"With a wonderful jerk, hold! let us prepare, messieurs, to be waked with
an Irish jerk!" and Pierre pensively trifled with the fringe on Shon's
buckskin jacket, which was whisked from his fingers with smothered anger.
For a few moments he was silent; but the eager looks of the Chief Factor
and Lazenby encouraged him to continue. Besides, it was only Pierre's
way--provoking Shon was the piquant sauce of his life.

"Lyin' awake I was," continued Shon, "in the middle of the night, not
bein' able to sleep for a pain in a shoulder I'd strained, whin I heard a
thing that drew me up standin'. It was the sound of a child laughin'; so
wonderful and bright, and at the very door of me tent it seemed. Then it
faded away till it was only a breath, lovely, and idle, and swingin'. I
wint to the door and looked out. There was nothin' there, av coorse."
"And why 'av coorse'?" rejoined Pierre. The Chief Factor was intent on
what Shon was saying, while Lazenby drummed his fingers on the table, his
nose in the air.

"Divils me darlin', but ye know as well as I, that there's things in the
world neither for havin' nor handlin'. And that's wan of thim, says I to
meself. . . . I wint back and lay down, and I heard the voice singin'
now and comin' nearer and nearer, and growin' louder and louder, and then
there came with it a patter of feet, till it was as a thousand children
were dancin' by me door. I was shy enough, I'll own; but I pulled aside
the curtain of the tent to see again: and there was nothin' beyand for
the eye. But the singin' was goin' past and recedin' as before, till it
died away along the waves of prairie grass. I wint back and give Grey
Nose, my Injin bed-fellow, a lift wid me fut. 'Come out of that,' says
I, 'and tell me if dead or alive I am.' He got up, and there was the
noise soft and grand again, but with it now the voices of men, the flip
of birds' wings and the sighin' of tree tops, and behind all that the