The next was a group of
wigwams with squaws and children in the foreground. Then came more nuns;
then more voyageurs with their canoes; then more Indians and wigwams It
occurred to Ford that the nuns might have been painted from life, the
voyageurs and Indians from imagination He turned to the two framed
drawings on the chimney-piece Both represented winter scenes. In the one a
sturdy voyageur was conveying his wife and small personal belongings
across the frozen snow on a sled drawn by a team of dogs. In the other a
woman, apparently the same woman as in the preceding sketch, had fallen in
the midst of a blinding storm, while a tall man of European
aspect--decidedly not the voyageur--was standing beside her with a baby in
his arms. These were clearly fancy pictures, and, so it seemed to Ford,
the work of one who was trying to recapture some almost forgotten memory.
In any case he was too deeply engrossed by his own situation to dwell on
them further.
He wheeled round again toward the centre of the room, impatiently casting
about him for something to eat. The tin box, from which he had devoured
all the biscuits, lay empty on the floor, but he picked it up and ate
hungrily the few crumbs sticking in its corners.
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