Trézinie, the blacksmith’s daughter, stepped out upon the gallery just as M’sieur Michel passed by. He did not notice the girl but walked straight on down the village street.  
His seven hounds , as usual, about him. At his side hung his powder-horn, and on his shoulder a gunny-bag slackly filled with game that he carried to the store. A broad felt hat shaded his bearded face and in his hand he carelessly swung his old-fashioned rifle. It was doubtless the same with which he had so many people, Trézinie reflected. For Cami, the cobbler’s son—who must have known—had often related to her how this man had killed two Choctaws, as many Texans, a free mulatto and numberless blacks, in that vague locality known as “the hills.”
 
108Older people who knew better took little trouble to correct this ghastly record that a younger generation had scored against him. They themselves had come to half-believe that M’sieur Michel might be capable of anything, living as he had, for so many years, apart from humanity, alone with his hounds in a of a cabin on the hill. The time seemed to most of them fainter than a memory when, a lusty young fellow of twenty-five, he had cultivated his strip of land across the lane from Les Chêniers; when home and and wife and child were so many that he thanked heaven for having given him.
 
But in the early ’60’s he went with his friend Duplan and the rest of the “Louisiana Tigers.” He came back with some of them. He came to find—well, death may in a peaceful valley lying in wait to ensnare the feet of little ones. Then, there are women—there are wives with thoughts that roam and grow wanton with roaming; women whose pulses are stirred by strange voices and eyes that woo; women who forget the claims of yesterday, the hopes of to-morrow, in the impetuous clutch of to-day.
 
109But that was no reason, some people thought, why he should have cursed men who found their where they had left them—cursed God, who had abandoned him.
 
Persons who met him upon the road had long ago stopped greeting him. What was the use? He never answered them; he to no one; he never so much as looked into men’s faces. When he his game and fish at the village store for powder and shot and such food as he needed, he did so with few words and less courtesy. Yet feeble as it was, this was the only link that held him to his fellow-beings.
 
Strange to say, the sight of M’sieur Michel, though more forbidding than ever that spring afternoon, was so suggestive to Trézinie as to be almost an inspiration.
 
It was Easter eve and the early part of April. The whole earth seemed with new, green, vigorous life everywhere—except the spot that immediately surrounded Trézinie. It was no use; she had tried. Nothing would grow among tho............