French and words of the Chippewa tongue were to be heard. In the growing forests, the old mill towns bleached and cracked under the summer sun, rotted in the melting snows,—deserted, gray and ghostlike. But here and there, where something had happened—for good or for evil—which a man might never forget, the ghosts drew back the living.
At least, men thus explained the return of Lucas Cullen to St. Florentin—Lucas, the younger of the two Cullen brothers with whose names everything "successful" in, that section was once associated. More than a generation ago they had gutted St. Florentin township; so when they went, almost every one else went with them. No one thought that Lucas would return; but in 1896 suddenly he appeared and, upon the site of the cabin where he and his wife lived when they founded St. Florentin and bossed the men building the first sawmill, he caused a new, enormous dwelling to be erected.
Lucas, who then was speaking of himself as "of Chicago," called this a summer cottage; and he made it famous immediately by bringing there for the summer the French nobleman, the Marquis de Chenal, "a friend of my daughter Cecilia." The Marquis so well liked Cecilia and liked the place—not to mention, as did many of the enviously minded, Lucas Cullen's millions—that he remained at St. Florentin all summer.
He married Cecilia that winter and took her—together with a million or so of Michigan forest money—to his château in Touraine; and neither of them ever returned to the peninsula. But Lucas and his wife and their younger daughter and their two sons came the next year; then Deborah married a westerner and moved to Wyoming. "Junior" Lucas and his brother
