ting on the stiles and swinging on the lower halves of the wide barn doors. The dogs slept in the sun, the cocks crew, and the pigeons cooed in the airy lofts. The barns themselves, four times as large as the houses, were still bursting with last year's harvest. The children, true little Frenchmen, left their play to courtesy to Jason Lee and to watch the wonderful white women. Their mothers, in calico dresses and leggings and moccasins, with red kerchiefs crossed on their breasts, nodded and smiled as the strangers passed. These women, whose mothers had packed teepees and dug camas all their lives, women who had passed their infancy strapped on a baby-board, now scrubbed their little cabins and managed the garden and dairy as well as any thrifty frau among the Germans. For their Canadian husbands they deemed no sacrifice too great, for their children they filled the last measure of devotion.
"Indeed," Jason Lee used to say, "these happy-go-lucky voyageurs are fortunate in finding such capable women to make them homes," and the Canadians themselves would have told you they were worth "half a dozen civilized wives."
Exchanging the canoe for the saddle, the mission party galloped across French Prairie knee-deep in flowers. The larks flew up and sung.
It was not a princely mansion, that humble log mission twenty by thirty, with chimney of sticks and clay. Jason Lee had swung the broadaxe that hewed the logs; Daniel Lee had calked the crevices with moss. There were Indian mats on the hewn-fir floors, homemade stools and tables. The hearth was of baked clay and ashes, the batten doors hung on leather hinges and clicked with wooden latches. Four small windows let
