command me to do something, the while you
are trembling from head to foot for fear I will obey. Will you always
play the martyr to your spirit? Mary, I shall not lead the tribes."

"But your unfinished work!"

"What was worth doing has been done. This crisis is past. The west
will be safe from the Iroquois for some time. There is other work for
me. We will go to France. I have business there. Then I would show
the world my wife."

Yet she held me away a moment longer. "You can do this without regret?"

I folded her to me. "It is the only path I see before me," I answered
her.

And then, for the first time, she sobbed as she lay in my arms.

A little later we stood together in the tent door. The sunset was lost
in the woods behind and the shadows were long and cool. The camp was
gay. All memory of death and conquest was put aside, and the men were
living in the moment. French and Indians were feasting, and there were
song and talk and the movement of lithe bodies, gayly clad. The water
babbled strange songs upon the shore, and the forest was full of quiet
and mystery. The wilderness, the calm, unfathomed wilderness, had
forgotten sorrow and carnage. We forgot, too.

I suddenly laughed as of old, and the sound did not jar. The woman on
my arm laughed with me. A thrush was singing. Life was before me, and
the woman of my love loved me. My blood tingled and I breathed deep.
The wood smoke--the smoke of the pathfinder's fire--pricked keen in my
nostrils.

I pointed the woman to the forest. "We shall come back to it," I
cried. "We leave it now, but we shall come back to it, some time,
somehow. Perhaps we shall be settlers, explorers. I do not know. But
we shall come back. This land belongs to us; to us and to our children
and our children's children. French or English, what will it matter
then? It will be a new race."

The woman turned. I heard her quick breath and saw the red flood her
from chin to brow. "A new race!" she repeated, and her eyes grew dark
with the splendor of the thought. She clasped her hands, and looked to
the west over the unmapped forest, and I knew that for the moment her
blood was pulsing, not for me, but for that unborn race which was to
hold this land. I had married a woman, yes, but also I had married a
poet and a dreamer and a will incarnate. It was such spirit as hers
that would shape the destinies of nations yet to come.

I laughed again, and the joy o