"What have I done?" Charle' spread his hands. "My commandant has no complaint to make of me. It is Charle' Charette who leads on the trail or breaks a road where there is none, and carries the heaviest pack of furs, and pulls men out of the water when they are drowning; it is Charle' Charette who can best endure fasting when the rations run low, and can hunt and bring in meat when other voyageurs lie exhausted about the camp-fire. I am no little lard-eater from Canada, brother to a man with a stomach having no lid. Look at that." Charle' shook the decorated cap at her. "I wear the black feather of my brigade. That means that I am the best man in it." His wife reared her head. She was like the wild sweet-brier roses which crowded alluvial strips of the island, fragrant and pink and bristling. "Yes, monsieur, that black feather--regard it. Me, I am sick of that black feather. You say I have concealments. I have. All winter I go lonely. The ice is massed on the lake; the snow is so deep, the wind is keener than a knife; I weep for my husband away in the wilderness, believing he thinks of me. Eh bien! he comes back to Mackinac. It is as you say: I fly to meet him, my breath chokes me. But my husband, what does he do?" She looked him up and down with wrathful eyes. "He does not see 'Tite. He sees nothing but that black feather in his cap that he must take off and show to Monsieur Ramsay Crooks and Monsieur Stuart--while his wife suffocates." Charle' shrunk from his height, and his mouth opened like a fish's. "But I thought you would be proud of it." "Me, what do I care how many men you have thrown down? You do not like me any better because you have thrown down all the men in your brigade." "She is jealous--jealous of a feather!" Humbled as he was by her tongue, the young voyageur felt delighted at giving his wife so trivial a rival. He settled his belt and approached her and bowed. "Madame, permit me to offer you this black quill, which I have won for your sake, and which I boasted of to my masters that they might know you have not thrown yourself away on the poorest creature in Mackinac. Destroy it, madame. It was only the poor token of my love for you." Graceful and polite as all the voyageurs were, Charle' Charette was the prince of them with his big sweet presence as he bent. 'Tite flew at him and flung her arms around his neck. After the manner of Latin peoples, they instantly shed tears upon each other, and the black feather was crushed between their breasts. End of Project Gutenberg's The Black Feather, by Mary Hartwell Catherwood