He snatched the hat from the table by the stove and ran out into the snow. In front of the shanty a good-sized spruce, tall, smooth, very straight, was still standing. He went up the trunk like a bear.
But there was a dead balsam that had fallen against the spruce and lodged on the lower branches. It was barely strong enough to bear the weight of a light man. Up this slanting ladder Prosper ran quickly in his moccasined feet, snatched the hat from Raoul's teeth as he swarmed up the trunk, and ran down again. As he neared the ground, the balsam, shaken from its lodgement, cracked and fell. Raoul was left up the tree, perched among the branches, out of breath. Luck had set the scene for the lumberman's favorite trick.
"Chop him down! chop him down!" was the cry; and a trio of axes were twanging against the spruce-tree, while the other men shouted and laughed and pelted the tree with ice to keep the prisoner from climbing down.
[Illustration: They looked fine on Corpus Christi day.—Page 162.]
Prosper neither shouted nor chopped, but he grinned a little as he watched the tree quiver and shake, and heard the rain of "_sacrés!_" and "_maudits!_" that came out of the swaying top. He grinned—until he saw that a half-dozen more blows would fell the spruce right on the roof of the shanty.
"Are you fools?" he cried, as he picked up an axe; "you know nothing how to chop. You kill a man. You smash the _cabane_. Let go!" He shoved one of the boys away and sent a score of mighty cuts into the side of the spruce that was farthest from the cabin; then two short cuts on the other side; the tree shivered, staggered, cracked, and swept in a great arc toward the deep snow-drift by the brook. As the top swung earth-ward, Raoul jumped clear of the crashing branches and landed safely in the featherbed of snow, buried up to his neck. Nothing was to be seen of him but his head, like some new kind of fire-work—sputtering bad words.
Well, this was the first thing that put an edge on Vaillantcœur's hunger to fight. No man likes to be chopped down by his friend, even if the friend does it for the sake of saving him from being killed by a fall on the shanty-roof. It is easy to forget that part of it. What you remember is the grin.