Part 44 (2/2)

I looked off at the blue, beckoning west. ”I do not know, father. I go without ties or responsibilities. I am not sure where I shall end.

I doubt that I return this way.”

”But where, my son? Where do you go?”

I pointed, and his mystic glance followed my hand. ”Out there in the blue, father,--somewhere. I don't know where. It has beckoned you thus far; can you resist its cry to you to come farther and force its secrets from it?”

He clutched his rosary, and I knew I had touched one of his temptations. He loved the wilderness as I have never seen it loved.

Even his fellow priests and the few soldiers and traders crowded him.

He wanted the land alone,--alone with his Indians. He would not look at the blue track.

”It is the path of ambition, and it is strewn with wrecks. Come back to us here, my son.”

But I would not look away from the west. ”Some day I shall come back.

Not now. Father, I married Ambition. She lives in the wilderness. I think I shall abide with her the next year.”

He frowned at me. ”Where has Madame de Montlivet gone?”

”She has started for her home in England, father.”

He tapped his teeth with his forefinger. ”You sent a curious guard with her. Take the advice of an old man who has lived among Indians.

It is usually unwise to mix tribes.”

”What do you mean?”

”You should have sent a guard of Ottawas with your wife and Starling.”

”They were all Ottawas.”

”No, they were more than half Hurons. I counted.”

I jammed my teeth together and tried to think. I had just said that the west was calling me, that I was untrammeled. Untrammeled! Why, I was enmeshed, choked by conflicting duties. I put my head back, and breathed hard.

”Father, are you sure? Cadillac himself saw to it that they were all Ottawas.”

The priest stepped forward and wiped his handkerchief across my face.

It was wet. ”My son, take this more calmly. Cadillac does not know one Indian from another. Does this mean harm?”

I shook the sweat from my fingers. ”I do not know what it means. But I must go west. I must. Hundreds of men depend on me. Father Carheil?”

”Yes, my son.”

”I bound you once on this very spot. May I bind you again?”

”With promises?”

”Yes. Will you see Cadillac at once, tell him what you know, and have a company of Ottawas sent in pursuit of Lord Starling? Will you yourself see that it is rightly done?”

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