smiling too--for he had small chance at disclaiming with those two
crosses on his breast.

"I shall be enchanted to hear m'sieur's tale of his guide. For the rest
I am myself quite mad over the 'sport.' I love to insanity the out of
doors and shooting and fishing. It is a regret that the service has
given me no opportunity these four years for a breathing spell in the
woods. M'sieur will tell me the tale of his guide's superstition?"

A scheme began to form in my brain at that instant too delightful, it
seemed, to come true. I put it aside and went on with my story. "I have
one guide, a Huron half-breed," I said, "whom I particularly like. He's
an old fellow--sixty--but light and quick and powerful as a boy. More
interesting than a boy, because he's full of experiences. Two years ago
a bear swam across the lake where my camp is, and I went out in a canoe
with this Rafael and got him."

Colonel Raffré made of this fact an event larger than--I am sure--he
would have made of his winning of the war cross.

"You shame me, colonel," I said, and went on hurriedly. "Rafael, the
guide, was pleased about the bear. 'When gentlemens kill t'ings, guides
is more happy,' he explained to me, and he proceeded to tell an
anecdote. He prefaced it by informing me that one time he hunt bear and
he see devil. He had been hunting, it seemed, two or three winters
before with his brother-in-law at the headwaters of the St. Maurice
River, up north there," I elucidated, pointing through the window toward
the "long white street of Beauport," across the St. Lawrence. "It's very
lonely country, entirely wild, Indian hunting-ground yet. These two
Hurons, Rafael and his brother-in-law, were on a two months' trip to