see about buying a ranch with my old chum at
Trinity, Polly Cliffshawe--Polydore, you know. Whom should I meet in a
hut on the ranch but Jacques's friend, Pretty Pierre. This was luck; but
he was not like Jacques Pontiac, he was secretive as a Buddhist deity.
He had a good many of the characteristics that go to a fashionable
diplomatist: clever, wicked, cool, and in speech doing the vanishing
trick just when you wanted him. But my star of fortune was with me. One
day Silverbottle, an Indian, being in a murderous humour, put a bullet
in Pretty Pierre's leg, and would have added another, only I stopped it
suddenly. While in his bed he told me what he knew of the Malbroucks.

"This is the fashion of it. John and Audrey Malbrouck had come to Quebec
in the year 1865, and sojourned in the parish of St. Genevieve, in the
house of the mother of Pretty Pierre. Of an inquiring turn of mind,
the French half-breed desired to know concerning the history of these
English people, who, being poor, were yet gentle, and spoke French
with a grace and accent which was to the French-Canadian patois as
Shakespeare's English is to that of Seven Dials. Pierre's methods of
inquisitiveness were not strictly dishonest. He did not open letters,
he did not besiege dispatch-boxes, he did not ask impudent questions; he
watched and listened. In his own way he found out that the man had been
a soldier in the ranks, and that he had served in India. They were most
attached to the child, whose name was Marguerite. One day a visitor, a
lady, came to them. She seemed to be the cause of much unhappiness
to Mrs. Malbrouck. And Pierre was alert enough to discover that this
distinguished-looking person desired to take the child away with her. To
this the young mother would not consent, and the visitor departed with
some chillingly-polite phrases, part English, part French, beyond the
exact comprehension of Pierre, and leaving the father and mother and
little Marguerite happy. Then, however, these people seemed to become
suddenly poorer, and Malbrouck began farming in a humble, but not
entirely successful way. The energy of the man was prodigious; but his
luck was sardonic. Floods destroyed his first crops, prices ran low,
debt accumulated, foreclosure of mortgage occurred, and Malbrouck and
the wife and child went west.

"Five years later, Pretty Pierre saw them again at Marigold Lake:
Malbrouck as agent for the Hudson's Bay Company--still poor, but
contented.