* * * * *

All that would have been when Xavier was young. When Gramma Julie roused from her catnap and went on, she surmised, from the shadows of great legends she had heard in girlhood, that Xavier became an independent trader. She knew that he lived on till 1850, always a mover, and she was certain that he had been the first white man to explore dark leagues of wasteland where now there are farms and villages that were founded on the rock of Xavier’s skill and bravery.

It was unquestionable, she stridently maintained against her husband’s grunting, that this pioneering Frenchman had been one of the builders, the primitive warrior-kings, of the new provinces of the Americans and the British: Minnesota and Wisconsin, Ontario and Manitoba.

But, Neil improvised, Xavier’s service to the Anglican visky-guzzlers must have been involuntary. He must still have borne in his heart the Lilies of the Sun, not the beef-red banner of the British nor the candy-striped bunting of the Yanks. Might not this valorous Gaul, more than some lanky English lordling, have been the ancestor who established for him a valid claim to the blood royal?

This would not gratify Dr. Kenneth, who had none of Xavier’s fire in his brittle veins, but some day it would enchant a Biddy who was as venturesome as Xavier.

Why not? Who could tell? Perhaps this singular Xavier Pic was the exiled offspring of some half-royal Duc of Picardie!

But the ducal banner was instantly taken from Neil’s hand.

* * * * *

“You understand,” said Gramma Julie, “that Xavier may not have been pure French? I wouldn’t wonder if he was part Indian. We may be part Chippewa ourselves, you and me.”

“Chippewa?” said Neil, not very brightly.

“Why, you haven’t got any prejudice against our having some Indian blood?” said the old lady, with a foxy glance at her husband.

“No, no, certainly not!” declared Neil, with an extraordinary lack of conviction. “I haven’t any prejudices against any race. After all, I was in the War Against Prejudice!”

Grampa Edgar complained, “‘Tain’t a question of the boy having prejudices against being a nekkid, baby-scalping Indian. You just don’t have to advertise everything you know!”

Julie eyed her man. “Don’t talk like you got the simples! I ain’t afraid to advertise what my folks were! They never peddled wooden clocks, like some! If anybody came up to me and asked, ‘Are you a tomahawking Indian?’ I’d say, Sure. And tomahawk ‘em!”

While the old ones bickered, with the skill of sixty years’ practice, Neil was in a small state of shock. In a general way, he believed that Indians were very fine people—they were good at canoeing and the tanning of deerskins. But it was a tumble from the castle of a Duc de Picardie to a bark lodge, smoke-encrusted.

After some spirited notes on Edgar’s ancestors as Yankee skinflints, Julie was going on:

“Anyway, the only time that I ever heard of Xavier’s getting careless and marrying, the girl was a Chippewa squaw, so I guess we got Indian blood from her, even if Xavier wasn’t part Indian himself. And me, I’d rather have kin that et berries and fresh pickerel than Edgar’s folks, that never had anything but codfish—dried—and that’s how they all come to look so dry themselves.”