"Indeed! What things?" Norris asked placidly.
"Suppose you enlarge your mind by looking up the stories of the old
coureurs du bois who used to stumble through these woods when they
were the border-land between Chippewa and Sioux." Dick threw a pebble at
Norris' face. "Suppose you go up to that inky stream in the north, which
twists mysteriously through the forests, black with the bodies of dead
men rotting in its mire. I don't wonder they thought the rough life more
fascinating than kings and courts. I'd like to have seen sun-dances and
maiden-tests; I'd like to have eaten food strange enough to be
picturesque, and to have found new streams and traced them to their
sources, and to have come unexpectedly on new lakes, like amethysts.
It's as much fun to discover as to invent. And then the Jesuit fathers,
half-tramp, half-martyr,--they were great old fellows."
"And the Frenchman--where is he?" said Madeline. "Gone, and left a few
names for the Swede and the American to mispronounce; but you may come
down later, Mr. Norris, and find how law and order, in our own people,
fought with savagery out here on the frontier. It's a thrilling story."
"You love it all and its legends, don't you?" Ellery looked from one to
the other.
"Don't you?" Madeline asked.
"By Jove, I do!" he cried, sitting suddenly upright as though stirred
with genuine feeling. "I love it without its legends. It does not seem
to me to have any past. It is all future. It makes me feel all future,
too."
"Do you know what's happened to you?" Dick laughed exultantly. "Gitche
Manito the Mighty has got you--the spirit of the West--which, being
interpreted, is Ozone."
"Something has got me, I admit," Norris cried. "What is it? What is it
that makes the sky so dazzling? What is it that makes the leaves fairly
radiate light? What is it that, every time you take a breath, makes the
air freshen you down to your toes? I feel younger than I ever did before
in all my life."
The other two were looking at him.
"Well, our height above the sea-level--" Dick began.
"Oh, rot!" Ellery exclaimed. "It's something more than air--it's
atmosphere. You feel here that it's glorious to work."
"You make me proud of you, old boy."
"It's funny how universally you fellows call me 'old boy'. I suppose I
was older than the rest of you. I had to take the responsibility for my
own life too soon and it took out of me that assurance that most of you
had--that complacent confidence that things would somehow manage
themselves. But I'm getting even now. I'm appreciating being young,
which most men don't."
"Bully for you!" Dick cried. "If you couldn't be born a Westerner, you
are born again one. I am moved to tell you something that gave me a
small glow yesterday. I met Lewis--the editor of the Star, you know,
Madeline--and he insisted on stopping me and congratulating me on having
brought Mr. Norris to St. Etienne; said he was irritated at first by
having a man forced on him by influence, when there was really no
particular place for him, but, he went on, 'Mr. Norris is rapidly making
his own place. We think him a real acquisition.'"