Take me to them, daft one, quick."

A little later the Idiot sat inside the store, wrapped in loose furs, and
blowing bubbles; while Pretty Pierre, with many handfuls of bullets by
him, waited for the attack.

"Eh," he said, as he watched from a loophole, "Gyng and the others have
got safely past the Causeway, and the rest is possible. Well, it hurts
an idiot as much to die, perhaps, as a half-breed or a factor. It is
good to stay here. If we fight, and go out swift like Grah's bubbles,
it is the game. If we starve and sleep as did Grah's mother, then it
also is the game. It is great to have all the chances against and then
to win. We shall see."

With a sharp relish in his eye he watched the enemy coming slowly
forward. Yet he talked almost idly to himself: "I have a thought of so
long ago. A woman--she was a mother, and it was on the Madawaska River,
and she said: 'Sometimes I think a devil was your father, an angel
sometimes. You were begot in an hour between a fighting and a mass:
between blood and heaven. And when you were born you made no cry. They
said that was a sign of evil. You refused the breast, and drank only of
the milk of wild cattle. In baptism you flung your hand before your face
that the water might not touch, nor the priest's finger make a cross upon
the water. And they said it were better if you had been born an idiot
than with an evil spirit; and that your hand would be against the loins
that bore you. But Pierre, ah Pierre, you love your mother, do you
not?'" . . . And he standing now, his eye closed with the gate-chink
in front of Fort o' God, said quietly: "She was of the race that hated
these--my mother; and she died of a wound they gave her at the Tete
Blanche Hill. Well, for that you die now, Yellow Arm, if this gun has a