“If you are the boy I take you to be,” Madame Tank finally said, sinking her voice, “you may find you have enemies.”

“If I am the boy you take me to be, madame, who am I?”

She shook her head.

“I wish I had not spoken at all.  To tell you anything more would only plunge you into trouble.  You are better off to be as you are, than to know the truth and suffer from it.  Besides, I may be mistaken.  And I am certainly too helpless myself to be of any use to you.  This much I will say:  when you are older, if things occur that make it necessary for you to know what I know, send a letter to me, and I will write it down.”

With delicacy Monsieur Grignon began to play a whisper of a tune on his violin.  I did not know what she meant by a letter, though I understood her.  Madame Tank spoke the language as well as anybody.  I thought then, as idiom after idiom rushed back on my memory, that it was an universal language, with the exception of Iroquois and English.

“We are going to a place called Green Bay, in the Northwest Territory.  Remember the name:  Green Bay.  It is in the Wisconsin country.”

IV

Dawn found me lying wide awake with my head on a saddle.  I slipped out into the dewy half light.

That was the first time I ever thought about the mountains.  They seemed to be newly created, standing up with streamers of mist torn and floating across their breasts.  The winding cliff-bound lake was like a gorge of smoke.  I felt as if I had reared upon my hind feet, lifting my face from the ground to discover there was a God.  Some of the prayers our priest had industriously beaten into my head, began to repeat themselves.  In a twinkling I was a child, lonely in the universe, separated from my dim old life, instinct with growth, yet ignorant of my own needs.

What Madame de Ferrier and Madame Tank had said influenced me less than the intense life of my roused activities.

It was mid forenoon by the sun when I reached our lodges, and sat down fagged outside my father’s door, to think longer before I entered.  Hunger was the principal sensation, though we had eaten in the cabin the night before, and the Indian life inures a man to fasting when he cannot come by food.  I heard Skenedonk talking to my father and mother in our cabin.  The village was empty; children and women, hunters and fishermen having scattered to woods and waters.

“He ought to learn books,” said Skenedonk.  “Money is sent you every year to be spent upon him:  yet you spend nothing upon him.”

“What has he needed?” said my father.

“He needs much now.  He needs American clothes.  He wept at the sight of a book.  God has removed the touch since he plunged in the water.”

“You would make a fool of him,” said my father.  “He was gone from the lodge this morning.  You taught him an evil path when you carried him off.”