eyes sparkled and he twirled his mustache
fiercely. "SAPRIE!" he cried, "that was nothing! Any man with an axe can
cut a log. But to fight--that is another affair. That demands the brave
heart. The strong man who will not fight is a coward. Some day I will
put him through the mill--you shall see what that small Leclere is made
of. SACREDAM!"

Of course, affairs had not come to this pass all at once. It was a long
history, beginning with the time when the two boys had played together,
and Raoul was twice as strong as the other, and was very proud of it.
Prosper did not care; it was all right so long as they had a good time.
But then Prosper began to do things better and better. Raoul did not
understand it; he was jealous. Why should he not always be the leader?
He had more force. Why should Prosper get ahead? Why should he have
better luck at the fishing and the hunting and the farming? It was by
some trick. There was no justice in it.

Raoul was not afraid of anything but death; and whatever he wanted, he
thought he had a right to have. But he did not know very well how to get
it. He would start to chop a log just at the spot where there was a big
knot.

He was the kind of a man that sets hare-snares on a caribou-trail, and
then curses his luck because he catches nothing.

Besides, whatever he did, he was always thinking most about beating
somebody else. But Prosper eared most for doing the thing as well as
he could. If any one else could beat him--well, what difference did it
make? He would do better the next time.

If he had a log to chop, he looked it all over for a clear place before
he began. What he wanted was, not to make the chips fly, but to get the
wood split.

You are not to suppose that the one man was a saint and a hero, and
the other a fool and a ruffian. No; that sort of thing happens only in
books. People in Abbeville were not made on that plan. They were both
plain men. But there was a difference in their hearts; and out of that
difference grew all the trouble.

It was hard on Vaillantcoeur, of course, to see Leclere going ahead,
getting rich, clearing off the mortgage on his farm, laying up money
with the notary Bergeron, who acted as banker for the parish--it was
hard to look on at this, while he himself stood still, or even slipped
back a little, got into debt, had to sell a bit of the land that his
father left him. There must be some cheating about it.

But this was not the hardest morsel