rench people began the telling of their sins in confession. And
she hurriedly turned away toward the horses.

She smiled wearily as she leaned against Brom Bones, thinking of
Jeffrey Whiting. Here was one of the things that he did not like--the
Catholic Church always turning up in everything.

She wondered where he was and what he was doing and thinking, up there
behind that awful veil of red.

VI

THE BUSINESS OF THE SHEPHERD

The Bishop laid the man's head back so that he lay as easy as it was
possible and spoke a word or two in that astonishing French of his
which was the wonder and the peculiar pride of all the North Country.

But for a long time the man seemed unable to go farther. He saw the
Bishop slip the little pocket stole around his neck and seemed to know
what it was and what it was for. The swollen lips, however, only
continued to mumble the words with which they had begun:

_"Mon Pere, je me 'cuse_--"

Rafe Gadbeau could speak English as well as or better than he could
speak French. But there are times when a man reverts to the tongue of
his mother. And confession, especially in the face of death, is one of
these.

Again the Bishop lowered the man's head and changed the position of
the body, while he fanned what air there was across the gasping mouth
with his hat.

Now the man tried to gather his straying wits to him. With a sharp
effort that seemed to send a tremor through his whole long body he
forced his faculties back into their grooves. With a muttered word of
encouragement from the Bishop, he began hoarsely that precise,
recitative form of confession that the good priests of Lower Canada
have been drilling into the children for the last three hundred
years.

Once the memory found itself going the long-accustomed way it worked
easily, mechanically. Since five years he had not confessed. At that
time he had received the Sacrament. He went through the "table of
sins" with the methodical care of a man who knows that if he misses a
step in the sequence he will lose his way. It was the story of the
young men of his people in the hills, in the lumber camps, in the
sawmills, in the towns. A thousand men of his kind in the hill country
would have told the same story, of hard work and anger and fighting in
the camps, of drink and debauch in the towns when they went down to
spend their money; and would have told it in exactly the same way. The
Bishop had heard the story ten thousand times