Then he reached out, caught the priest's hand in his gnarled fingers, and
wrung it.

The father never spoke a harsh word to the girl. Otherwise he seemed to
harden into stone. When the Protestant missionary came, he would not see
him. The child was born before the river-drivers came along again the
next year with their rafts and logs. There was a feeling abroad that it
would be ill for Dugard if he chanced to camp at Bamber's Boom. The look
of the old man's face was ominous, and he was known to have an iron will.

Dugard was a handsome man, half French, half Scotch, swarthy and
admirably made. He was proud of his strength, and showily fearless in
danger. For there were dangerous hours to the river life: when, for
instance, a mass of logs became jammed at a rapids, and must be loosened;
or a crib struck into the wrong channel, or, failing to enter a slide
straight, came at a nasty angle to it, its timbers wrenched and tore
apart, and its crew, with their great oars, were plumped into the busy
current. He had been known to stand singly in some perilous spot when one
log, the key to the jam, must be shifted to set free the great tumbled
pile. He did everything with a dash. The handspike was waved and thrust
into the best leverage, the long robust cry, "O-hee-hee-hoi!" rolled over
the waters, there was a devil's jumble of logs, and he played a desperate
game with them, tossing here, leaping there, balancing elsewhere, till,
reaching the smooth rush of logs in the current, he ran across them to
the shore as they spun beneath his feet.

His gang of river-drivers, with their big drives of logs, came sweeping
down one beautiful day of early summer, red-shifted, shouting,
good-tempered. It was about this time that Pierre came to know Magor.