The Ruling Passion [25]
he is afraid. He has not as much courage as the musk-rat. You
stamp on the bank. He dives. He swims away. Bah!"
"How about that time he cut loose the jam of logs in the Rapide des
Cedres?" said old Girard from his corner.
Vaillantcoeur's black eyes sparkled and he twirled his mustache
fiercely. "SAPRIE!" he cried, "that was nothing! Any man with an
axe can cut a log. But to fight--that is another affair. That
demands the brave heart. The strong man who will not fight is a
coward. Some day I will put him through the mill--you shall see
what that small Leclere is made of. SACREDAM!"
Of course, affairs had not come to this pass all at once. It was a
long history, beginning with the time when the two boys had played
together, and Raoul was twice as strong as the other, and was very
proud of it. Prosper did not care; it was all right so long as they
had a good time. But then Prosper began to do things better and
better. Raoul did not understand it; he was jealous. Why should he
not always be the leader? He had more force. Why should Prosper
get ahead? Why should he have better luck at the fishing and the
hunting and the farming? It was by some trick. There was no
justice in it.
Raoul was not afraid of anything but death; and whatever he wanted,
he thought he had a right to have. But he did not know very well
how to get it. He would start to chop a log just at the spot where
there was a big knot.
He was the kind of a man that sets hare-snares on a caribou-trail,
and then curses his luck because he catches nothing.
Besides, whatever he did, he was always thinking most about beating
somebody else. But Prosper eared most for doing the thing as well
as he could. If any one else could beat him--well, what difference
did it make? He would do better the next time.
If he had a log to chop, he looked it all over for a clear place
before he began. What he wanted was, not to make the chips fly, but
to get the wood split.
You are not to suppose that the one man was a saint and a hero, and
the other a fool and a ruffian. No; that sort of thing happens only
in books. People in Abbeville were not made on that plan. They
were both plain men. But there was a difference in their hearts;
and out of that difference grew all the trouble.
It was hard on Vaillantcoeur, of course, to see Leclere going ahead,
getting rich, clearing off the mortgage on his farm, laying up money
with the notary Bergeron, who acted as banker for the parish--it was
hard to look on at this, while he himself stood still, or even
slipped back a little, got into debt, had to sell a bit of the land
that his father left him. There must be some cheating about it.
But this was not the hardest morsel to swallow. The great thing
that stuck in his crop was the idea that the little Prosper, whom he
could have whipped so easily, and whom he had protected so loftily,
when they were boys, now stood just as high as he did as a capable
man--perhaps even higher. Why was it that when the Price Brothers,
down at Chicoutimi, had a good lumber-job up in the woods on the
Belle Riviere, they made Leclere the boss, instead of Vaillantcoeur?
Why did the cure Villeneuve choose Prosper, and not Raoul, to steady
the strain of the biggest pole when they were setting up the derrick
for the building of the new church?
It was rough, rough! The more Raoul thought of it, the rougher it
seemed. The fact that it was a man who had once been his protege,
and still insisted on being his best friend, did not make it any
smoother. Would you have liked it any better on that account? I am
not telling you how it ought to have been, I am telling you how it
was. This isn't Vaillantcoeur's account-book; it's his story. You
must strike your balances as you go along.
And all the time, you see, he felt