"Stop the horse. I'll walk the rest of the way," he said presently to
the groom. "You needn't come for me, Finn; I'll walk back as far as the
Marochal Tavern. At twelve sharp I'll be there. Give yourself a drink
and some supper"--he put a dollar into the man's hand--"and no white
whiskey, mind: a bottle of beer and a leg of mutton, that's the thing."
He nodded his head, and by the light of the moon walked away smartly down
the corduroy-road through the shadows of the swamp. Finn the groom
looked after him.

"Well, if he ain't a queer dick! A reg'lar 'centric--but a reg'lar
brick, cutting a wide swathe as he goes. He's a tip-topper; and he's a
sort of tough too--a sort of a kind of a tough. Well, it's none of my
business. Get up!" he added to the horse, and turning round in the road
with difficulty, he drove back a mile to the Tavern Marochal for his beer
and mutton--and white whiskey.

Charley stepped on briskly, his shining leather shoes, straw hat, and
light cane in no good keeping with his surroundings. He was thinking
that he had never been in such a mood for talk with Suzon Charlemagne.
Charlemagne's tavern of the Cote Dorion was known over half a province,
and its patrons carried news of it half across a continent. Suzon
Charlemagne--a girl of the people, a tavern-girl, a friend of sulking,
coarse river-drivers! But she had an alert precision of brain, an
instinct that clove through wastes of mental underbrush to the tree of
knowledge. Her mental sight was as keen and accurate as that which runs
along the rifle-barrel of the great hunter with the red deer in view.
Suzon Charlemagne no company for Charley Steele? What did it matter! He
had entered into other people's lives to-day, had played their games with
them and for them, and now he would play his own game, live his own life
in his own way through the rest of this day. He thirsted for some sort