CHAPTER X.THE WAY IN AND THE WAY OUT.
In his own world of the parish of Chaudiere Jo Portugais was counted a widely travelled man.

He had adventured freely on the great rivers and in the forests, and had journeyed up towards Hudson's Bay farther than any man in seven parishes.
Jo's father and mother had both died in one year--when he was twenty-five.

That year had turned him from a clean-shaven cheerful boy into a morose bearded man who looked forty, for it had been marked by his disappearance from Chaudiere and his return at the end of it, to find his mother dead and his father dying broken-hearted.

What had driven Jo from home only his father knew; what had happened to him during that year only Jo himself knew, and he told no one, not even his dying father.
A mystery surrounded him, and no one pierced it.

He was a figure apart in Chaudiere parish.