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