Back at Grand Portage the girl had listened from her late childhood to
tales of the wilderness told at her father's cabin by voyageurs and
trappers, by returning wanderers and stray Indians smoking the peace-
pipe at his hearth. Long before she had reached the stature of woman
she had sat on her stool beside that jovial old man, her father, grimy
from his forge, and drunk the tales wide-eyed, to creep away and watch
the stars, to dream of those dashing streams and to clinch her hands
for that she was not born a man.
And then when she was fifteen had come the day when the tales had at
last kindled to flame the parent fire of that wildness in her which
slept unsuspected in the breast of the blacksmith, then old as the way
of life runs, and he had closed his cabin and his forge, given his two
motherless girls to the wife of Jacques Baptiste, joined a party going
into the wilderness, and gone out of their lives.
Eleven years had passed with its varied life, at Grand Portage and he
had never returned,--only vague rumors that had sunk in tears the head
of gentle Marie, the younger of the two sisters, and lifted with
sympathetic understanding that of Maren the elder.
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