The Ozark spectator., 1917-02-21
CHAPTER XVI.
The Poison linoers.


 David stayed behind in Vincennes going back to his work at the trading house of Francois Vigo. But he stayed there only week or two before his loneliness made existence without q sight of Toinette an existence not to be endured. He hated the sight of the ill-smelling store, with its heaps of green skins, its cracking bundles of furs, hated the sight of the cheerful Hoosiers and French who thronged the streets of the old capital. and loathed the wretched Piankeshaw Indians who slept in the doorway. Suddenly, one morning, he told old Vigo that he must leave; and the next day found him once more n Corydon, where Ike welcomed him with beaming face.
 Still the breach was open! It is so hard for young men and maidens to lay down their pride!
 To Toinette the days were almost unbearable. David acted like bear with a sore head, she thought. It was just what she might have expected. she told herself. It is perfectly silly to be so big and flinty, she was sure. David had never spoken ten words to her at any one time, since the day he had knocked everything into cooked hut by telling her he loved her. Peo- pie who loved each other didn't act as they did, she knew: why, whenever they had been together she felt as though something tremendous, some thing bigger than she was, was in the very air around and on the point of exploding. She didn't approve of ex plosiOns, still less of things, nameless forces, that were bigger than she was. When she had talked to David in the old days 1t was like talking to the heart of one of those terrible creatures of steel, about which Mir. Livingston had written her father--that great throb- being caldron which they fed with logs and which palpitated with fury and drove boat from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in month. It was bigger than she was and unmanageable and 1t was not at all her idea of love. Whenever she thought about 1t, that Is to say about the atmosphere which was immediately and mysteriously evolved out of common day whenever David and she encountered, her eyes filled with tears of vexation. As for being sorry, that was another matter. If Da- vid wished to be flint, she was perfect ly capable of being steel. Yet she thought about him every day.
 Her father for the first time In her experience, failed to be of any help to her. At home. in New Orleans, she had gone to him with the story of each boy who had danced attendance upon her and he had seen them us she did and together they had laughed each cavalier into oblivion; but she found it impossible to discuss this new problem with him. It was no use telling her father that she was afraid of some thing she couldn't name. If 1t was true that she had trembled from head to foot when she felt that the sparks which flashed back and forth from her steel and David's flint were danger ously near a powder mine somewhere inside her. that was her affair and she would have to drown it with her own contempt as best she might.
 Accordingly, the little old gentleman, who was sincerely troubled by the evi- dent breach between his daughter and David, got small satisfaction from Toinette when he stuck cautious fin ger into the difficulty. There was nothing wrong and she was perfectly happy and if David chose to be bear with sore head that was his