ere impressed. They were a slow lot, selected for various
purposes other than wit. Their minds moved too sluggishly for swift
reactions, and I dismissed anxiety about them from my mind.

The Englishman turned to me. "Will you conduct me to the shore? I
will take Pierre's place."

It was my turn to stare. "Suppose you conduct yourself," was on my
tongue, but I let it escape unsaid. "Come, then," I answered, with a
shrug.

I led the way over logs and under bushes, and the Englishman followed
silently; silently at least as to his tongue, but his feet were
garrulous. They stepped on twigs, stumbled on slippery lichen, and
shouted their passage for rods around.

"I would rather lead a buffalo in tether," I fretted, and just as I
said it he completed the sum of his blundering by catching his toe in a
root and plunging head foremost to the ground. I pulled him up by the
sleeve of his skin blouse and shook him free from loam and twigs.

"Now will you stop that?" I cried.

He looked at me gravely, unabashed, but curious. "I did not fall
purposely to irritate you. Gravity, which, I understand, operates
alike on the learned and the foolish, had some share in it. Why are
you angry?"

"Why are you reckless? You have crashed through here as careless of
noise as a stag with the hounds hot behind."

He dropped to the ground, and took one slim moccasined foot in his
hand. He looked at it soberly. "It seems a small thing, does it not,
to cause so much ill-will between us? It has neither weight nor mental
force above it, that it should make the earth tremble. No, monsieur,
you are searching for excuses for your annoyance with me. You are
annoyed all the time. I vex you by my silence, still more by my
speech. We are to be some time together, and I do not want to be a
constant canker. Is it not possible for you to forget me, to ignore
me?"

I saw he was in earnest. "And so you really do not know what irritated
me? Are you so little of a woodsman?"

"I have never traveled through the woods."

I gave him a dubious glance. "Yet you were weeks with the Hurons after
your capture."

I saw him set his teeth hard as if at a memory. "We traveled by water
ways. I was little on the shore except at night."

A sudden picture sickened me. The nightly camp and this slender lad
with his curious air of daintiness, and the great oily Hurons lounging
in the dirt and smoke.

"Were they cruel to you?" I broke out.