VIIIKING MADOC
“IF you had one you should not use it! Are you a dreadful hunter?”
Margot had turned upon her guest with a defiant fear. As near as she had ever come to hating anything she hated the men, of whom she had heard, who used this wonderful northland as a murder ground. That was what she named it in her uncompromising judgment of those who killed for the sake of killing, for the lust of blood that was in them.
“Yes; I reckon I am a ‘dreadful’ hunter, for I am a mighty poor shot. But I’d like a try at that fellow. What horns! what a head! and how can that fellow in the canoe keep so close to him, yet not finish him?”
Adrian was so excited he could not stand still. His eyes gleamed, his hands clenched, and his whole appearance was changed; greatly for the worse, the girl thought, regarding him with disgust.
“Finish him? That’s King Madoc, Pierre’s trained moose. You’d be finished yourself, I fear, if you harmed that splendid creature. Pierre’s a lazy fellow, mostly, but he spent a long time teaching Madoc; and with his temper—I’m thankful you lost your gun.”
“Do you never shoot things up here? I saw you giving the fox and herons what looked like meat. You had a stew for supper, and fish for breakfast. I don’t mean to be impertinent, but the sight of that big game—whew!”
“Yes; we do kill things, or have them killed, when it is necessary for food. Never in sport. Man is almost the only animal who does that. It’s all terrible, seems to me. Everything preys upon something else, weaker than itself. Sometimes when I think of it, my dinner chokes me. It’s so easy to take life, and only God can create it. But uncle says it is also God’s law to take what is provided, and that there is no mistake, even if it seems such to me.”
But there Margot perceived that Adrian was not listening. Instead, he was watching, with the intensest interest, the closer approach of the canoe, in which sat idle Pierre, holding the reins of a harness attached to his aquatic steed. The moose swam easily, with powerful strokes, and Pierre was singing a gay melody, richer in his unique possession than any king.
“Indeed, it’s not one other has a king for a bow man,” he often asserted.
When he touched the shore and the great animal stood shaking his wet hide, Adrian’s astonishment found vent in a whirlwind of questions that Pierre answered at his leisure and after his kind. But he walked first toward Margot and offered her a great bunch of trailing arbutus flowers, saying:
“I saw these just as I pushed off and went back after them. What’s the matter here, that the flag is up? It was the biggest storm I ever saw. Yes; a deal of beasties are killed back on the mainland. Any dead over here?”
“No, I’m glad to say, none that we know of. But Snowfoot’s shed is down and uncle is going to build a new one. I hope you’ve come to work.”
Pierre laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh! yes.”
But his interest in work was far less than in the stranger whom he now answered, and whose presence on Peace Island was a mystery to him. Heretofore, the only visitors there had been laborers or traders, but this young fellow, so near his own age, and despite his worn clothing, was of another sort. He recognized this, at once, as Margot had done, and his curiosity made him ask:
“Where’d you come from? Hurricane blow you out the sky?”
“About the same. I was lost in the woods and Margot found me and saved my life. What’ll you take for that moose?”
“There isn’t money enough in the State of Maine to buy him!”
“Nonsense! Well, if there was I haven’t it. But you could get a good price for it anywhere.”
Pierre looked Adrian over. From his appearance the lad was not likely to be possessed of much cash, but the moose-trainer was eager for capital, and never missed an opportunity of seeking it.
“I want to go into the show business. What do you say? would you furnish the tents and fixings, and share the profits? I’m no scholar, but maybe you’d know enough to get out the hand bills and so on. What do you say?”
“I—say—What you mean, Pierre Ricord, keepin’ the master waitin’ your foolishness and him half sick? What kept you twice as long as you ought? Hurry up, now, and put that moose in the cow yard and get to work.”
The interruption was caused by Angelique, and it was curious to see the fear with which she inspired the great fellow, her son. He forgot the stranger, the show business, and all his own immediate interests, and with the docility of a little child obeyed. Unhitching his odd steed, he turned the canoe bottom upwards on the beach and hastily led the animal toward that part of the island clearing where Snowfoot stood in a little fenced-in lot behind her ruined shed.
Adrian went with him, and asked:
“Won’t those two animals fight?”
“Won’t get a chance. When one goes in the other goes out. Here, bossy, you can take the range of the island. Get out!”
She was more willing to go than Madoc to enter the cramped place, but the transfer was made, and Adrian lingered by the osier paling, to observe at close range this subjugated monarch of the forest.
“Oh! for a palette and brush!” he exclaimed, while Pierre walked away.
“What would you do with them?”
Margot had followed the lads and was beside Adrian, though he had not heard her footsteps. Now he wheeled about, eager, enthusiastic.
“Paint—as I have never painted before!”
“Oh!—are you an—artist?”
“I want to be one. That’s why I’m here.”
“What! What do you mean?”
“I told you I was a runaway. I didn’t say why, before. It’s truth. My people, my—father—forced me to college. I hated it. He was forcing me to business. I liked art. All my friends were artists. When I should have been at the books I was in their studios. They were a gay crowd, spent money like water when they had it; merrily starved and pinched when they hadn’t. A few were worse than spendthrifts, and with my usual want of sense I made that particular set my intimates. I never had any money, though, after it was suspected what my tastes were, except a little that my mother gave.”
Margot was listening breathlessly and watching intently. At the mention of his mother a shadow crossed Adrian’s face, softening and bettering it, and as they rose to go home she saw that his whole mood had changed.