one will but find it. I myself might with justice be accused of being a miner. I find my leads, I develop them, I a.s.say my ores; but always in miniature--on a small scale."

Then, in a flash, Michal Lafond saw at least the outlines of his plan, and he knew why he had come in here to talk to the garrulous old man.

"You know the a.s.say, then?" he inquired conversationally.

"In a modest way--a few simple tests."

"But that is much. Do you not know that it is at Rapid, in the School of Mines, that the nearest a.s.sayer is? You have a profession here at your lands."

A sudden scream broke through the apartment, a rush of wings, a growl.

The old man ran nimbly to the stove, and rescued the little racc.o.o.n from the savage attacks of a magpie. The magpie sailed back to his perch on one of the b.u.t.terfly cases, where he ruffled his feathers indignantly. The racc.o.o.n curled up in the old man's lap.

"You are French?" inquired the latter, with more interest than he had hitherto shown.

"I have some French blood," replied Lafond cautiously.

"I knew it," said Durand, immensely pleased. "I am rarely mistaken.

It was a twist of your words that suggested it, an idiom. _Et maintenant nous pouvons causer_," he added in the purest Parisian accent.

"_Oui, oui, oui,_" cried the half-breed, suddenly swept up by an uncontrollable excitement he could not himself understand. "_La belle langue!_"

He felt an unwonted expansion of the heart at thus hearing once more the language of his youth. The formality of the interview was gone.

They conversed freely, swiftly, animatedly. Durand had been educated in Paris, and had a thousand reminiscences to impart. He told of many quaint customs, and Lafond, with growing emotion, recalled similar or a.n.a.logous customs among his own expatriated branch of the race in the pine forests of Canada. His sullen, taciturn manner broke. He became the Gaul. He gesticulated, he overflowed, his eye lighted up, he said a thousand things.

After a time Durand opened a chest at the foot of the bed, from which he abstracted a bottle and two long-stemmed gla.s.ses. These he placed on the table with a quaint little air of ceremony.

"Sir," said he, "we must know each other better. We speak each the language we love. We talk of old days. Sir," he concluded, bowing with stately grace as he poured the red wine into the gla.s.ses, "I ask you to drink wine with me to our acquaintance. My name is Durand."

He inclined, his hand to his heart, and somehow there seemed to be nothing ridiculous in the act.

"I am Michal Lafond," replied the half-breed simply.

A silence fell. The realities came back to Lafond's mind.

"I would ask you a favor," he said abruptly.