await our coming, and dashed back to their main body, getting well peppered on the way. On the rocks I left another strong picket who managed to fire into the enemy with some effect, for our farther advance was almost unopposed, and when we arrived at the position we found it empty, save for a man lying with his thigh broken by a bullet. From him we learnt that our opponents had suffered about a dozen casualties, but the other wounded had managed to get away with the help of their companions. He quickly recovered his spirits when he saw that we had no intention of cutting his throat. We pressed on for a little way in pursuit, but could not venture far into that wild unknown country. From a high point I looked north and west to the farthest verge of No Man's Land. Range beyond tumbled range the hills rose, a friendless lifeless land, until they merged into the slopes which rose to where, through the wicked dance of the heat haze, I could dimly see the great head of the Takht-iSuleiman serene in the coolness of its eleven thousand feet of height. OLD JOE GAGNÉ'S JOKE. BY A. G. "Lorsqu'il le juge nécessaire pour la protection des forêts le lieutenantgouverneur en conseil peut exiger que toute personne voulant pénétrer et circuler dans ces forêts se munisse, au préalable, d'un permis.”—Statutes of Quebec, para. 1647a. OLD Joe Gagné was a splendid old rascal. He was seventy years old, slim, wiry, blackhaired, and unstooping; and continuous exposure to the sun and all kinds of weather had turned his face to brown parchment. He was quite illiterate and fearfully dirty in person and habits, but his great force of character and the remembrance of his father's and grandfather's good service to the firm (the family seemed to go back to the French Régime at least) made it difficult for the woods manager to pension the old devil off. So he was made caretaker of a small depôt of tools and provisions intended for the next winter's logging work; it was thought that here, with some hens to keep and the dam to fish in and the bush-telephone to gossip over in the evenings, he would be happy, and could do little harm beyond poisoning occasional portageurs who looked in at the depôt for a meal. And portageurs take a lot of poisoning! At the same time, the local I. Fire Protective Association 1 required a permanent guardian to check the travel-permits of persons entering the forest by the road which passed this depôt. Bonhomme Gagné being ready to their hand, they enrolled him as a garde-feu, told him to turn back any and every person who attempted to cross the bridge without a permit, and instructed him in the other (simple) duties of his post. These he understood perfectly, being a clever old man; and he was not at all ill-pleased with his ranger's badge and the authority that it carried with it. For the upper parts of Bonhomme Gagné's road a moving patrol was required, to catch any one who might slip past his vigilance, and more particularly to prevent smoking or the lighting of fires on the part of authorised travellers, such as the portageurs aforementioned. The choice fell upon one Joe Proulx, another old servant of the lumber firm: red-faced and stout but vail 1 This is a co-operative body formed by the lumbermen for the protection of their forest holdings; it is recognised by the Government, and is empowered to administer the fire-laws. lant," and generally known as Bonhomme Calvaire," from the frequent use that he made of that blasphemous expression.1 On the first day of this story, a Monday, Bonhomme Calvaire had come to lunch with Bonhomme Gagné. It was convenient for him to do this, as the depôt was at one end of his patrol, and he did not notice dirt. Bonhomme Gagné, in preparing the meal, found that a mouse had been drowned in the molasses-pot. He extracted it by the tail and threw it out of the door, and as he leaned out to throw it he was petrified by the apparition of a small black person close by and advancing upon him. He made a most regrettable exclamation, and then remembered that the sign of the cross was rather what the occasion called for. However, the creature wished him goodday in English, and he realised that he was confronted by nothing worse than a niggerastonishing enough, in fact unparalleled, but perfectly harmless. It was a small rotund nigger with a short curly beard, and dressed in rags. The lining was coming out of his cap and his toes out of his boots, and he carried a stick, but no sack or pack, and had no appearance of business. It proved that he could not speak French -a great disaster for two eager gossip mongers. But Bon ago, chopped wood in the United States, and now by great efforts managed to find out that the nigger wished to walk over into the State of Maine, believed that this bushroad would lead him thither, and intended to penetrate into the forest in a southerly direction without food, blanket, or prospect of shelter, in the hope of getting somewhere some time. They gave him food, and then what a clattering of French began as they explored every aspect of this mad proposal! "Maudit fou, calvaire ! Ha! ha! . . . Maudit petit nèg' de même, se lâcher dans le bois ! Ha! ha! ha!... Va s'écarter, certain; ouay, batême, s'écarter à diab'! Mourra de faim, pas mal. Ha! ha ha!" et cetera. He Twenty minutes' discussion on these lines finally engendered a great thought in the mind of old Joe Gagné. saw the whole scheme of a colossal practical joke, such as should be told of as long as bushmen spit round stoves. Far from warning the silly idiot of his danger, they would encourage him in his plan, give him bogus directions as to how and where to go, and ring up a camp that he would pass farther up the road to warn them of his approach, and post them in the kind of lies to tell. Then he should go merrily off into a hopeless and homme Calvaire had once, long impenetrable wilderness of . 1 Vernacular Canadian is often garnished with phrases of a religious or ecclesiastical origin. trees, lakes, and swamps, and four or five days later they would, no doubt, see him back again starved, exhausted, and more dead than alive, but wiser than to attempt to walk through the bush to the United States again. Bonhomme Calvaire quite agreed that it would be the joke of the century, far surpassing all upsettings of sleighs and fallings into water, and manfully summoned up his English to give the necessary misinformation. Everything went well; the nigger understood him and was delighted, and went on his way heartened by his lunch and cheered by the advice of these kind strangers. The camp up the road, where the cook spoke English, also received him with open arms; swilled him with tea, overwhelmed him with advice and information for his journey, and despatched him on his way with incredible heartiness. The nigger began to think that there was some good in the Canadians after all. But of the junketings that passed over the bush - telephone that evening, who shall tell? Tuesday morning broke in peace and quiet on the Fire Protective Association's Office in St Germain. Nine o'clock brought the usual tuning of the typewriter, the gentle scurry of the junior fetching out files, and the clear tones of the clerk and the accountant making a decisive analysis of yesterday's baseball news before they started work. There had been no forest fires for a fortnight, and, like an army in peacetime, the office staff of the Association could afford not to bustle. Moreover, the boss was away till late, and both inspectors were in the bush. In fact, all was right with the world in that office in the Rue Lepage. The morning's duties passed with such ideal suavity that the clerk was able to go to II. dinner soon after eleven; the accountant likewise, who had gone to the bank to draw paycash, saw little gain in returning for what remained of the morning, so when the bushtelephone rang about noon, it was answered by the junior, a Norwegian lad who had jumped" his ship, and was keeping out of touch with the immigration authorities. Unfortunately he was not yet sufficiently Canadianised to be proficient in French, especially in the kind that is spoken without front teeth over a telephone. However, he gathered that there was some huge joke in progress at Depôt No. 4, which its guardian was anxious to share with Mr Gagnon, the accountant. So he promised that the latter should be near the instrument on his return from dinner, say about 3.30 P.M. to be on the safe side, in order to get the benefit of the full story in its original tongue. The possibilities of this joke naturally formed the chief topic of office conversation all through the earlier part of the afternoon. Gunnarsen was questioned closely as to what old Joe had told him, but all that he had understood was that somebody or something, a "maudit something" had apparently been "lâché dans le bois," and there was something about America too, and "rappeler M. Gagnon." But what it was really all about, or where the joke came in, had eluded him completely. Cross-examination had done as much as could be expected of it by three o'clock, and had then to be broken off abruptly as the boss came in, returned unexpectedly by the afternoon train. He was not in the best of humour after a rough passage through some financial strait at headquarters, and had, moreover, a mass of figures demanding immediate discussion with M. Gagnon. They had hardly fallen to work on this when the telephone rang. Mr Gosse reached out mechanically for it— "Hullo. Yes. Oui; OUI. Qui parle là ? Oh, here, for you, Gagnon; old Joe on to something." Dead silence in the office while Mr Gosse waited, bored, and Gunnarsen and Lavoie strained their ears behind a What's that about a nigger?" M. Gagnon had by this time got the bones of the story, and though the joke played on a helpless stranger by the two old Joes appealed to him as keenly as it had to its originators, the pressing work in hand made that particular moment an awkward-indeed, an improper-one for its development: he didn't want to have to explain it to the boss in the middle of checking accounts, and so tried to pass the interruption off with some evasive murmur about an old fool. But the boss possessed himself of the telephone, and began to make his own inquiries. Old Joe, of course, was delighted to be able to tell his story all over again, this time to a distinguished man, and the office staff could judge the dramatic perfection of his recital even from the faint clickings and ghostly sub-noises that reached them through the wrong end of the ear-piece. But Gagnon was astonished to see that the boss was not overcome by amusement it had been remarked before that |