The strange light that made her seem all spirit flamed in the glance that thanked me.

“Yet think well,” she cautioned.  “I—­I am proud of you.”  Her voice sank to a whisper.  “Sometimes even my love seems swallowed in my pride in you.  I live on my pride in your power.  Think of your unfinished work.  No, no, you must go on.”

I took her by the shoulders.  “You strange, double woman!” I cried, with my voice unsteady.  “You command me to do something, the while you are trembling from head to foot for fear I will obey.  Will you always play the martyr to your spirit?  Mary, I shall not lead the tribes.”

“But your unfinished work!”

“What was worth doing has been done.  This crisis is past.  The west will be safe from the Iroquois for some time.  There is other work for me.  We will go to France.  I have business there.  Then I would show the world my wife.”

Yet she held me away a moment longer.  “You can do this without regret?”

I folded her to me.  “It is the only path I see before me,” I answered her.

And then, for the first time, she sobbed as she lay in my arms.

A little later we stood together in the tent door.  The sunset was lost in the woods behind and the shadows were long and cool.  The camp was gay.  All memory of death and conquest was put aside, and the men were living in the moment.  French and Indians were feasting, and there were song and talk and the movement of lithe bodies, gayly clad.  The water babbled strange songs upon the shore, and the forest was full of quiet and mystery.  The wilderness, the calm, unfathomed wilderness, had forgotten sorrow and carnage.  We forgot, too.

I suddenly laughed as of old, and the sound did not jar.  The woman on my arm laughed with me.  A thrush was singing.  Life was before me, and the woman of my love loved me.  My blood tingled and I breathed deep.  The wood smoke—­the smoke of the pathfinder’s fire—­pricked keen in my nostrils.

I pointed the woman to the forest.  “We shall come back to it,” I cried.  “We leave it now, but we shall come back to it, some time, somehow.  Perhaps we shall be settlers, explorers.  I do not know.  But we shall come back.  This land belongs to us; to us and to our children and our children’s children.  French or English, what will it matter then?  It will be a new race.”

The woman turned.  I heard her quick breath and saw the red flood her from chin to brow.  “A new race!” she repeated, and her eyes grew dark with the splendor of the thought.  She clasped her hands, and looked to the west over the unmapped forest, and I knew that for the moment her blood was pulsing, not for me, but for that unborn race which was to hold this land.  I had married a woman, yes, but also I had married a poet and a dreamer and a will incarnate.  It was such spirit as hers that would shape the destinies of nations yet to come.