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The Stroke Of The Hour
by
Fine creature as she was, her finest features were her eyes and her hands. The eyes might have been found in the most savage places; the hands, however, only could have come through breeding. She had got them honestly; for her mother was descended from an old family of the French province. That was why she had the name of Loisette–and had a touch of distinction. It was the strain of the patrician in the full blood of the peasant; but it gave her something which made her what she was–what she had been since a child, noticeable and besought, sometimes beloved. It was too strong a nature to compel love often, but it never failed to compel admiration. Not greatly a creature of words, she had become moody of late; and even now, alive with light and feeling and animal life, she suddenly stopped her romp and run, and called the dog to her.
“Heel, Shako!” she said, and made for the door of the little house, which looked so snug and homelike. She paused before she came to the door, to watch the smoke curling up from the chimney straight as a column, for there was not a breath of air stirring. The sun was almost gone, and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even the green spruce-trees a curious burnished tone.
Swish! Thud! She faced the woods quickly. It was only a sound that she had heard how many hundreds of times! It was the snow slipping from some broad branch of the fir-trees to the ground. Yet she started now. Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her self-control.
“I’ll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks the ice, next,” she said, aloud, contemptuously. “I dunno what’s the matter with me. I feel as if some one was hiding somewhere ready to pop out on me. I haven’t never felt like that before.”
She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon journeys for the Government, that by-and-by she would start at the sound of her own voice if she didn’t think aloud. So she was given to soliloquy, defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves were going mad. She laughed at that. She said that birds sang to themselves and didn’t go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked, and owls hooted, and she would talk and not go crazy either. So she talked to herself and to Shako when she was alone.
How quiet it was inside when her light supper was eaten–bread and beans and pea-soup; she had got this from her French mother. Now she sat, her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hands, looking into the fire. Shako was at her feet upon the great musk-ox rug, which her father had got on one of his hunting trips in the Athabasca country years ago. It belonged as she belonged. It breathed of the life of the north-land, for the timbers of the hut were hewn cedar; the rough chimney, the seats, and the shelves on which a few books made a fair show beside the bright tins and the scanty crockery, were of pine; and the horned heads of deer and wapiti made pegs for coats and caps, and rests for guns and rifles. It was a place of comfort; it had an air of well-to-do thrift, even as the girl’s dress, though plain, was made of good, sound stuff, gray, with a touch of dark red to match the auburn of her hair.
A book lay open in her lap, but she had scarcely tried to read it. She had put it down after a few moments fixed upon it. It had sent her thoughts off into a world where her life had played a part too big for books, too deep for the plummet of any save those who had lived through the storm of life’s trials; and life when it is bitter to the young is bitter with an agony the old never know. At last she spoke to herself.