Macavoy
would have hesitated to go with Pierre, were it not that he feared a
woman. Not that he had wronged her; she had wronged him: she had married
him. And the fear of one's own wife is the worst fear in the world.
But though his heart went out to women, and his tongue was of the race
that beguiles, he stood to his "lines" like a man, and people wondered.
Even Wonta, the daughter of Foot-in-the-Sun, only bent him, she could not
break him to her will. Pierre turned her shy coaxing into irony--that
was on the day when all Fort O'Angel conspired to prove Macavoy a child
and not a warrior. But when she saw what she had done, and that the
giant was greater than his years of brag, she repented, and hung a dead
coyote at Pierre's door as a sign of her contempt.
Pierre watched Macavoy, sitting with a sponge of vinegar to his head,
for he had had nasty joltings in his great fight. A little laugh came
crinkling up to the half-breed's lips, but dissolved into silence.
"We'll start in the morning," he said.
Macavoy looked up. "Whin you plaze; but a word in your ear; are you sure
she'll not follow us?"
"She doesn't know. Fort Ste. Anne is in the south, and Fort Comfort,
where we go, is far north."
"But if she kem!" the big man persisted.
"You will be a king; you can do as other kings have done," Pierre
chuckled.
The other shook his head. "Says Father Nolan to me, says he, "tis till
death us do part, an' no man put asunder'; an' I'll stand by that, though
I'd slice out the bist tin years av me life, if I niver saw her face
again.
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