f the swaying top. He grinned--until he saw
that a half-dozen more blows would fell the birch right on the roof of
the shanty.

"Are you crazy?" he cried, as he picked up an axe; "you know nothing how
to chop. You kill a man. You smash the cabane. Let go!" He shoved one of
the boys away and sent a few mighty cuts into the side of the birch that
was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts on the other side; the
tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept in a great arc toward the
deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top swung earthward, Raoul jumped
clear of the crashing branches and landed safely in the feather-bed of
snow, buried up to his neck. Nothing was to be seen of him but his head,
like some new kind of fire-work--sputtering bad words.

Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcoeur's
hunger to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend, even
if the friend does it for the sake of saving him from being killed by a
fall on the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part of it. What you
remember is the grin.

The second thing that made it worse was the bad chance that both of
these men had to fall in love with the same girl. Of course there were
other girls in the village beside Marie Antoinette Girard--plenty of
them, and good girls, too. But somehow or other, when they were beside
her, neither Raoul nor Prosper cared to look at any of them, but only
at 'Toinette. Her eyes were so much darker and her cheeks so much more
red--bright as the berries of the mountain-ash in September. Her hair
hung down to her waist on Sunday in two long braids, brown and shiny
like a ripe hazelnut; and her voice when she laughed made the sound of
water tumbling over little stones.

No one knew which of the two lovers she liked best. At school it was
certainly Raoul, because he was bigger and bolder. When she came back
from her year in the convent at Roberval it was certainly Prosper,
because he could talk better and had read more books. He had a volume of
songs full of love and romance, and knew most of them by heart. But
this did not last forever. 'Toinette's manners had been polished at the
convent, but her ideas were still those of her own people. She never
thought that knowledge of books could take the place of strength, in
the real battle of life. She was a brave girl, and she felt sure in her
heart that the man of the most courage must be the best man after all.

For a while she appeared to