The Honor of the Big Snows - James Oliver Curwood (best ereader for pdf and epub .txt) 📗

falling in thick waves over her shoulders, and he knew that at last it had come to be like the woman's. The changing lights in her eyes fascinated him, and he rejoiced again when he saw that they were deepening into the violet blue of the bakneesh flowers that bloomed on the tops of the ridges.
To him, Melisse was growing into everything that was beautiful. She was his world, his life, and at Post Lac Bain there was nothing to come between the two. Jan noticed that in her thirteenth year she could barely stand under his outstretched arm. The next year she had grown so tall that she could not stand there at all. Very soon she would be a woman!
The thought leaped from his heart, and he spoke it aloud. It was on the girl's fifteenth birthday. They had come up to the top of the ridge on which he had fought the missionary, to gather red sprigs of the bakneesh for the festival that they were to have in the cabin that night. High up on the face of a jagged rock, Jan saw a bit of the crimson vine thrusting itself out into the sun, and, with Melisse laughing and encouraging him from below, he climbed up until he had secured it. He tossed it down to her.
"It's the last one," she cried, seeing his disadvantage, "and I'm going home. You can't catch me!"
She darted away swiftly along the snow-covered ridge, taunting him with merry laughter as she left him clambering in cautious descent down the rock. Jan followed in pursuit, shouting to her in French, in Cree, and in English, and their two voices echoed happily in their wild frolic.
Jan slackened his steps. It was a joy to see Melisse springing from rock to rock and darting across the thin openings close ahead of him, her hair loosening and sweeping out in the sun, her slender figure fleeing with the lightness of the pale sun-shadows that ran up and down the mountain.
He would not have overtaken her of his own choosing, but at the foot of the ridge Melisse gave up. She returned toward him, panting and laughing, shimmering like a sea-naiad under the glistening veil of her disheveled hair. Her face glowed with excitement; her eyes, filled with the light of the sun, dazzled Jan in their laughing defiance. Before her he stopped, and made no effort to catch her. Never had he seen her so beautiful, still daring him with her laugh, quivering and panting, flinging back her hair. Half reaching out his arms, he cried:
"Melisse, you are beautiful--you are almost a woman!"
The flush deepened in her cheeks, and there was no longer the sweet, taunting mischief in her eyes. She made no effort to run from him when he came to her.
"Do you think so, Brother Jan?"
"If you did your hair up like the pictures we have in the books, you would be a woman," he answered softly. "You are more beautiful than the pictures!"
He drew a step back, and her eyes flashed at him again with the sparkle of the old fun in them.
"You say that I am pretty, and that I am almost a woman," she pouted. "And yet--" She shrugged her shoulders at him in mock disdain. "Jan Thoreau, this is the third time in the last week that you have not played the game right! I won't play with you any more!"
In a flash he was at her side, her face between his two hands and, bending down, he kissed her upon the mouth.
"There," she said, as he released her. "Isn't that the way we have played it ever since I can remember? Whenever you catch me, you may have that!"
"I am afraid, Melisse," he said seriously. "You are growing so tall and so pretty that I am afraid."
"Afraid! My brother afraid to kiss me! And what will you do when I get to be a woman, Jan--which will be very soon, you say?"
"I don't know, Melisse."
She turned her back to him and flung out her hair; and Jan, who had done this same thing for her a hundred times before, divided the silken mass into three strands and plaited them into a braid.
"I don't believe that you care for me as much as you used to, Jan. I wish I were a woman, so that I might know if you are going to forget me entirely!"
Her shoulders trembled; and when he had finished his task, he found that she was laughing, and that her eyes were swimming with a new mischief which she was trying to hide from him. In that laugh there was something which was not like Melisse. Slight as the change was, he noticed it; but instead of displeasing him, it set a vague sensation of pleasure trilling like a new song within him.
When they reached the post, Melisse went to the cabin with her bakneesh, and Jan to the company's store. Tossing the vines upon the table, Melisse ran back to the door and watched him until he disappeared. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips half parted in excitement; and no sooner had he gone from view than she hurried to Iowaka's home across the clearing.
It was fully three quarters of an hour later when Jan saw Melisse, with Iowaka's red shawl over her head, walking slowly and with extreme precision of step back to the cabin.
"I wonder if she has the earache," he said to himself, watching her curiously. "That is Iowaka's shawl, and she has it all about her head."
"A clear half-inch of the rarest wool from London," added the cheery voice of Jean de Gravois, whose moccasins had made no sound behind him. He always spoke in French to Jan. "There is but one person in the world who looks better in it than your Melisse, Jan Thoreau, and that is Iowaka, my wife. Blessed saints, man, but is she not growing more beautiful every day?"
"Yes," said Jan. "She will soon be a woman."
"A woman!" shouted Jean, who, not having his caribou whip, jumped up and down to emphasize his words. "She will soon be a woman, did you say, Jan Thoreau? And if she is not a woman at thirty, with two children--God send others like them!--when will she be, I ask you?"
"I meant Melisse," laughed Jan.
"And I meant Iowaka," said Jean. "Ah, there she is now, come out to see if her Jean de Gravois is on his way home with the sugar for which she sent him something like an hour ago; for you know she is chef de cuisine of this affair to-night. Ah, she sees me not, and she turns back heartily disappointed, I'll swear by all the saints in the calendar! Did you ever see a figure like that, Jan Thoreau? And did you ever see hair that shines so, like the top-feathers of a raven who's nibbling at himself in the hottest bit of sunshine he can find? Deliver us, but I'll go with the sugar this minute!"
The happy Jean hopped out, like a cricket over-burdened with life, calling loudly to his wife, who came to meet him.
A few minutes later Jan thrust his head in at their door, as he was passing.
"I knew I should get a beating, or something worse, for forgetting that sugar," cried the little Frenchman, holding up his bared arms. "Dough--dough--dough--I'm rolling dough--dough for the bread, dough for the cakes, dough for the pies--dough, Jan Thoreau, just common flour and water mixed and swabbed--I, Jean de Gravois, chief man at Post Lac Bain, am mixing dough! She is as beautiful as an angel and sweeter than sugar--my Iowaka, I mean; but there is more flesh in her earthly tabernacle than in mine, so I am compelled to mix this dough, mon ami. Iowaka, my dear, tell Jan what you were telling me, about Melisse and--"
"Hush!" cried Iowaka in her sweet Cree. "That is for Jan to find out for himself."
"So--so it is," exclaimed the irrepressible Jean, plunging himself to the elbows in his pan of dough. "Then hurry to the cabin, Jan, and see what sort of a birthday gift Melisse has got for you."


CHAPTER XVI
BIRTHDAYS
The big room was empty when Jan came quietly through the open door. He stopped to listen, and caught a faint laugh from the other room, and then another; and to give warning of his presence, he coughed loudly and scraped a chair along the floor. A moment's silence followed. The farther door opened a little, and then it opened wide, and Melisse came out.
"Now what do you think of me, brother Jan?" She stood in the light of the window through which came the afternoon sun, her hair piled in glistening coils upon the crown of her head, as they had seen them in the pictures, her cheeks flushed, her eyes glowing questioningly at Jan.
"Do I look--as you thought--I would, Jan?" she persisted, a little doubtful at his silence. She turned, so that he saw the cluster of soft curls that fell upon her shoulder, with sprigs of bakneesh half smothered in them. "Do I?"
"You are prettier than I have ever seen you, Melisse," he replied softly.
There was a seriousness in his voice that made her come to him in her old impulsive, half-childish way. She lifted her hands and rested them on his shoulders, as she had always done when inviting him to toss her above his head.
"If I am prettier--and you like me this way--why don't you--"
She finished with a sweet, upturned pouting of her mouth, and, with a sudden, laughing cry, Jan caught her in his arms and kissed the lips she held up to him. It was but an instant, and he freed her, a hot blush burning in his brown cheeks.
"My dear brother!" she laughed at him, gathering up the bakneesh on the table. "I love to have you kiss me, and now I have to make you do it. Father kisses me every morning when he goes to the store. I remember when you used to kiss me every time you came home, but now you forget to do it at all. Do brothers love their sisters less as they grow older?"
"Sometimes they love the SISTER less and the OTHER GIRL more, ma belle Melisse," came a quick voice from the door, and Jean de Gravois bounded in like a playful cat, scraping and bowing before Melisse until his head nearly touched the floor. "Lovely saints, Jan Thoreau, but she IS a woman, just as my Iowaka told me! And the cakes--the bread--the pies! You must delay the supper my lady, for the good Lord deliver me if I haven't spilled all the dough on the floor! Swas-s-s- s-h--such a mess! And my Iowaka did nothing but laugh and call me a clumsy dear!"
"You're terribly in love, Jean," cried Melisse, laughing until her eyes were wet; "just like some of the people in the books which Jan and I read."
"And I always shall be, my dear, so long as the daughter of a princess and the great-granddaughter of a chef de bataillon allows me to mix her dough!"
Melisse flung the red shawl over her head, still laughing.
"I will go and help her, Jean."
"Mon Dieu!" gasped Gravois, looking searchingly at Jan, when she had left. "Shall I give you my best wishes, Jan Thoreau? Does it signify?"
"Signify--what?"
The little Frenchman's eyes snapped.
"Why, when our pretty Cree maiden becomes engaged, she puts up her hair for the first time, that is all, my dear Jan. When I asked my blessed Iowaka to be my wife, she answered by running away from me, taunting me until