efooted, doing chores, running after the shaggy,
troublesome pony which would let him catch it when no one else could,
and, with only a halter on, galloping wildly back to the farmyard, to be
hitched up in the carriole which had once belonged to the old Seigneur.
He saw himself as a young man, back from "the States" where he had been
working in the mills, regarded austerely by little Father Roche, who had
given him his first Communion--for, down in Massachusetts he had learned
to wear his curly hair plastered down on his forehead, smoke bad cigars,
and drink "old Bourbon," to bet and to gamble, and be a figure at
horse-races.

Then he saw himself, his money all gone, but the luck still with him,
at Mass on the Sunday before going to the backwoods lumber-camp for
the winter, as boss of a hundred men. He had a way with him, and he had
brains, had Jacques Grassette, and he could manage men, as Michelin
the lumber-king himself had found in a great river-row and strike, when
bloodshed seemed certain. Even now the ghost of a smile played at his
lips, as he recalled the surprise of the old habitants and of Father
Roche when he was chosen for this responsible post; for to run a great
lumber-camp well, hundreds of miles from civilisation, where there is
no visible law, no restraints of ordinary organised life, and where men,
for seven months together, never saw a woman or a child, and ate pork
and beans, and drank white whisky, was a task of administration as
difficult as managing a small republic new-created out of violent
elements of society. But Michelin was right, and the old Seigneur, Sir
Henri Robitaille, who was a judge of men, knew he was right, as did also
Hennepin the schoolmaster, whose despair Jacques had been, for he
never worked at his lessons as a boy, and yet he absorbed Latin and
mathematics by some sure but unexplainable process. "Ah! if you would
but work, Jacques, you vaurien, I would make a great man of you,"
Hennepin had said to him more than once; but this had made no impression
on Jacques. It was more to the point that the ground-hogs and black
squirrels and pigeons were plentiful in Casanac Woods.

And so he thought as he stood at the door of the Church of St. Francis
on that day before going "out back" to the lumber-camp. He had reached
the summit of greatness--to command men. That was more than wealth or
learning, and as he spoke to the old Seigneur going in to Mass, he still
thought so, for the Seign