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Alice of Old Vincennes

by Maurice Thompson · English · Gutenberg #4097 · 622,401 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Alice of Old Vincennes

Author: Maurice Thompson


        
Release date: May 1, 2003 [eBook #4097]
                Most recently updated: December 27, 2020

Language: English

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Produced by Charles Franks, Robert Rowe and the Online
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Alice of Old Vincennes


by

Maurice Thompson




PREFACE


To M. PLACIDE VALCOUR
  M. D., Ph D., LL. D.

MY DEAR DR. VALCOUR: You gave me the Inspiration which made this story
haunt me until I wrote it. Gaspard Roussillon's letter, a mildewed
relic of the year 1788, which you so kindly permitted me to copy, as
far as it remained legible, was the point from which my imagination,
accompanied by my curiosity, set out upon a long and delightful quest.
You laughed at me when I became enthusiastic regarding the possible
historical importance at that ancient find, alas! fragmentary epistle;
but the old saying about the beatitude of him whose cachinations are
latest comes handy to me just now, and I must remind you that "I told
you so." True enough, it was history pure and simple that I had in mind
while enjoying the large hospitality of your gulf-side home. Gaspard
Roussillon's letter then appealed to my greed for materials which would
help along the making of my little book "The Story of Louisiana."
Later, however, as my frequent calls upon you for both documents and
suggestions have informed you, I fell to strumming a different guitar.
And now to you I dedicate this historical romance of old Vincennes, as
a very appropriate, however slight, recognition of your scholarly
attainments, your distinguished career in a noble profession, and your
descent from one of the earliest French families (if not the very
earliest) long resident at that strange little post on the Wabash, now
one of the most beautiful cities between the greet river and the ocean.

Following, with ever tantalized expectancy, the broken and breezy hints
in the Roussillon letter, I pursued a will-o'-the-wisp, here, there,
yonder, until by slowly arriving increments I gathered up a large
amount of valuable facts, which when I came to compare them with the
history of Clark's conquest of the Wabash Valley, fitted amazingly well
into certain spaces heretofore left open in that important yet sadly
imperfect record.

You will find that I was not so wrong in suspecting that Emile Jazon,
mentioned in the Roussillon letter, was a brother of Jean Jazon and a
famous scout in the time of Boone and Clark. He was, therefore, a
kinsman of yours on the maternal side, and I congratulate you. Another
thing may please you, the success which attended my long and patient
research with a view to clearing up the connection between Alice
Roussillon's romantic life, as brokenly sketched in M. Roussillon's
letter, and the capture of Vincennes by Colonel George Rogers Clark.

Accept, then, this book, which to those who care only for history will
seem but an idle romance, while to the lovers of romance it may look
strangely like the mustiest history. In my mind, and in yours I hope,
it will always be connected with a breezy summer-house on a headland of
the Louisiana gulf coast, the rustling of palmetto leaves, the fine
flash of roses, a tumult of mocking-bird voices, the soft lilt of
Creole patois, and the endless dash and roar of a fragrant sea over
which the gulls and pelicans never ceased their flight, and beside
which you smoked while I dreamed.

MAURICE THOMPSON.
  JULY, 1900.





Contents

     I. Under the Cherry Tree
    II. A Letter from Afar
   III. The Rape of the Demijohn
    IV. The First Mayor of Vincennes
     V. Father Gibault
    VI. A Fencing Bout
   VII. The Mayor's Party
  VIII. The Dilemma of Captain Helm
    IX. The Honors of War
     X. M. Roussillon Entertains Colonel Hamilton
    XI. A Sword and a Horse Pistol
   XII. Manon Lescaut, and a Rapier-Thrust
  XIII. A Meeting in the Wilderness
   XIV. A Prisoner of Love
    XV. Virtue in a Locket
   XVI. Father Beret's Old Battle
  XVII. A March through Cold Water
 XVIII. A Duel by Moonlight
   XIX. The Attack
    XX. Alice's Flag
   XXI. Some Transactions in Scalps
  XXII. Clark Advises Alice
 XXIII. And So It Ended





Alice of Old Vincennes





CHAPTER I

UNDER THE CHERRY TREE


Up to the days of Indiana's early statehood, probably as late as 1825,
there stood, in what is now the beautiful little city of Vincennes on
the Wabash, the decaying remnant of an old and curiously gnarled cherry
tree, known as the Roussillon tree, le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon,
as the French inhabitants called it, which as long as it lived bore
fruit remarkable for richness of flavor and peculiar dark ruby depth of
color. The exact spot where this noble old seedling from la belle
France flourished, declined, and died cannot be certainly pointed out;
for in the rapid and happy growth of Vincennes many land-marks once
notable, among them le cerisier de Monsieur Roussillon, have been
destroyed and the spots where they stood, once familiar to every eye in
old Vincennes, are now lost in the pleasant confusion of the new town.

The security of certain land titles may have largely depended upon the
disappearance of old, fixed objects here and there. Early records were
loosely kept, indeed, scarcely kept at all; many were destroyed by
designing land speculators, while those most carefully preserved often
failed to give even a shadowy trace of the actual boundaries of the
estates held thereby; so that the position of a house or tree not
infrequently settled an important question of property rights left open
by a primitive deed. At all events the Roussillon cherry tree
disappeared long ago, nobody living knows how, and with it also
vanished, quite as mysteriously, all traces of the once important
Roussillon estate. Not a record of the name even can be found, it is
said, in church or county books.

The old, twisted, gum-embossed cherry tree survived every other
distinguishing feature of what was once the most picturesque and
romantic place in Vincennes. Just north of it stood, in the early
French days, a low, rambling cabin surrounded by rude verandas
overgrown with grapevines. This was the Roussillon place, the most
pretentious home in all the Wabash country. Its owner was Gaspard
Roussillon, a successful trader with the Indians. He was rich, for the
time and the place, influential to a degree, a man of some education,
who had brought with him to the wilderness a bundle of books and a
taste for reading.

From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once clung
fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it is drawn that
the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away from the present
site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell of ground overlooking a
wide marshy flat and the silver current of the Wabash. If the tree grew
there, then there too stood the Roussillon house with its cosy log
rooms, its clay-daubed chimneys and its grapevine-mantled verandas,
while some distance away and nearer the river the rude fort with its
huddled officers' quarters seemed to fling out over the wild landscape,
through its squinting and lopsided port-holes, a gaze of stubborn
defiance.

Not far off was the little log church, where one good Father Beret, or
as named by the Indians, who all loved him, Father Blackrobe, performed
the services of his sacred calling; and scattered all around were the
cabins of traders, soldiers and woodsmen forming a queer little town,
the like of which cannot now be seen anywhere on the earth.

It is not known just when Vincennes was first founded; but most
historians make the probable date very early in the eighteenth century,
somewhere between 1710 and 1730. In 1810 the Roussillon cherry tree was
thought by a distinguished botanical letter-writer to be at least fifty
years old, which would make the date of its planting about 1760.
Certainly as shown by the time-stained family records upon which this
story of ours is based, it was a flourishing and wide-topped tree in
early summer of 1778, its branches loaded to drooping with luscious
fruit. So low did the dark red clusters hang at one point that a tall
young girl standing on the ground easily reached the best ones and made
her lips purple with their juice while she ate them.

That was long ago, measured by what has come to pass on the gentle
swell of rich country from which Vincennes overlooks the Wabash. The
new town flourishes notably and its appearance marks the latest limit
of progress. Electric cars in its streets, electric lights in its
beautiful homes, the roar of railway trains coming and going in all
directions, bicycles whirling hither and thither, the most fashionable
styles of equipages, from brougham to pony-phaeton, make the days of
flint-lock guns and buckskin trousers seem ages down the past; and yet
we are looking back over but a little more than a hundred and twenty
years to see Alice Roussillon standing under the cherry tree and
holding high a tempting cluster of fruit, while a very short,
hump-backed youth looks up with longing eyes and vainly reaches for it.
The tableau is not merely rustic, it is primitive. "Jump!" the girl is
saying in French, "jump, Jean; jump high!"

Yes, that was very long ago, in the days when women lightly braved what
the strongest men would shrink from now.

Alice Roussillon was tall, lithe, strongly knit, with an almost perfect
figure, judging by what the master sculptors carved for the form of
Venus, and her face was comely and winning, if not absolutely
beautiful; but the time and the place were vigorously indicated by her
dress, which was of coarse stuff and simply designed. Plainly she was a
child of the American wilderness, a daughter of old Vincennes on the
Wabash in the time that tried men's souls.

"Jump, Jean!" she cried, her face laughing with a show of
cheek-dimples, an arching of finely sketched brows and the twinkling of
large blue-gray eyes.

"Jump high and get them!"

While she waved her sun-browned hand holding the cherries aloft, the
breeze blowing fresh from the southwest tossed her hair so that some
loose strands shone like rimpled flames. The sturdy little hunchback
did leap with surprising activity; but the treacherous brown hand went
higher, so high that the combined altitude of his jump and the reach of
his unnaturally long arms was overcome. Again and again he sprang
vainly into the air comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog.

"And you brag of your agility and strength, Jean," she laughingly
remarked; "but you can't take cherries when they are offered to you.
What a clumsy bungler you are."

"I can climb and get some," he said with a hideously happy grin, and
immediately embraced the bole of the tree, up which he began scrambling
almost as fast as a squirrel.

When he had mounted high enough to be extending a hand for a hold on a
crotch, Alice grasped his leg near the foot and pulled him down,
despite his clinging and struggling, until his hands clawed in the soft
earth at the tree's root, while she held his captive leg almost
vertically erect.

It was a show of great strength; but Alice looked quite unconscious of
it, laughing merrily, the dimples deepening in her plump cheeks, her
forearm, now bared to the elbow, gleaming white and shapely while its
muscles rippled on account of the jerking and kicking of Jean.

All the time she was holding the cherries high in her other hand,
shaking them by the twig to which their slender stems attached them,
and saying in a sweetly tantalizing tone:

"What makes you climb downward after cherries. Jean? What a foolish
fellow you are, indeed, trying to grabble cherries out of the ground,
as you do potatoes! I'm sure I didn't suppose that you knew so little
as that."

Her French was colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there what
we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in
isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call
the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast appearing
oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and local,--a
peculiarity not easy to transfer from one language to another.

Jean the hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder of good
nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely between
the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like a shaggy black
animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose in his amiable
way and never knew just when to acknowledge defeat. How long he might
have kept up the hopeless struggle with the girl's invincible grip
would be hard to guess. His release was caused by the approach of a
third person, who wore the robe of a Catholic priest and the
countenance of a man who had lived and suffered a long time without
much loss of physical strength and endurance.

This was Pere Beret, grizzly, short, compact, his face deeply lined,
his mouth decidedly aslant on account of some lost teeth, and his eyes
set deep under gray, shaggy brows. Looking at him when his features
were in repose a first impression might not have been favorable; but
seeing him smile or hearing him speak changed everything. His voice was
sweetness itself and his smile won you on the instant. Something like a
pervading sorrow always seemed to be close behind his eyes and under
his speech; yet he was a genial, sometimes almost jolly, man, very
prone to join in the lighter amusements of his people.

"Children, children, my children," he called out as he approached along
a little pathway leading up from the direction of the church, "what are
you doing now? Bah there, Alice, will you pull Jean's leg off?"

At first they did not hear him, they were so nearly deafened by their
own vocal discords.

"Why are you standing on your head with your feet so high in air,
Jean?" he added. "It's not a polite attitude in the presence of a young
lady. Are you a pig, that you poke your nose in the dirt?"

Alice now turned her bright head and gave Pere Beret a look of frank
welcome, which at the same time shot a beam of willful self-assertion.

"My daughter, are you trying to help Jean up the tree feet foremost?"
the priest added, standing where he had halted just outside of the
straggling yard fence.

He had his hands on his hips and was quietly chuckling at the scene
before him, as one who, although old, sympathized with the natural and
harmless sportiveness of young people and would as lief as not join in
a prank or two.

"You see what I'm doing, Father Beret," said Alice, "I am preventing a
great damage to you. You will maybe lose a good many cherry pies and
dumplings if I let Jean go. He was climbing the tree to pilfer the
fruit; so I pulled him down, you understand."

"Ta, ta!" exclaimed the good man, shaking his gray head; "we must
reason with the child. Let go his leg, daughter, I will vouch for him;
eh, Jean?"

Alice released the hunchback, then laughed gayly and tossed the cluster
of cherries into his hand, whereupon he began munching them voraciously
and talking at the same time.

"I knew I could get them," he boasted; "and see, I have them now." He
hopped around, looking like a species of ill-formed monkey.

Pere Beret came and leaned on the low fence close to Alice. She was
almost as tall as he.

"The sun scorches to-day," he said, beginning to mop his furrowed face
with a red-flowered cotton handkerchief; "and from the look of the sky
yonder," pointing southward, "it is going to bring on a storm. How is
Madame Roussillon to-day?"

"She is complaining as she usually does when she feels extremely well,"
said Alice; "that's why I had to take her place at the oven and bake
pies. I got hot and came out to catch a bit of this breeze. Oh, but you
needn't smile and look greedy, Pere Beret, the pies are not for your
teeth!"

"My daughter, I am not a glutton, I hope; I had meat not two hours
since--some broiled young squirrels with cress, sent me by Rene de
Ronville. He never forgets his old father."

"Oh, I never forget you either, mon pere; I thought of you to-day every
time I spread a crust and filled it with cherries; and when I took out
a pie all brown and hot, the red juice bubbling out of it so good
smelling and tempting, do you know what I said to myself?"

"How could I know, my child?"

"Well, I thought this: 'Not a single bite of that pie does Father Beret
get.'"

"Why so, daughter?"

"Because you said it was bad of me to read novels and told Mother
Roussillon to hide them from me. I've had any amount of trouble about
it."

"Ta, ta! read the good books that I gave you. They will soon kill the
taste for these silly romances."

"I tried," said Alice; "I tried very hard, and it's no use; your books
are dull and stupidly heavy. What do I care about something that a
queer lot of saints did hundreds of years ago in times of plague and
famine? Saints must have been poky people, and it is poky people who
care to read about them, I think. I like reading about brave, heroic
men and beautiful women, and war and love."

Pere Beret looked away with a curious expression in his face, his eyes
half closed.

"And I'll tell you now, Father Beret," Alice went on after a pause, "no
more claret and pies do you get until I can have my own sort of books
back again to read as I please." She stamped her moccasin-shod foot
with decided energy.

The good priest broke into a hearty laugh, and taking off his cap of
grass-straw mechanically scratched his bald head. He looked at the
tall, strong girl before him for a moment or two, and it would have
been hard for the best physiognomist to decide just how much of
approval and how much of disapproval that look really signified.

Although, as Father Beret had said, the sun's heat was violent, causing
that gentle soul to pass his bundled handkerchief with a wiping
circular motion over his bald and bedewed pate, the wind was momently
freshening, while up from behind the trees on the horizon beyond the
river, a cloud was rising blue-black, tumbled, and grim against the sky.

"Well," said the priest, evidently trying hard to exchange his laugh
for a look of regretful resignation, "you will have your own way, my
child, and--"

"Then you will have pies galore and no end of claret!" she interrupted,
at the same time stepping to the withe-tied and peg-latched gate of the
yard and opening it. "Come in, you dear, good Father, before the rain
shall begin, and sit with me on the gallery" (the creole word for
veranda) "till the storm is over."

Father Beret seemed not loath to enter, albeit he offered a weak
protest against delaying some task he had in hand. Alice reached forth
and pulled him in, then reclosed the queer little gate and pegged it.
She caressingly passed her arm through his and looked into his
weather-stained old face with childlike affection.

There was not a photographer's camera to be had in those days; but what
if a tourist with one in hand could have been there to take a snapshot
at the priest and the maiden as they walked arm in arm to that squat
little veranda! The picture to-day would be worth its weight in a
first-water diamond. It would include the cabin, the cherry-tree, a
glimpse of the raw, wild background and a sharp portrait-group of Pere
Beret, Alice, and Jean the hunchback. To compare it with a photograph
of the same spot now would give a perfect impression of the historic
atmosphere, color and conditions which cannot be set in words. But we
must not belittle the power of verbal description. What if a thoroughly
trained newspaper reporter had been given the freedom of old Vincennes
on the Wabash during the first week of June, 1778, and we now had his
printed story! What a supplement to the photographer's pictures! Well,
we have neither photographs nor graphic report; yet there they are
before us, the gowned and straw-capped priest, the fresh-faced,
coarsely-clad and vigorous girl, the grotesque little hunchback, all
just as real as life itself. Each of us can see them, even with closed
eyes. Led by that wonderful guide, Imagination, we step back a century
and more to look over a scene at once strangely attractive and
unspeakably forlorn.

What was it that drew people away from the old countries, from the
cities, the villages and the vineyards of beautiful France, for
example, to dwell in the wilderness, amid wild beasts and wilder savage
Indians, with a rude cabin for a home and the exposures and hardships
of pioneer life for their daily experience?

Men like Gaspard Roussillon are of a distinct stamp. Take him as he
was. Born in France, on the banks of the Rhone near Avignon, he came as
a youth to Canada, whence he drifted on the tide of adventure this way
and that, until at last he found himself, with a wife, at Post
Vincennes, that lonely picket of religion and trade, which was to
become the center of civilizing energy for the great Northwestern
Territory. M. Roussillon had no children of his own; so his kind heart
opened freely to two fatherless and motherless waifs. These were Alice,
now called Alice Roussillon, and the hunchback, Jean. The former was
twelve years old, when he adopted her, a child of Protestant parents,
while Jean had been taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been
killed and scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid,
whose appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed
itself most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding, was
a woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband clung
tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances most in
vogue when he took leave of France.

M. Roussillon had been, in a way, Alice's teacher, though not greatly
inclined to abet Father Beret in his kindly efforts to make a Catholic
of the girl, and most treacherously disposed toward the good priest in
the matter of his well-meant attempts to prevent her from reading and
re-reading the aforesaid romances. But for many weeks past Gaspard
Roussillon had been absent from home, looking after his trading schemes
with the Indians; and Pere Beret acting on the suggestion of the
proverb about the absent cat and the playing mouse, had formed an
alliance offensive and defensive with Madame Roussillon, in which it
was strictly stipulated that all novels and romances were to be
forcibly taken and securely hidden away from Mademoiselle Alice; which,
to the best of Madame Roussillon's ability, had accordingly been done.

Now, while the wind strengthened and the softly booming summer shower
came on apace, the heavy cloud lifting as it advanced and showing under
it the dark gray sheet of the rain, Pere Beret and Alice sat under the
clapboard roof behind the vines of the veranda and discussed, what was
generally uppermost in the priest's mind upon such occasions, the good
of Alice's immortal soul,--a subject not absorbingly interesting to her
at any time.

It was a standing grief to the good old priest, this strange perversity
of the girl in the matter of religious duty, as he saw it. True she had
a faithful guardian in Gaspard Roussillon; but, much as he had done to
aid the church's work in general, for he was always vigorous and
liberal, he could not be looked upon as a very good Catholic; and of
course his influence was not effective in the right direction. But then
Pere Beret saw no reason why, in due time and with patient work, aided
by Madame Roussillon and notwithstanding Gaspard's treachery, he might
not safely lead Alice, whom he loved as a dear child, into the arms of
the Holy Church, to serve which faithfully, at all hazards and in all
places, was his highest aim.

"Ah, my child," he was saying, "you are a sweet, good girl, after all,
much better than you make yourself out to be. Your duty will control
you; you do it nobly at last, my child."

"True enough, Father Beret, true enough!" she responded, laughing,
"your perception is most excellent, which I will prove to you
immediately."

She rose while speaking and went into the house.

"I'll return in a minute or two," she called back from a region which
Pere Beret well knew was that of the pantry; "don't get impatient and
go away!"

Pere Beret laughed softly at the preposterous suggestion that he would
even dream of going out in the rain, which was now roaring heavily on
the loose board roof, and miss a cut of cherry pie--a cherry pie of
Alice's making! And the Roussillon claret, too, was always excellent.
"Ah, child," he thought, "your old Father is not going away."

She presently returned, bearing on a wooden tray a ruby-stained pie and
a short, stout bottle flanked by two glasses.

"Of course I'm better than I sometimes appear to be," she said, almost
humbly, but with mischief still in her voice and eyes, "and I shall get
to be very good when I have grown old. The sweetness of my present
nature is in this pie."

She set the tray on a three-legged stool which she pushed close to him.

"There now," she said, "let the rain come, you'll be happy, rain or
shine, while the pie and wine last, I'll be bound."

Pere Beret fell to eating right heartily, meantime handing Jean a
liberal piece of the luscious pie.

"It is good, my daughter, very good, indeed," the priest remarked with
his mouth full. "Madame Roussillon has not neglected your culinary
education." Alice filled a glass for him. It was Bordeaux and very
fragrant. The bouquet reminded him of his sunny boyhood in France, of
his journey up to Paris and of his careless, joy-brimmed youth in the
gay city. How far away, how misty, yet how thrillingly sweet it all
was! He sat with half closed eyes awhile, sipping and dreaming.

The rain lasted nearly two hours; but the sun was out again when Pere
Beret took leave of his young friend. They had been having another
good-natured quarrel over the novels, and Madame Roussillon had come
out on the veranda to join in.

"I've hidden every book of them," said Madame, a stout and swarthy
woman whose pearl-white teeth were her only mark of beauty. Her voice
indicated great stubbornness.

"Good, good, you have done your very duty, Madame," said Pere Beret,
with immense approval in his charming voice.

"But, Father, you said awhile ago that I should have my own way about
this," Alice spoke up with spirit; "and on the strength of that remark
of yours I gave you the pie and wine. You've eaten my pie and swigged
the wine, and now--"

Pere Beret put on his straw cap, adjusting it carefully over the
shining dome out of which had come so many thoughts of wisdom, kindness
and human sympathy. This done, he gently laid a hand on Alice's bright
crown of hair and said:

"Bless you, my child. I will pray to the Prince of Peace for you as
long as I live, and I will never cease to beg the Holy Virgin to
intercede for you and lead you to the Holy Church."

He turned and went away; but when he was no farther than the gate,
Alice called out:

"O Father Beret, I forgot to show you something!"

She ran forth to him and added in a low tone:

"You know that Madame Roussillon has hidden all the novels from me."

She was fumbling to get something out of the loose front of her dress.

"Well, just take a glance at this, will you?" and she showed him a
little leather bound volume, much cracked along the hinges of the back.

It was Manon Lescaut, that dreadful romance by the famous Abbe Prevost.

Pere Beret frowned and went his way shaking his head; but before he
reached his little hut near the church he was laughing in spite of
himself.

"She's not so bad, not so bad," he thought aloud, "it's only her young,
independent spirit taking the bit for a wild run. In her sweet soul she
is as good as she is pure."




CHAPTER II

A LETTER FROM AFAR


Although Father Beret was for many years a missionary on the Wabash,
most of the time at Vincennes, the fact that no mention of him can be
found in the records is not stranger than many other things connected
with the old town's history. He was, like nearly all the men of his
calling in that day, a self-effacing and modest hero, apparently quite
unaware that he deserved attention. He and Father Gibault, whose name
is so beautifully and nobly connected with the stirring achievements of
Colonel George Rogers Clark, were close friends and often companions.
Probably Father Gibault himself, whose fame will never fade, would have
been to-day as obscure as Father Beret, but for the opportunity given
him by Clark to fix his name in the list of heroic patriots who
assisted in winning the great Northwest from the English.

Vincennes, even in the earliest days of its history, somehow kept up
communication and, considering the circumstances, close relations with
New Orleans. It was much nearer Detroit; but the Louisiana colony stood
next to France in the imagination and longing of priests, voyageurs,
coureurs de bois and reckless adventurers who had Latin blood in their
veins. Father Beret first came to Vincennes from New Orleans, the
voyage up the Mississippi, Ohio, and Wabash, in a pirogue, lasting
through a whole summer and far into the autumn. Since his arrival the
post had experienced many vicissitudes, and at the time in which our
story opens the British government claimed right of dominion over the
great territory drained by the Wabash, and, indeed, over a large,
indefinitely outlined part of the North American continent lying above
Mexico; a claim just then being vigorously questioned, flintlock in
hand, by the Anglo-American colonies.

Of course the handful of French people at Vincennes, so far away from
every center of information, and wholly occupied with their trading,
trapping and missionary work, were late finding out that war existed
between England and her colonies. Nor did it really matter much with
them, one way or another. They felt secure in their lonely situation,
and so went on selling their trinkets, weapons, domestic implements,
blankets and intoxicating liquors to the Indians, whom they held bound
to them with a power never possessed by any other white dwellers in the
wilderness. Father Beret was probably subordinate to Father Gibault. At
all events the latter appears to have had nominal charge of Vincennes,
and it can scarcely be doubted that he left Father Beret on the Wabash,
while he went to live and labor for a time at Kaskaskia beyond the
plains of Illinois.

It is a curious fact that religion and the power of rum and brandy
worked together successfully for a long time in giving the French posts
almost absolute influence over the wild and savage men by whom they
were always surrounded. The good priests deprecated the traffic in
liquors and tried hard to control it, but soldiers of fortune and
reckless traders were in the majority, their interests taking
precedence of all spiritual demands and carrying everything along. What
could the brave missionaries do but make the very best of a perilous
situation?

In those days wine was drunk by almost everybody, its use at table and
as an article of incidental refreshment and social pleasure being
practically universal; wherefore the steps of reform in the matter of
intemperance were but rudimentary and in all places beset by well-nigh
insurmountable difficulties. In fact the exigencies of frontier life
demanded, perhaps, the very stimulus which, when over indulged in,
caused so much evil. Malaria loaded the air, and the most efficacious
drugs now at command were then undiscovered or could not be had.
Intoxicants were the only popular specific. Men drank to prevent
contracting ague, drank again, between rigors, to cure it, and yet
again to brace themselves during convalescence.

But if the effect of rum as a beverage had strong allurement for the
white man, it made an absolute slave of the Indian, who never hesitated
for a moment to undertake any task, no matter how hard, bear any
privation, even the most terrible, or brave any danger, although it
might demand reckless desperation, if in in the end a well filled
bottle or jug appeared as his reward.

Of course the traders did not overlook such a source of power.
Alcoholic liquor became their implement of almost magical work in
controlling the lives, labors, and resources of the Indians. The
priests with their captivating story of the Cross had a large influence
in softening savage natures and averting many an awful danger; but when
everything else failed, rum always came to the rescue of a threatened
French post.

We need not wonder, then, when we are told that Father Beret made no
sign of distress or disapproval upon being informed of the arrival of a
boat loaded with rum, brandy or gin. It was Rene de Ronville who
brought the news, the same Rene already mentioned as having given the
priest a plate of squirrels. He was sitting on the doorsill of Father
Beret's hut, when the old man reached it after his visit at the
Roussillon home, and held in his hand a letter which he appeared proud
to deliver.

"A batteau and seven men, with a cargo of liquor, came during the
rain," he said, rising and taking off his curious cap, which, made of
an animal's skin, had a tail jauntily dangling from its crown-tip; "and
here is a letter for you, Father. The batteau is from New Orleans.
Eight men started with it; but one went ashore to hunt and was killed
by an Indian."

Father Beret took the letter without apparent interest and said:

"Thank you, my son, sit down again; the door-log is not wetter than the
stools inside; I will sit by you."

The wind had driven a flood of rain into the cabin through the open
door, and water twinkled in puddles here and there on the floor's
puncheons. They sat down side by side, Father Beret fingering the
letter in an absent-minded way.

"There'll be a jolly time of it to-night," Rene de Ronville remarked,
"a roaring time."

"Why do you say that, my son?" the priest demanded.

"The wine and the liquor," was the reply; "much drinking will be done.
The men have all been dry here for some time, you know, and are as
thirsty as sand. They are making ready to enjoy themselves down at the
river house."

"Ah, the poor souls!" sighed Father Beret, speaking as one whose
thoughts were wandering far away.

"Why don't you read your letter, Father?" Rene added.

The priest started, turned the soiled square of paper over in his hand,
then thrust it inside his robe.

"It can wait," he said. Then, changing his voice; "the squirrels you
gave me were excellent, my son. It was good of you to think of me," he
added, laying his hand on Rene's arm.

"Oh, I'm glad if I have pleased you, Father Beret, for you are so kind
to me always, and to everybody. When I killed the squirrels I said to
myself: 'These are young, juicy and tender, Father Beret must have
these,' so I brought them along."

The young man rose to go; for he was somehow impressed that Father
Beret must wish opportunity to read his letter, and would prefer to be
left alone with it. But the priest pulled him down again.

"Stay a while," he said, "I have not had a talk with you for some time."

Rene looked a trifle uneasy.

"You will not drink any to-night, my son," Father Beret added. "You
must not; do you hear?"

The young man's eyes and mouth at once began to have a sullen
expression; evidently he was not pleased and felt rebellious; but it
was hard for him to resist Father Beret, whom he loved, as did every
soul in the post. The priest's voice was sweet and gentle, yet positive
to a degree. Rene did not say a word.

"Promise me that you will not taste liquor this night," Father Beret
went on, grasping the young man's arm more firmly; "promise me, my son,
promise me."

Still Rene was silent. The men did not look at each other, but gazed
away across the country beyond the Wabash to where a glory from the
western sun flamed on the upper rim of a great cloud fragment creeping
along the horizon. Warm as the day had been, a delicious coolness now
began to temper the air; for the wind had shifted into the northwest. A
meadowlark sang dreamingly in the wild grass of the low lands hard by,
over which two or three prairie hawks hovered with wings that beat
rapidly.

"Eh bien, I must go," said Rene presently, getting to his feet nimbly
and evading Father Beret's hand which would have held him.

"Not to the river house, my son?" said the priest appealingly.

"No, not there; I have another letter; one for M'sieu' Roussillon; it
came by the boat too. I go to give it to Madame Roussillon."

Rene de Ronville was a dark, weather-stained young fellow, neither tall
nor short, wearing buckskin moccasins, trousers and tunic. His eyes
were dark brown, keen, quick-moving, set well under heavy brows. A
razor had probably never touched his face, and his thin, curly beard
crinkled over his strongly turned cheeks and chin, while his moustaches
sprang out quite fiercely above his full-lipped, almost sensual mouth.
He looked wiry and active, a man not to be lightly reckoned with in a
trial of bodily strength and will power.

Father Beret's face and voice changed on the instant. He laughed dryly
and said, with a sly gleam in his eyes:

"You could spend the evening pleasantly with Madame Roussillon and
Jean. Jean, you know, is a very amusing fellow."

Rene brought forth the letter of which he had spoken and held it up
before Father Beret's face.

"Maybe you think I haven't any letter for M'sieu' Roussillon," he
blurted; "and maybe you are quite certain that I am not going to the
house to take the letter."

"Monsieur Roussillon is absent, you know," Father Beret suggested. "But
cherry pies are just as good while he's gone as when he's at home, and
I happen to know that there are some particularly delicious ones in the
pantry of Madame Roussillon. Mademoiselle Alice gave me a juicy sample;
but then I dare say you do not care to have your pie served by her
hand. It would interfere with your appetite; eh, my son?"

Rene turned short about wagging his head and laughing, and so with his
back to the priest he strode away along the wet path leading to the
Roussillon place.

Father Beret gazed after him, his face relaxing to a serious expression
in which a trace of sadness and gloom spread like an elusive twilight.
He took out his letter, but did not glance at it, simply holding it
tightly gripped in his sinewy right hand. Then his old eyes stared
vacantly, as eyes do when their sight is cast back many, many years
into the past. The missive was from beyond the sea--he knew the
handwriting--a waft of the flowers of Avignon seemed to rise out of it,
as if by the pressure of his grasp.

A stoop-shouldered, burly man went by, leading a pair of goats, a kid
following. He was making haste excitedly, keeping the goats at a lively
trot.

"Bon jour, Pere Beret," he flung out breezily, and walked rapidly on.

"Ah, ah; his mind is busy with the newly arrived cargo," thought the
old priest, returning the salutation; "his throat aches for the
liquor,--the poor man."

Then he read again the letter's superscription and made a faltering
move, as if to break the seal. His hands trembled violently, his face
looked gray and drawn.

"Come on, you brutes," cried the receding man, jerking the thongs of
skin by which he led the goats.

Father Beret rose and turned into his damp little hut, where the light
was dim on the crucifix hanging opposite the door against the
clay-daubed wall. It was a bare, unsightly, clammy room; a rude bed on
one side, a shelf for table and two or three wooden stools constituting
the furniture, while the uneven puncheons of the floor wabbled and
clattered under the priest's feet.

An unopened letter is always a mysterious thing. We who receive three
or four mails every day, scan each little paper square with a
speculative eye. Most of us know what sweet uncertainty hangs on the
opening of envelopes whose contents may be almost anything except
something important, and what a vague yet delicious thrill comes with
the snip of the paper knife; but if we be in a foreign land and long
years absent from home, then is a letter subtly powerful to move us,
even more before it is opened than after it is read.

It had been many years since a letter from home had come to Father
Beret. The last, before the one now in his hand, had made him ill of
nostalgia, fairly shaking his iron determination never to quit for a
moment his life work as a missionary. Ever since that day he had found
it harder to meet the many and stern demands of a most difficult and
exacting duty. Now the mere touch of the paper in his hand gave him a
sense of returning weakness, dissatisfaction, and longing. The home of
his boyhood, the rushing of the Rhone, a seat in a shady nook of the
garden, Madeline, his sister, prattling beside him, and his mother
singing somewhere about the house--it all came back and went over him
and through him, making his heart sink strangely, while another voice,
the sweetest ever heard--but she was ineffable and her memory a
forbidden fragrance.

Father Beret tottered across the forlorn little room and knelt before
the crucifix holding his clasped hands high, the letter pressed between
them. His lips moved in prayer, but made no sound; his whole frame
shook violently.

It would be unpardonable desecration to enter the chamber of Father
Beret's soul and look upon his sacred and secret trouble; nor must we
even speculate as to its particulars. The good old man writhed and
wrestled before the cross for a long time, until at last he seemed to
receive the calmness and strength he prayed for so fervently; then he
rose, tore the letter into pieces so small that not a word remained
whole, and squeezed them so firmly together that they were compressed
into a tiny, solid ball, which he let fall through a crack between the
floor puncheons. After waiting twenty years for that letter, hungry as
his heart was, he did not even open it when at last it arrived. He
would never know what message it bore. The link between him and the old
sweet days was broken forever. Now with God's help he could do his work
to the end.

He went and stood in his doorway, leaning against the side. Was it a
mere coincidence that the meadowlark flew up just then from its
grass-tuft, and came to the roof's comb overhead, where it lit with a
light yet audible stroke of its feet and began fluting its tender,
lonesome-sounding strain? If Father Beret heard it he gave no sign of
recognition; very likely he was thinking about the cargo of liquor and
how he could best counteract its baleful influence. He looked toward
the "river house," as the inhabitants had named a large shanty, which
stood on a bluff of the Wabash not far from where the road-bridge at
present crosses, and saw men gathering there.

Meantime Rene de Ronville had delivered Madame Roussillon's letter with
due promptness. Of course such a service demanded pie and claret. What
still better pleased him, Alice chose to be more amiable than was
usually her custom when he called. They sat together in the main room
of the house where M. Roussillon kept his books, his curiosities of
Indian manufacture collected here and there, and his surplus firearms,
swords, pistols, and knives, ranged not unpleasingly around the walls.

Of course, along with the letter, Rene bore the news, so interesting to
himself, of the boat's tempting cargo just discharged at the river
house. Alice understood her friend's danger--felt it in the intense
enthusiasm of his voice and manner. She had once seen the men carousing
on a similar occasion when she was but a child, and the impression then
made still remained in her memory. Instinctively she resolved to hold
Rene by one means or another away from the river house if possible. So
she managed to keep him occupied eating pie, sipping watered claret and
chatting until night came on and Madame Roussillon brought in a lamp.
Then he hurriedly snatched his cap from the floor beside him and got up
to go.

"Come and look at my handiwork," Alice quickly said; "my shelf of pies,
I mean." She led him to the pantry, where a dozen or more of the cherry
pates were ranged in order. "I made every one of them this morning and
baked them; had them all out of the oven before the rain came up. Don't
you think me a wonder of cleverness and industry? Father Beret was
polite enough to flatter me; but you--you just eat what you want and
say nothing! You are not polite, Monsieur Rene de Ronville."

"I've been showing you what I thought of your goodies," said Rene;
"eating's better than talking, you know; so I'll just take one more,"
and he helped himself. "Isn't that compliment enough?"

"A few such would make me another hot day's work," she replied,
laughing. "Pretty talk would be cheaper and more satisfactory in the
long run. Even the flour in these pates I ground with my own hand in an
Indian mortar. That was hard work too."

By this time Rene had forgotten the river house and the liquor. With
softening eyes he gazed at Alice's rounded cheeks and sheeny hair over
which the light from the curious earthen lamp she bore in her hand
flickered most effectively. He loved her madly; but his fear of her was
more powerful than his love. She gave him no opportunity to speak what
he felt, having ever ready a quick, bright change of mood and manner
when she saw him plucking up courage to address her in a sentimental
way. Their relations had long been somewhat familiar, which was but
natural, considering their youth and the circumstances of their daily
life; but Alice somehow had kept a certain distance open between them,
so that very warm friendship could not suddenly resolve itself into a
troublesome passion on Rene's part.

We need not attempt to analyze a young girl's feeling and motives in
such a case; what she does and what she thinks are mysteries even to
her own understanding. The influence most potent in shaping the
rudimentary character of Alice Tarleton (called Roussillon) had been
only such as a lonely frontier post could generate. Her associations
with men and women had, with few exceptions, been unprofitable in an
educational way, while her reading in M. Roussillon's little library
could not have given her any practical knowledge of manners and life.

She was fond of Rene de Ronville, and it would have been quite in
accordance with the law of ordinary human forces, indeed almost the
inevitable thing, for her to love and marry him in the fullness of
time; but her imagination was outgrowing her surroundings. Books had
given her a world of romance wherein she moved at will, meeting a class
of people far different from those who actually shared her experiences.
Her day-dreams and her night-dreams partook much more of what she had
read and imagined than of what she had seen and heard in the raw little
world around her.

Her affection for Rene was interfered with by her large admiration for
the heroic, masterful and magnetic knights who charged through the
romances of the Roussillon collection. For although Rene was
unquestionably brave and more than passably handsome, he had no armor,
no war-horse, no shining lance and embossed shield--the difference,
indeed, was great.

Those who love to contend against the fatal drift of our age toward
over-education could find in Alice Tarleton, foster daughter of Gaspard
Roussillon, a primitive example, an elementary case in point. What
could her book education do but set up stumbling blocks in the path of
happiness? She was learning to prefer the ideal to the real. Her soul
was developing itself as best it could for the enjoyment of conditions
and things absolutely foreign to the possibilities of her lot in life.

Perhaps it was the light and heat of imagination, shining out through
Alice's face, which gave her beauty such a fascinating power. Rene saw
it and felt its electrical stroke send a sweet shiver through his
heart, while he stood before her.

"You are very beautiful to-night Alice," he presently said, with a
suddenness which took even her alertness by surprise. A flush rose to
his dark face and immediately gave way to a grayish pallor. His heart
came near stopping on the instant, he was so shocked by his own daring;
but he laid a hand on her hair, stroking it softly.

Just a moment she was at a loss, looking a trifle embarrassed, then
with a merry laugh she stepped aside and said:

"That sounds better, Monsieur Rene de Ronville much better; you will be
as polite as Father Beret after a little more training."

She slipped past him while speaking and made her way back again to the
main room, whence she called to him:

"Come here, I've something to show you."

He obeyed, a sheepish trace on his countenance betraying his
self-consciousness.

When he came near Alice she was taking from its buckhorn hook on the
wall a rapier, one of a beautiful pair hanging side by side.

"Papa Roussillon gave me these," she said with great animation. "He
bought them of an Indian who had kept them a long time; where he came
across them he would not tell; but look how beautiful! Did you ever see
anything so fine?"

Guard and hilt were of silver; the blade, although somewhat corroded,
still showed the fine wavy lines of Damascus steel and traces of
delicate engraving, while in the end of the hilt was set a large oval
turquoise.

"A very queer present to give a girl," said Rene; "what can you do with
them?"

A captivating flash of playfulness came into her face and she sprang
backward, giving the sword a semicircular turn with her wrist. The
blade sent forth a keen hiss as it cut the air close, very close to
Rene's nose. He jerked his head and flung up his hand.

She laughed merrily, standing beautifully poised before him, the
rapier's point slightly elevated. Her short skirt left her feet and
ankles free to show their graceful proportions and the perfect pose in
which they held her supple body.

"You see what I can do with the colechemarde, eh, Monsieur Rene de
Ronville!" she exclaimed, giving him a smile which fairly blinded him.
"Notice how very near to your neck I can thrust and yet not touch it.
Now!"

She darted the keen point under his chin and drew it away so quickly
that the stroke was like a glint of sunlight.

"What do you think of that as a nice and accurate piece of skill?"

She again resumed her pose, the right foot advanced, the left arm well
back, her lissome, finely developed body leaning slightly forward.

Rene's hands were up before his face in a defensive position, palms
outward.

Just then a chorus of men's voices sounded in the distance. The river
house was beginning its carousal with a song. Alice let fall her
sword's point and listened.

Rene looked about for his cap.

"I must be going," he said.

Another and louder swish of the rapier made him pirouette and dodge
again with great energy.

"Don't," he cried, "that's dangerous; you'll put out my eyes; I never
saw such a girl!"

She laughed at him and kept on whipping the air dangerously near his
eyes, until she had driven him backward as far as he could squeeze
himself into a comer of the room.

Madame Roussillon came to the door from the kitchen and stood looking
in and laughing, with her hands on her hips. By this time the rapier
was making a criss-cross pattern of flashing lines close to the young
man's head while Alice, in the enjoyment of her exercise, seemed to
concentrate all the glowing rays of her beauty in her face, her eyes
dancing merrily.

"Quit, now, Alice," he begged, half in fun and half in abject fear;
"please quit--I surrender!"

She thrust to the wall on either side of him, then springing lightly
backward a pace, stood at guard. Her thick yellow hair had fallen over
her neck and shoulders in a loose wavy mass, out of which her face
beamed with a bewitching effect upon her captive.

Rene, glad enough to have a cessation of his peril, stood laughing
dryly; but the singing down at the river house was swelling louder and
he made another movement to go.

"You surrendered, you remember," cried Alice, renewing the sword-play;
"sit down on the chair there and make yourself comfortable. You are not
going down yonder to-night; you are going to stay here and talk with me
and Mother Roussillon; we are lonesome and you are good company."

A shot rang out keen and clear; there was a sudden tumult that broke up
the distant singing; and presently more firing at varying intervals cut
the night air from the direction of the river.

Jean, the hunchback, came in to say that there was a row of some sort;
he had seen men running across the common as if in pursuit of a
fugitive; but the moonlight was so dim that he could not be sure what
it all meant.

Rene picked up his cap and bolted out of the house.




CHAPTER III

THE RAPE OF THE DEMIJOHN


The row down at the river house was more noise than fight, so far as
results seemed to indicate. It was all about a small dame jeanne of
fine brandy, which an Indian by the name of Long-Hair had seized and
run off with at the height of the carousal. He must have been soberer
than his pursuers, or naturally fleeter; for not one of them could
catch him, or even keep long in sight of him. Some pistols were emptied
while the race was on, and two or three of the men swore roundly to
having seen Long-Hair jump sidewise and stagger, as if one of the shots
had taken effect. But, although the moon was shining, he someway
disappeared, they could not understand just how, far down beside the
river below the fort and the church.

It was not a very uncommon thing for an Indian to steal what he wanted,
and in most cases light punishment followed conviction; but it was felt
to be a capital offense for an Indian or anybody else to rape a
demijohn of fine brandy, especially one sent as a present, by a friend
in New Orleans, to Lieutenant Governor Abbott, who had until recently
been the commandant of the post. Every man at the river house
recognized and resented the enormity of Long-Hair's crime and each was,
for the moment, ready to be his judge and his executioner. He had
broken at once every rule of frontier etiquette and every bond of
sympathy. Nor was Long-Hair ignorant of the danger involved in his
daring enterprise. He had beforehand carefully and stolidly weighed all
the conditions, and true to his Indian nature, had concluded that a
little wicker covered bottle of brandy was well worth the risk of his
life. So he had put himself in condition for a great race by slipping
out and getting rid of his weapons and all surplus weight of clothes.

This incident brought the drinking bout at the river house to a sudden
end; but nothing further came of it that night, and no record of it
would be found in these pages, but for the fact that Long-Hair
afterwards became an important character in the stirring historical
drama which had old Vincennes for its center of energy.

Rene de Ronville probably felt himself in bad luck when he arrived at
the river house just too late to share in the liquor or to join in
chasing the bold thief. He listened with interest, however, to the
story of Long-Hair's capture of the commandant's demijohn and could not
refrain from saying that if he had been present there would have been a
quite different result.

"I would have shot him before he got to that door," he said, drawing
his heavy flint-lock pistol and going through the motions of one aiming
quickly and firing. Indeed, so vigorously in earnest was he with the
pantomime, that he actually did fire, unintentionally of course,--the
ball burying itself in the door-jamb.

He was laughed at by those present for being more excited than they who
witnessed the whole thing. One of them, a leathery-faced and grizzled
old sinner, leered at him contemptuously and said in queer French, with
a curious accent caught from long use of backwoods English:

"Listen how the boy brags! Ye might think, to hear Rene talk, that he
actually amounted to a big pile."

This personage was known to every soul in Vincennes as Oncle Jazon, and
when Oncle Jazon spoke the whole town felt bound to listen.

"An' how well he shoots, too," he added with an intolerable wink;
"aimed at the door and hit the post. Certainly Long-Hair would have
been in great danger! O yes, he'd 'ave killed Long-Hair at the first
shot, wouldn't he though!"

Oncle Jazon had the air of a large man, but the stature of a small one;
in fact he was shriveled bodily to a degree which suggested comparison
with a sun-dried wisp of hickory bark; and when he chuckled, as he was
now doing, his mouth puckered itself until it looked like a scar on his
face. From cap to moccasins he had every mark significant of a
desperate character; and yet there was about him something that
instantly commanded the confidence of rough men,--the look of
self-sufficiency and superior capability always to be found in
connection with immense will power. His sixty years of exposure,
hardship, and danger seemed to have but toughened his physique and
strengthened his vitality. Out of his small hazel eyes gleamed a light
as keen as ice.

"All right, Oncle Jazon," said Rene laughing and blowing the smoke out
of his pistol; "'twas you all the same who let Long-Hair trot off with
the Governor's brandy, not I. If you could have hit even a door-post it
might have been better."

Oncle Jazon took off his cap and looked down into it in a way he had
when about to say something final.

"Ventrebleu! I did not shoot at Long-Hair at all," he said, speaking
slowly, "because the scoundrel was unarmed. He didn't have on even a
knife, and he was havin' enough to do dodgin' the bullets that the rest
of 'em were plumpin' at 'im without any compliments from me to bother
'im more."

"Well," Rene replied, turning away with a laugh, "if I'd been scalped
by the Indians, as you have, I don't think there would be any
particular reason why I should wait for an Indian thief to go and arm
himself before I accepted him as a target."

Oncle Jazon lifted a hand involuntarily and rubbed his scalpless crown;
then he chuckled with a grotesque grimace as if the recollection of
having his head skinned were the funniest thing imaginable.

"When you've killed as many of 'em as Oncle Jazon has," remarked a
bystander to Rene, "you'll not be so hungry for blood, maybe."

"Especially after ye've took fifty-nine scalps to pay for yer one,"
added Oncle Jazon, replacing his cap over the hairless area of his
crown.

The men who had been chasing Long-Hair, presently came straggling back
with their stories--each had a distinct one--of how the fugitive
escaped. They were wild looking fellows, most of them somewhat
intoxicated, all profusely liberal with their stock of picturesque
profanity. They represented the roughest element of the well-nigh
lawless post.

"I'm positive that he's wounded," said one. "Jacques and I shot at him
together, so that our pistols sounded just as if only one had been
fired--bang! that way--and he leaped sideways for all the world like a
bird with a broken leg. I thought he'd fall; but ve! he ran faster'n
ever, and all at once he was gone; just disappeared."

"Well, to-morrow we'll get him," said another. "You and I and Jacques,
we'll take up his trail, the thief, and follow him till we find him. He
can't get off so easy."

"I don't know so well about that," said another; "it's Long-Hair, you
must remember, and Long-Hair is no common buck that just anybody can
find asleep. You know what Long-Hair is. Nobody's ever got even with
'im yet. That's so, ain't it? Just ask Oncle Jazon, if you don't
believe it!"

The next morning Long-Hair was tracked to the edge. He had been
wounded, but whether seriously or not could only be conjectured. A
sprinkle of blood, here and there quite a dash of it, reddened the
grass and clumps of weeds he had run through, and ended close to the
water into which it looked as if he had plunged with a view to baffling
pursuit. Indeed pursuit was baffled. No further trace could be found,
by which to follow the cunning fugitive. Some of the men consoled
themselves by saying, without believing, that Long-Hair was probably
lying drowned at the bottom of the river.

"Pas du tout," observed Oncle Jazon, his short pipe askew far over in
the corner of his mouth, "not a bit of it is that Indian drowned. He's
jes' as live as a fat cat this minute, and as drunk as the devil. He'll
get some o' yer scalps yet after he's guzzled all that brandy and slep'
a week."

It finally transpired that Oncle Jazon was partly right and partly
wrong. Long-Hair was alive, even as a fat cat, perhaps; but not drunk,
for in trying to swim with the rotund little dame jeanne under his arm
he lost hold of it and it went to the bottom of the Wabash, where it
may be lying at this moment patiently waiting for some one to fish it
out of its bed deep in the sand and mud, and break the ancient wax from
its neck!

Rene de Ronville, after the chase of Long-Hair had been given over,
went to tell Father Beret what had happened, and finding the priest's
hut empty turned into the path leading to the Roussillon place, which
was at the head of a narrow street laid out in a direction at right
angles to the river's course. He passed two or three diminutive cabins,
all as much alike as bee-hives. Each had its squat veranda and thatched
or clapboarded roof held in place by weight-poles ranged in roughly
parallel rows, and each had the face of the wall under its veranda
neatly daubed with a grayish stucco made of mud and lime. You may see
such houses today in some remote parts of the creole country of
Louisiana.

As Rene passed along he spoke with a gay French freedom to the dames
and lasses who chanced to be visible. His air would be regarded as
violently brigandish in our day; we might even go so far as to think
his whole appearance comical. His jaunty cap with a tail that wagged as
he walked, his short trousers and leggins of buckskin, and his loose
shirt-like tunic, drawn in at the waist with a broad belt, gave his
strong figure just the dash of wildness suited to the armament with
which it was weighted. A heavy gun lay in the hollow of his shoulder
under which hung an otter-skin bullet-pouch with its clear powder-horn
and white bone charger. In his belt were two huge flint-lock pistols
and a long case-knife.

"Bon jour, Ma'm'selle Adrienne," he cheerily called, waving his free
hand in greeting to a small, dark lass standing on the step of a
veranda and indolently swinging a broom. "Comment allez-vous auj
ourd'hui?"

"J'm'porte tres bien, merci, Mo'sieu Rene," was the quick response; "et
vous?"

"Oh, I'm as lively as a cricket."

"Going a hunting?"

"No, just up here a little way--just on business--up to Mo'sieu
Roussillon's for a moment."

"Yes," the girl responded in a tone indicative of something very like
spleen, "yes, undoubtedly, Mo'sieu de Ronville; your business there
seems quite pressing of late. I have noticed your industrious
application to that business."

"Ta-ta, little one," he wheedled, lowering his voice; "you mustn't go
to making bug-bears out of nothing."

"Bug-bears!" she retorted, "you go on about your business and I'll
attend to mine," and she flirted into the house.

Rene laughed under his breath, standing a moment as if expecting her to
come out again; but she did not, and he resumed his walk singing
softly--

"Elle a les joues vermeilles, vermeilles, Ma belle, ma belle petite."

But ten to one he was not thinking of Madamoiselle Adrienne Bourcier.
His mind, however, must have been absorbingly occupied; for in the
straight, open way he met Father Beret and did not see him until he
came near bumping against the old man, who stepped aside with
astonishing agility and said--

"Dieu vous benisse, mon fils; but what is your great hurry--where can
you be going in such happy haste?" Rene did not stop to parley with the
priest. He flung some phrase of pleasant greeting back over his
shoulder as he trudged on, his heart beginning a tattoo against his
ribs when the Roussillon place came in sight, and he took hold of his
mustache to pull it, as some men must do in moments of nervousness and
bashfulness. If sounds ever have color, the humming in his ears was of
a rosy hue; if thoughts ever exhale fragrance, his brain overflowed
with the sweets of violet and heliotrope.

He had in mind what he was going to say when Alice and he should be
alone together. It was a pretty speech, he thought; indeed a very
thrilling little speech, by the way it stirred his own nerve-centers as
he conned it over.

Madame Roussillon met him at the door in not a very good humor.

"Is Mademoiselle Alice here?" he ventured to demand.

"Alice? no, she's not here; she's never here just when I want her most.
V'la le picbois et la grive--see the woodpecker and the robin--eating
the cherries, eating every one of them, and that girl running off
somewhere instead of staying here and picking them," she railed in
answer to the young man's polite inquiry. "I haven't seen her these
four hours, neither her nor that rascally hunchback, Jean. They're up
to some mischief, I'll be bound!"

Madame Roussillon puffed audibly between phrases; but she suddenly
became very mild when relieved of her tirade.

"Mais entrez," she added in a pleasant tone, "come in and tell me the
news."

Rene's disappointment rushed into his face, but he managed to laugh it
aside.

"Father Beret has just been telling me," said Madame Roussillon, "that
our friend Long-Hair made some trouble last night. How about it?"

Rene told her what he knew and added that Long-Hair would probably
never be seen again.

"He was shot, no doubt of it," he went on, "and is now being nibbled by
fish and turtles. We tracked him by his blood to where he jumped into
the Wabash. He never came out."

Strangely enough it happened that, at the very time of this chat
between Madame Roussillon and Rene Alice was bandaging Long-Hair's
wounded leg with strips of her apron. It was under some willows which
overhung the bank of a narrow and shallow lagoon or slough, which in
those days extended a mile or two back into the country on the farther
side of the river. Alice and Jean went over in a pirogue to see if the
water lilies, haunting a pond there, were yet beginning to bloom. They
landed at a convenient spot some distance up the little lagoon, made
the boat fast by dragging its prow high ashore, and were on the point
of setting out across a neck of wet, grassy land to the pond, when a
deep grunt, not unlike that of a self-satisfied pig, attracted them to
the willows, where they discovered Long-Hair, badly wounded, weltering
in some black mud.

His hiding-place was cunningly chosen, save that the mire troubled him,
letting him down by slow degrees, and threatening to engulf him bodily;
and he was now too weak to extricate himself. He lifted his head and
glared. His face was grimy, his hair matted with mud. Alice, although
brave enough and quite accustomed to startling experiences, uttered a
cry when she saw those snaky eyes glistening so savagely amid the
shadows. But Jean was quick to recognize Long-Hair; he had often seen
him about town, a figure not to be forgotten.

"They've been hunting him everywhere," he said in a half whisper to
Alice, clutching the skirt of her dress. "It's Long-Hair, the Indian
who stole the brandy; I know him."

Alice recoiled a pace or two.

"Let's go back and tell 'em," Jean added, still whispering, "they want
to kill him; Oncle Jazon said so. Come on!"

He gave her dress a jerk; but she did not move any farther back; she
was looking at the blood oozing from a wound in the Indian's leg.

"He is shot, he is hurt, Jean, we must help him," she presently said,
recovering her self-control, yet still pale. "We must get him out of
that bad place."

Jean caught Alice's merciful spirit with sympathetic readiness, and
showed immediate willingness to aid her.

It was a difficult thing to do; but there was a will and of course a
way. They had knives with which they cut willows to make a standing
place on the mud. While they were doing this they spoke friendly words
to Long-Hair, who understood French a little, and at last they got hold
of his arms, tugged, rested, tugged again, and finally managed to help
him to a dry place, still under the willows, where he could lie more at
ease. Jean carried water in his cap with which they washed the wound
and the stolid savage face. Then Alice tore up her cotton apron, in
which she had hoped to bear home a load of lilies, and with the strips
bound the wound very neatly. It took a long time, during which the
Indian remained silent and apparently quite indifferent.

Long-Hair was a man of superior physique, tall, straight, with the
muscles of a Vulcan; and while he lay stretched on the ground half clad
and motionless, he would have been a grand model for an heroic figure
in bronze. Yet from every lineament there came a strange repelling
influence, like that from a snake. Alice felt almost unbearable disgust
while doing her merciful task; but she bravely persevered until it was
finished.

It was now late in the afternoon, and the sun would be setting before
they could reach home.

"We must hurry back, Jean," Alice said, turning to depart. "It will be
all we can do to reach the other side in daylight. I'm thinking that
they'll be out hunting for us too, if we don't move right lively. Come."

She gave the Indian another glance when she had taken but a step. He
grunted and held up something in his hand--something that shone with a
dull yellow light. It was a small, oval, gold locket which she had
always worn in her bosom. She sprang and snatched it from his palm.

"Thank you," she exclaimed, smiling gratefully. "I am so glad you found
it."

The chain by which the locket had hung was broken, doubtless by some
movement while dragging Long-Hair out of the mud, and the lid had
sprung open, exposing a miniature portrait of Alice, painted when she
was a little child, probably not two years old. It was a sweet baby
face, archly bright, almost surrounded with a fluff of golden hair. The
neck and the upper line of the plump shoulders, with a trace of richly
delicate lace and a string of pearls, gave somehow a suggestion of
patrician daintiness.

Long-Hair looked keenly into Alice's eyes, when she stooped to take the
locket from his hand, but said nothing.

She and Jean now hurried away, and, so vigorously did they paddle the
pirogue, that the sky was yet red in the west when they reached home
and duly received their expected scolding from Madame Roussillon.

Alice sealed Jean's lips as to their adventure; for she had made up her
mind to save Long-Hair if possible, and she felt sure that the only way
to do it would be to trust no one but Father Beret.

It turned out that Long-Hair's wound was neither a broken bone nor a
cut artery. The flesh of his leg, midway between the hip and the knee,
was pierced; the bullet had bored a neat hole clean through. Father
Beret took the case in hand, and with no little surgical skill
proceeded to set the big Indian upon his feet again. The affair had to
be cleverly managed. Food, medicines and clothing were surreptitiously
borne across the river; a bed of grass was kept fresh under Long-Hair's
back; his wound was regularly dressed; and finally his weapons--a
tomahawk, a knife, a strong bow and a quiver of arrows--which he had
hidden on the night of his bold theft, were brought to him.

"Now go and sin no more," said good Father Beret; but he well knew that
his words were mere puffs of articulate wind in the ear of the grim and
silent savage, who limped away with an air of stately dignity into the
wilderness.

A load fell from Alice's mind when Father Beret informed her of
Long-Hair's recovery and departure. Day and night the dread lest some
of the men should find out his hiding-place and kill him had depressed
and worried her. And now, when it was all over, there still hovered
like an elusive shadow in her consciousness a vague haunting impression
of the incident's immense significance as an influence in her life. To
feel that she had saved a man from death was a new sensation of itself;
but the man and the circumstances were picturesque; they invited
imagination; they furnished an atmosphere of romance dear to all young
and healthy natures, and somehow stirred her soul with a strange appeal.

Long-Hair's imperturbable calmness, his stolid, immobile countenance,
the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the
soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on
the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by
the romances she had read in M. Roussillon's mildewed books.

Long-Hair was not a young man; but it would have been impossible to
guess near his age. His form and face simply showed long experience and
immeasurable vigor. Alice remembered with a shuddering sensation the
look he gave her when she took the locket from his hand. It was of but
a second's duration, yet it seemed to search every nook of her being
with its subtle power.

Romancers have made much of their Indian heroes, picturing them as
models of manly beauty and nobility; but all fiction must be taken with
liberal pinches of salt. The plain truth is that dark savages of the
pure blood often do possess the magnetism of perfect physical
development and unfathomable mental strangeness; but real beauty they
never have. Their innate repulsiveness is so great that, like the
snake's charm, it may fascinate; yet an indescribable, haunting disgust
goes with it. And, after all, if Alice had been asked to tell just how
she felt toward the Indian she had labored so hard to save, she would
promptly have said:

"I loathe him as I do a toad!"

Nor would Father Beret, put to the same test, have made a substantially
different confession. His work, to do which his life went as fuel to
fire, was training the souls of Indians for the reception of divine
grace; but experience had not changed his first impression of savage
character. When he traveled in the wilderness he carried the Word and
the Cross; but he was also armed with a gun and two good pistols, not
to mention a dangerous knife. The rumor prevailed that Father Beret
could drive a nail at sixty yards with his rifle, and at twenty snuff a
candle with either one of his pistols.




CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST MAYOR OF VINCENNES


Governor Abbott probably never so much as heard of the dame jeanne of
French brandy sent to him by his creole friend in New Orleans. He had
been gone from Vincennes several months when the batteau arrived,
having been recalled to Detroit by the British authorities; and he
never returned. Meantime the little post with its quaint cabins and its
dilapidated block-house, called Fort Sackville, lay sunning drowsily by
the river in a blissful state of helplessness from the military point
of view. There was no garrison; the two or three pieces of artillery,
abandoned and exposed, gathered rust and cobwebs, while the pickets of
the stockade, decaying and loosened in the ground by winter freezes and
summer rains, leaned in all directions, a picture of decay and
inefficiency.

The inhabitants of the town, numbering about six hundred, lived very
much as pleased them, without any regular municipal government, each
family its own tribe, each man a law unto himself; yet for mutual
protection, they all kept in touch and had certain common rights which
were religiously respected and defended faithfully. A large pasturing
ground was fenced in where the goats and little black cows of the
villagers browsed as one herd, while the patches of wheat, corn and
vegetables were not inclosed at all. A few of the thriftier and more
important citizens, however, had separate estates of some magnitude,
surrounding their residences, kept up with care and, if the time and
place be taken into account, with considerable show of taste.

Monsieur Gaspard Roussillon was looked upon as the aristocrat par
excellence of Vincennes, notwithstanding the fact that his name bore no
suggestion of noble or titled ancestry. He was rich and in a measure
educated; moreover the successful man's patent of leadership, a
commanding figure and a suave manner, came always to his assistance
when a crisis presented itself. He traded shrewdly, much to his own
profit, but invariably with the excellent result that the man, white or
Indian, with whom he did business felt himself especially favored in
the transaction. By the exercise of firmness, prudence, vast
assumption, florid eloquence and a kindly liberality he had greatly
endeared himself to the people; so that in the absence of a military
commander he came naturally to be regarded as the chief of the town,
Mo'sieu' le maire.

He returned from his extended trading expedition about the middle of
July, bringing, as was his invariable rule, a gift for Alice. This time
it was a small, thin disc of white flint, with a hole in the center
through which a beaded cord of sinew was looped. The edge of the disc
was beautifully notched and the whole surface polished so that it shone
like glass, while the beads, made of very small segments of porcupine
quills, were variously dyed, making a curiously gaudy show of bright
colors.

"There now, ma cherie, is something worth fifty times its weight in
gold," said M. Roussillon when he presented the necklace to his foster
daughter with pardonable self-satisfaction. "It is a sacred
charm-string given me by an old heathen who would sell his soul for a
pint of cheap rum. He solemnly informed me that whoever wore it could
not by any possibility be killed by an enemy."

Alice kissed M. Roussillon.

"It's so curious and beautiful," she said, holding it up and drawing
the variegated string through her fingers. Then, with her mischievous
laugh, she added; "and I'm glad it is so powerful against one's enemy;
I'll wear it whenever I go where Adrienne Bourcier is, see if I don't!"

"Is she your enemy? What's up between you and la petite Adrienne, eh?"
M. Roussillon lightly demanded. "You were always the best of good
friends, I thought. What's happened?"

"Oh, we are good friends," said Alice, quickly, "very good friends,
indeed; I was but chaffing."

"Good friends, but enemies; that's how it is with women. Who's the
young man that's caused the coolness? I could guess, maybe!" He laughed
and winked knowingly. "May I be so bold as to name him at a venture?"

"Yes, if you'll be sure to mention Monsieur Rene de Ronville," she
gayly answered. "Who but he could work Adrienne up into a perfect green
mist of jealousy?"

"He would need an accomplice, I should imagine; a young lady of some
beauty and a good deal of heartlessness."

"Like whom, for example?" and she tossed her bright head. "Not me, I am
sure."

"Poh! like every pretty maiden in the whole world, ma petite coquette;
they're all alike as peas, cruel as blue jays and as sweet as
apple-blossoms." He stroked her hair clumsily with his large hand, as a
heavy and roughly fond man is apt to do, adding in an almost serious
tone:

"But my little girl is better than most of them, not a foolish
mischief-maker, I hope."

Alice was putting her head through the string of beads and letting the
translucent white disc fall into her bosom.

"It's time to change the subject," she said; "tell me what you have
seen while away. I wish I could go far off and see things. Have you
been to Detroit, Quebec, Montreal?"

"Yes, I've been to all, a long, hard journey, but reasonably
profitable. You shall have a goodly dot when you get married, my child."

"And did you attend any parties and balls?" she inquired quickly,
ignoring his concluding remark. "Tell me about them. How do the fine
ladies dress, and do they wear their hair high with great big combs? Do
they have long skirts and--"

"Hold up, you double-tongued chatterbox!" he interrupted; "I can't
answer forty questions at once. Yes, I danced till my legs ached with
women old and girls young; but how could I remember how they were
dressed and what their style of coiffure was? I know that silk rustled
and there was a perfume of eau de Cologne and mignonette and my heart
expanded and blazed while I whirled like a top with a sweet lady in my
arms."

"Yes, you must have cut a ravishing figure!" interpolated Madame
Roussillon with emphatic disapproval, her eyes snapping. "A bull in a
lace shop. How delighted the ladies must have been!"

"Never saw such blushing faces and burning glances--such fluttering
breasts, such--"

"Big braggart," Madame Roussillon broke in contemptuously, "it's a
piastre to a sou that you stood gawping in through a window while
gentlemen and ladies did the dancing. I can imagine how you looked--I
can!" and with this she took her prodigious bulk at a waddling gait out
of the room. "I remember how you danced even when you were not clumsy
as a pig on ice!" she shrieked back over her shoulder.

"Parbleu! true enough, my dear," he called after her, "I should think
you could--you mind how we used trip it together. You were the
prettiest dancer them all, and the young fellows all went to the swords
about you!"

"But tell me more," Alice insisted; "I want to know about what you saw
in the great towns--in the fine houses--how the ladies looked, how they
acted--what they said--the dresses they wore--how--"

"Ciel! you will split my ears, child; can't you fill my pipe and bring
it to me with a coal on it? Then I'll try to tell you what I can," he
cried, assuming a humorously resigned air. "Perhaps if I smoke I can
remember everything."

Alice gladly ran to do what he asked. Meantime Jean was out on the
gallery blowing a flute that M. Roussillon had brought him from Quebec.

The pipe well filled and lighted apparently did have the effect to
steady and encourage M. Roussillon's memory; or if not his memory, then
his imagination, which was of that fervid and liberal sort common to
natives of the Midi, and which has been exquisitely depicted by the
late Alphonse Daudet in Tartarin and Bompard. He leaned far back in a
strong chair, with his massive legs stretched at full length, and gazed
at the roof-poles while he talked.

He sympathized fully, in his crude way, with Alice's lively curiosity,
and his affection for her made him anxious to appease her longing after
news from the great outside world. If the sheer truth must come out,
however, he knew precious little about that world, especially the
polite part of it in which thrived those femininities so dear to the
heart of an isolated and imaginative girl. Still, as he, too, lived in
Arcadia, there was no great effort involved when he undertook to blow a
dreamer's flute.

In the first place he had not been in Quebec or Montreal during his
absence from home. Most of the time he had spent disposing of pelts and
furs at Detroit and in extending his trading relations with other
posts; but what mattered a trifling want of facts when his meridional
fancy once began to warm up? A smattering of social knowledge gained at
first hand in his youthful days in France while he was a student whose
parents fondly expected him to conquer the world, came to his aid, and
besides he had saturated himself all his life with poetry and romance.
Scudery, Scarron, Prevost, Madame La Fayette and Calprenede were the
chief sources of his information touching the life and manners, morals
and gayeties of people who, as he supposed, stirred the surface of that
resplendent and far-off ocean called society. Nothing suited him better
than to smoke a pipe and talk about what he had seen and done; and the
less he had really seen and done the more he had to tell.

His broad, almost over-virile, kindly and contented face beamed with
the warmth of wholly imaginary recollections while he recounted with
minute circumstantiality to the delighted Alice his gallant adventures
in the crowded and brilliant ball-rooms of the French-Canadian towns.
The rolling burr of his bass voice, deep and resonant, gave force to
the improvised descriptions.

Madame Roussillon heard the heavy booming and presently came softly
back into the door from the kitchen to listen. She leaned against the
facing in an attitude of ponderous attention, a hand, on her bulging
hip. She could not suppress her unbounded admiration of her liege
lord's manly physique, and jealous to fierceness as she was of his
experiences so eloquently and picturesquely related, her woman's nature
took fire with enjoyment of the scenes described.

This is the mission of the poet and the romancer--to sponge out of
existence, for a time, the stiff, refractory, and unlovely realities
and give in their place a scene of ideal mobility and charm. The two
women reveled in Gaspard Roussillon's revelations. They saw the
brilliant companies, the luxurious surroundings, heard the rustle of
brocade and the fine flutter of laces, the hum of sweet voices,
breathed in the wafts of costly perfumeries, looked on while the
dancers whirled and flickered in the confusion of lights; and over all
and through all poured and vibrated such ravishing music as only the
southern imagination could have conjured up out of nothing.

Alice was absolutely charmed. She sat on a low wooden stool and gazed
into Gaspard Roussillon's face with dilating eyes in which burned that
rich and radiant something we call a passionate soul. She drank in his
flamboyant stream of words with a thirst which nothing but experience
could ever quench. He felt her silent applause and the admiring
involuntary absorption that possessed his wife; the consciousness of
his elementary magnetism augmented the flow of his fine descriptions,
and he went on and on, until the arrival of Father Beret put an end to
it all.

The priest, hearing of M. Roussillon's return, had come to inquire
about some friends living at Detroit. He took luncheon with the family,
enjoying the downright refreshing collation of broiled birds, onions,
meal-cakes and claret, ending with a dish of blackberries and cream.

M. Roussillon seized the first opportunity to resume his successful
romancing, and presently in the midst of the meal began to tell Father
Beret about what he had seen in Quebec.

"By the way," he said, with expansive casualness in his voice, "I
called upon your old-time friend and co-adjutor, Father Sebastien,
while up there. A noble old man. He sent you a thousand good messages.
Was mightily delighted when I told him how happy and hale you have
always been here. Ah, you should have seen his dear old eyes full of
loving tears. He would walk a hundred miles to see you, he said, but
never expected to in this world. Blessings, blessings upon dear Father
Beret, was what he murmured in my ear when we were parting. He says
that he will never leave Quebec until he goes to his home above--ah!"

The way in which M. Roussillon closed his little speech, his large eyes
upturned, his huge hands clasped in front of him, was very effective.

"I am under many obligations, my son," said Father Beret, "for what you
tell me. It was good of you to remember my dear old friend and go to
him for his loving messages to me. I am very, very thankful. Help me to
another drop of wine, please."

Now the extraordinary feature of the situation was that Father Beret
had known positively for nearly five years that Father Sebastien was
dead and buried.

"Ah, yes," M. Roussillon continued, pouring the claret with one hand
and making a pious gesture with the other; "the dear old man loves you
and prays for you; his voice quavers whenever he speaks of you."

"Doubtless he made his old joke to you about the birth-mark on my
shoulder," said Father Beret after a moment of apparently thoughtful
silence. "He may have said something about it in a playful way, eh?"

"True, true, why yes, he surely mentioned the same," assented M.
Roussillon, his face assuming an expression of confused memory; "it was
something sly and humorous, I mind; but it just escapes my
recollection. A right jolly old boy is Father Sebastien; indeed very
amusing at times."

"At times, yes," said Father Beret, who had no birth-mark on his
shoulder, and had never had one there, or on any other part of his
person.

"How strange!" Alice remarked, "I, too, have a mark on my shoulder--a
pink spot, just like a small, five-petaled flower. We must be of kin to
each other, Father Beret."

The priest laughed.

"If our marks are alike, that would be some evidence of kinship," he
said.

"But what shape is yours, Father?"

"I've never seen it," he responded.

"Never seen it! Why?"

"Well, it's absolutely invisible," and he chuckled heartily, meantime
glancing shrewdly at M. Roussillon out of the tail of his eye.

"It's on the back part of his shoulder," quickly spoke up M.
Roussillon, "and you know priests never use looking-glasses. The mark
is quite invisible therefore, so far as Father Beret is concerned!"

"You never told me of your birth-mark before, my daughter," said Father
Beret, turning to Alice with sudden interest. "It may some day be good
fortune to you."

"Why so, Father?"

"If your family name is really Tarleton, as you suppose from the
inscription on your locket, the birth-mark, being of such singular
shape, would probably identify you. It is said that these marks run
regularly in families. With the miniature and the distinguishing
birth-mark you have enough to make a strong case should you once find
the right Tarleton family."

"You talk as they write in novels," said Alice. "I've read about just
such things in them. Wouldn't it be grand if I should turn out to be
some great personage in disguise!"

The mention of novels reminded Father Beret of that terrible book,
Manon Lescaut, which he last saw in Alice's possession, and he could
not refrain from mentioning it in a voice that shuddered.

"Rest easy, Father Beret," said Alice; "that is one novel I have found
wholly distasteful to me. I tried to read it, but could not do it, I
flung it aside in utter disgust. You and mother Roussillon are welcome
to hide it deep as a well, for all I care. I don't enjoy reading about
low, vile people and hopeless unfortunates; I like sweet and lovely
heroines and strong, high-souled, brave heroes."

"Read about the blessed saints, then, my daughter; you will find in
them the true heroes and heroines of this world," said Father Beret.

M. Roussillon changed the subject, for he always somehow dreaded to
have the good priest fall into the strain of argument he was about to
begin. A stray sheep, no matter how refractory, feels a touch of
longing when it hears the shepherd's voice. M. Roussillon was a
Catholic, but a straying one, who avoided the confessional and often
forgot mass. Still, with all his reckless independence, and with all
his outward show of large and breezy self-sufficiency, he was not
altogether free from the hold that the church had laid upon him in
childhood and youth. Moreover, he was fond of Father Beret and had done
a great deal for the little church of St. Xavier and the mission it
represented; but he distinctly desired to be let alone while he pursued
his own course; and he had promised the dying woman who gave Alice to
him that the child should be left as she was, a Protestant, without
undue influence to change her from the faith of her parents. This
promise he had kept with stubborn persistence and he meant to keep it
as long as he lived. Perhaps the very fact that his innermost
conscience smote him with vague yet telling blows at times for this
departure from the strict religion of his fathers, may have intensified
his resistance of the influence constantly exerted upon Alice by Father
Beret and Madame Roussillon, to bring her gently but surely to the
church. Perverseness is a force to be reckoned with in all original
characters.

A few weeks had passed after M. Roussillon's return, when that
big-hearted man took it into his head to celebrate his successful
trading ventures with a moonlight dance given without reserve to all
the inhabitants of Vincennes. It was certainly a democratic function
that he contemplated, and motley to a most picturesque extent.

Rene de Ronville called upon Alice a day or two previous to the
occasion and duly engaged her as his partenaire; but she insisted upon
having the engagement guarded in her behalf by a condition so obviously
fanciful that he accepted it without argument.

"If my wandering knight should arrive during the dance, you promise to
stand aside and give place to him," she stipulated. "You promise that?
You see I'm expecting him all the time. I dreamed last night that he
came on a great bay horse and, stooping, whirled me up behind the
saddle, and away we went!"

There was a childish, half bantering air in her look; but her voice
sounded earnest and serious, notwithstanding its delicious timbre of
suppressed playfulness.

"You promise me?" she insisted.

"Oh, I promise to slink away into a corner and chew my thumb, the
moment he comes," Rene eagerly assented. "Of course I'm taking a great
risk, I know; for lords and barons and knights are very apt to appear
Suddenly in a place like this."

"You may banter and make light if you want to," she said, pouting
admirably. "I don't care. All the same the laugh will jump to the other
corner of your mouth, see if it doesn't. They say that what a person
dreams about and wishes for and waits for and believes in, will come
true sooner or later."

"If that's so," said Rene, "you and I will get married; for I've
dreamed it every night of the year, wished for it, waited for it and
believed in it, and--"

It was a madly sudden rush. He made it on an impulse quite
irresistible, as hypnotized persons are said to do in response to the
suggestion of the hypnotist, and his heart was choking his throat
before he could end his speech. Alice interrupted him with a hearty
burst of laughter.

"A very pretty twist you give to my words, I must declare," she said;
"but not new by any means. Little Adrienne Bourcier could tell you
that. She says that you have vowed to her over and over that you dream
about her, and wish for her, and wait for her, precisely as you have
just said to me."

Rene's brown face flushed to the temples, partly with anger, partly
with the shock of mingled surprise and fear. He was guilty, and the
guilt showed in his eyes and paralyzed his tongue, so that he sat there
before Alice with his under jaw sagging ludicrously.

"Don't you rather think, Monsieur Rene de Ronville," she presently
added in a calmly advisory tone, "that you had better quit trying to
say such foolish things to me, and just be my very good friend? If you
don't, I do, which comes to the same thing. What's more, I won't be
your partenaire at the dance unless you promise me on your word of
honor that you will dance two dances with Adrienne to every one that
you have with me. Do you promise?"

He dared not oppose her outwardly, although in his heart resistance
amounted to furious revolt and riot.

"I promise anything you ask me to," he said resignedly, almost
sullenly; "anything for you."

"Well, I ask nothing whatever on my own account," Alice quickly
replied; "but I do tell you firmly that you shall not maltreat little
Adrienne Bourcier and remain a friend of mine. She loves you, Rene de
Ronville, and you have told her that you love her. If you are a man
worthy of respect you will not desert her. Don't you think I am right?"

Like a singed and crippled moth vainly trying to rise once again to the
alluring yet deadly flame, Rene de Ronville essayed to break out of his
embarrassment and resume equal footing with the girl so suddenly become
his commanding superior; but the effort disclosed to him as well as to
her that he had fallen to rise no more. In his abject defeat he
accepted the terms dictated by Alice and was glad when she adroitly
changed her manner and tone in going on to discuss the approaching
dance.

"Now let me make one request of you," he demanded after a while. "It's
a small favor; may I ask it?"

"Yes, but I don't grant it in advance."

"I want you to wear, for my sake, the buff gown which they say was your
grandmother's."

"No, I won't wear it."

"But why, Alice?"

"None of the other girls have anything like such a dress; it would not
be right for me to put it on and make them all feel that I had taken
the advantage of them, just because I could; that's why."

"But then none of them is beautiful and educated like you," he said;
"you'll outshine them anyway."

"Save your compliments for poor pretty little Adrienne," she firmly
responded, "I positively do not wish to hear them. I have agreed to be
your partenaire at this dance of Papa Roussillon's, but it is
understood between us that Adrienne is your sweet-heart. I am not, and
I'm not going to be, either. So for your sake and Adrienne's, as well
as out of consideration for the rest of the girls who have no fine
dresses, I am not going to wear the buff brocade gown that belonged to
Papa Roussillon's mother long ago. I shall dress just as the rest do."

It is safe to say that Rene de Ronville went home with a troublesome
bee in his bonnet. He was not a bad-hearted fellow. Many a right good
young man, before him and since, has loved an Adrienne and been dazzled
by an Alice. A violet is sweet, but a rose is the garden's queen. The
poor youthful frontiersman ought to have been stronger; but he was not,
and what have we to say?

As for Alice, since having a confidential talk with Adrienne Bourcier
recently, she had come to realize what M. Roussillon meant when he
said; "But my little girl is better than most of them, not a foolish
mischief-maker, I hope." She saw through the situation with a quick
understanding of what Adrienne might suffer should Rene prove
permanently fickle. The thought of it aroused all her natural honesty
and serious nobleness of character, which lay deep under the almost
hoydenish levity usually observable in her manner. Crude as her sense
of life's larger significance was, and meager as had been her
experience in the things which count for most in the sum of a young
girl's existence under fair circumstances, she grasped intuitively the
gist of it all.

The dance did not come off; it had to be postponed indefinitely on
account of a grave change in the political relations of the little
post. A day or two before the time set for that function a rumor ran
through the town that something of importance was about to happen.
Father Gibault, at the head of a small party, had arrived from
Kaskaskia, far away on the Mississippi, with the news that France and
the American Colonies had made common cause against the English in the
great war of which the people of Vincennes neither knew the cause nor
cared a straw about the outcome.

It was Oncle Jazon who came to the Roussillon place to tell M.
Roussillon that he was wanted at the river house. Alice met him at the
door.

"Come in, Oncle Jazon," she cheerily said, "you are getting to be a
stranger at our house lately. Come in; what news do you bring? Take off
your cap and rest your hair, Oncle Jazon."

The scalpless old fighter chuckled raucously and bowed to the best of
his ability. He not only took off his queer cap, but looked into it
with a startled gaze, as if he expected something infinitely dangerous
to jump out and seize his nose.

"A thousand thanks, Ma'm'selle," he presently said, "will ye please
tell Mo'sieu' Roussillon that I would wish to see 'im?"

"Yes, Oncle Jazon; but first be seated, and let me offer you just a
drop of eau de vie; some that Papa Roussillon brought back with him
from Quebec. He says it's old and fine."

She poured him a full glass, then setting the bottle on a little stand,
went to find M. Roussillon. While she was absent Oncle Jazon improved
his opportunity to the fullest extent. At least three additional
glasses of the brandy went the way of the first. He grinned atrociously
and smacked his corrugated lips; but when Gaspard Roussillon came in,
the old man was sitting at some distance from the bottle and glass
gazing indifferently out across the veranda. He told his story curtly.
Father Gibault, he said, had sent him to ask M. Roussillon to come to
the river house, as he had news of great importance to communicate.

"Ah, well, Oncle Jazon, we'll have a nip of brandy together before we
go," said the host.

"Why, yes, jes' one agin' the broilin' weather," assented Oncle Jazon;
"I don't mind jes' one."

"A very rich friend of mine in Quebec gave me this brandy, Oncle
Jazon," said M. Roussillon, pouring the liquor with a grand flourish;
"and I thought of you as soon as I got it. Now, says I to myself, if
any man knows good brandy when he tastes it, it's Oncle Jazon, and I'll
give him a good chance at this bottle just the first of all my friends."

"It surely is delicious," said Oncle Jazon, "very delicious." He spoke
French with a curious accent, having spent long years with
English-speaking frontiersmen in the Carolinas and Kentucky, so that
their lingo had become his own.

As they walked side by side down the way to the river house they looked
like typical extremes of rough, sun-burned and weather-tanned manhood;
Oncle Jazon a wizened, diminutive scrap, wrinkled and odd in every
respect; Gaspard Roussillon towering six feet two, wide shouldered,
massive, lumbering, muscular, a giant with long curling hair and a
superb beard. They did not know that they were going down to help
dedicate the great Northwest to freedom.




CHAPTER V

FATHER GIBAULT


Great movements in the affairs of men are like tides of the seas which
reach and affect the remotest and quietest nooks and inlets, imparting
a thrill and a swell of the general motion. Father Gibault brought the
wave of the American Revolution to Vincennes. He was a simple
missionary; but he was, besides, a man of great worldly knowledge and
personal force. Colonel George Rogers Clark made Father Gibault's
acquaintance at Kaskaskia, when the fort and its garrison surrendered
to his command, and, quickly discerning the fine qualities of the
priest's character, sent him to the post on the Wabash to win over its
people to the cause of freedom and independence. Nor was the task
assumed a hard one, as Father Gibault probably well knew before he
undertook it.

A few of the leading men of Vincennes, presided over by Gaspard
Roussillon, held a consultation at the river house, and it was agreed
that a mass meeting should be called bringing all of the inhabitants
together in the church for the purpose of considering the course to be
taken under the circumstances made known by Father Gibault. Oncle Jazon
constituted himself an executive committee of one to stir up a noise
for the occasion.

It was a great day for Vincennes. The volatile temperament of the
French frontiersmen bubbled over with enthusiasm at the first hint of
something new, and revolutionary in which they might be expected to
take part. Without knowing in the least what it was that Father Gibault
and Oncle Jazon wanted of them, they were all in favor of it at a
venture.

Rene de Ronville, being an active and intelligent young man, was sent
about through the town to let everybody know of the meeting. In passing
he stepped into the cabin of Father Beret, who was sitting on the loose
puncheon floor, with his back turned toward the entrance and so
absorbed in trying to put together a great number of small paper
fragments that he did not hear or look up.

"Are you not going to the meeting, Father?" Rene bluntly demanded. In
the hurry that was on him he did not remember to be formally polite, as
was his habit.

The old priest looked up with a startled face. At the same time he
swept the fragments of paper together and clutched them hard in his
right hand. "Yes, yes, my son--yes I am going, but the time has not yet
come for it, has it?" he stammered. "Is it late?"

He sprang to his feet and appeared confused, as if caught in doing
something very improper.

Rene wondered at this unusual behavior, but merely said:

"I beg pardon, Father Beret, I did not mean to disturb you," and went
his way.

Father Beret stood for some minutes as if dazed, then squeezed the
paper fragments into a tight ball, just as they were when he took them
from under the floor some time before Rene came in, and put it in his
pocket. A little later he was kneeling, as we have seen him once
before, in silent yet fervent prayer, his clasped hands lifted toward
the crucifix on the wall.

"Jesus, give me strength to hold on and do my work," he murmured
beseechingly, "and oh, free thy poor servant from bitter temptation."

Father Gibault had come prepared to use his eloquence upon the
excitable Creoles, and with considerable cunning he addressed a motley
audience at the church, telling them that an American force had taken
Kaskaskia and would henceforth hold it; that France had joined hands
with the Americans against the British, and that it was the duty of all
Frenchmen to help uphold the cause of freedom and independence.

"I come," said he, "directly from Colonel George Rogers Clark, a noble
and brave officer of the American army, who told me the news that I
have brought to you. He sent me here to say to you that if you will
give allegiance to his government you shall be protected against all
enemies and have the full freedom of citizens. I think you should do
this without a moment's hesitation, as I and my people at Kaskaskia
have already done. But perhaps you would like to have a word from your
distinguished fellow-citizen, Monsieur Gaspard Roussillon. Speak to
your friends, my son, they will be glad to take counsel of your wisdom."

There was a stir and a craning of necks. M. Roussillon presently
appeared near the little chancel, his great form towering majestically.
He bowed and waved his hand with the air of one who accepts distinction
as a matter of course; then he took his big silver watch and looked at
it. He was the only man in Vincennes who owned a watch, and so the
incident was impressive. Father Gibault looked pleased, and already a
murmur of applause went through the audience. M. Roussillon stroked the
bulging crystal of the time-piece with a circular motion of his thumb
and bowed again, clearing his throat resonantly, his face growing
purplish above his beard.

"Good friends," he said, "what France does all high-class Frenchmen
applaud." He paused for a shout of approbation, and was not
disappointed. "The other name for France is glory," he added, "and all
true Frenchmen love both names. I am a true Frenchman!" and he struck
his breast a resounding blow with the hand that still held the watch. A
huge horn button on his buckskin jerkin came in contact with the
crystal, and there was a smash, followed by a scattered tinkling of
glass fragments.

All Vincennes stood breathless, contemplating the irreparable accident.
M. Roussillon had lost the effect of a great period in his speech, but
he was quick. Lifting the watch to his ear, he listened a moment with
superb dignity, then slowly elevating his head and spreading his free
hand over his heart he said:

"The faithful time-piece still tells off the seconds, and the loyal
heart of its owner still throbs with patriotism."

Oncle Jazon, who stood in front of the speaker, swung his shapeless cap
as high as he could and yelled like a savage. Then the crowd went wild
for a time.

"Vive la France! A bas l' Angleterre!" Everybody shouted at the top of
his voice.

"What France does we all do," continued M. Roussillon, when the noise
subsided. "France has clasped hands with George Washington and his
brave compatriots; so do we."

"Vive Zhorzh Vasinton!" shrieked Oncle Jazon in a piercing treble,
tiptoeing and shaking his cap recklessly under M. Roussillon's nose.

The orator winced and jerked his head back, but nobody saw it, save
perhaps Father Gibault, who laughed heartily.

Great sayings come suddenly, unannounced and unexpected. They have the
mysterious force of prophetic accident combined with happy economy of
phrasing. The southern blood in M. Roussillon's veins was effervescing
upon his brain; his tongue had caught the fine freedom and abandon of
inspired oratory. He towered and glowed; words fell melodiously from
his lips; his gestures were compelling, his visage magnetic. In
conclusion he said:

"Frenchmen, America is the garden-spot of the world and will one day
rule it, as did Rome of old. Where freedom makes her home, there is the
centre of power!"

It was in a little log church on the verge of a hummock overlooking a
marshy wild meadow. Westward for two thousand miles stretched the
unbroken prairies, woods, mountains, deserts reaching to the Pacific;
southward for a thousand miles rolled the green billows of the
wilderness to the warm Gulf shore; northward to the pole and eastward
to the thin fringe of settlements beyond the mountains, all was
houseless solitude.

If the reader should go to Vincennes to-day and walk southward along
Second Street to its intersection with Church Street, the spot then
under foot would be probably very near where M. Roussillon stood while
uttering his great sentence. Mind you, the present writer does not
pretend to know the exact site of old Saint Xavier church. If it could
be fixed beyond doubt the spot should have an imperishable monument of
Indiana stone.

When M, Roussillon ceased speaking the audience again exhausted its
vocal resources; and then Father Gibault called upon each man to come
forward and solemnly pledge his loyalty to the American cause. Not one
of them hesitated.

Meantime a woman was doing her part in the transformation of Post
Vincennes from a French-English picket to a full-fledged American fort
and town. Madame Godere, finding out what was about to happen, fell to
work making a flag in imitation of that under which George Washington
was fighting. Alice chanced to be in the Godere home at the time and
joined enthusiastically in the sewing. It was an exciting task. Their
fingers trembled while they worked, and the thread, heavily coated with
beeswax, squeaked as they drew it through the cloth.

"We shall not be in time," said Madame Godere; "I know we shall not.
Everything hinders me. My thread breaks or gets tangled and my needle's
so rusty I can hardly stick it through the cloth. O dear!"

Alice encouraged her with both words and work, and they had almost
finished when Rene came with a staff which he had brought from the fort.

"Mon dieu, but we have had a great meeting!" he cried. He was
perspiring with excitement and fast walking; leaning on the staff he
mopped his face with a blue handkerchief.

"We heard much shouting and noise," said Madame Godere, "M.
Roussillon's voice rose loud above the rest. He roared like a lion."

"Ah, he was speaking to us; he was very eloquent," Rene replied. "But
now they are waiting at the fort for the new flag. I have come for it."

"It is ready," said Madame Godere.

With flying fingers Alice sewed it to the staff.

"Voici!" she cried, "vive la republique Americaine!" She lifted the
staff and let the flag droop over her from head to foot.

"Give it to me," said Rene, holding forth a hand for it, "and I'll run
to the fort with it."

"No," said Alice, her face suddenly lighting up with resolve. "No, I am
going to take it myself," and without a moment's delay off she went.

Rene was so caught by surprise that he stood gazing after her until she
passed behind a house, where the way turned, the shining flag rippling
around her, and her moccasins twinkling as she ran.

At the blockhouse, awaiting the moment when the symbol of freedom
should rise like a star over old Vincennes the crowd had picturesquely
broken into scattered groups. Alice entered through a rent in the
stockade, as that happened to be a shorter route than through the gate,
and appeared suddenly almost in their midst.

It was a happy surprise, a pretty and catching spectacular apparition
of a sort to be thoroughly appreciated by the lively French fancy of
the audience. The caught the girl's spirit, or it caught them, and they
made haste to be noisy.

"V'la! V'la! l'p'tite Alice et la bannlere de Zhorzh Vasinton! (Look,
look, little Alice and George Washington's flag!)" shouted Oncle Jazon.
He put his wiry little legs through a sort of pas de zephyr and winked
at himself with concentrated approval.

All the men danced around and yelled till they were hoarse.

By this time Rene had reached Alice's side; but she did not see him;
she ran into the blockhouse and climbed up a rude ladder-way; then she
appeared on the roof, still accompanied by Rene, and planted the staff
in a crack of the slabs, where it stood bravely up, the colors floating
free.

She looked down and saw M. Roussillon, Father Gibault and Father Beret
grouped in the centre of the area. They were waving their hands aloft
at her, while a bedlam of voices sent up applause which went through
her blood like strong wine. She smiled radiantly, and a sweet flush
glowed in her cheeks.

No one of all that wild crowd could ever forget the picture sketched so
boldly at that moment when, after planting the staff, Alice stepped
back a space and stood strong and beautiful against the soft blue sky.
She glanced down first, then looked up, her arms folded across her
bosom. It was a pose as unconsciously taken as that of a bird, and the
grace of it went straight to the hearts of those below.

She turned about to descend, and for the first time saw that Rene had
followed her. His face was beaming.

"What a girl you are!" he exclaimed, in a tone of exultant admiration.
"Never was there another like you!"

Alice walked quickly past him without speaking; for down in the space
where some women were huddled aside from the crowd, looking on, she had
seen little Adrienne Bourcier. She made haste to descend. Now that her
impulsively chosen enterprise was completed her boldness deserted her
and she slipped out through a dilapidated postern opposite the crowd.
On her right was the river, while southward before her lay a great flat
plain, beyond which rose some hillocks covered with forest. The sun
blazed between masses of slowly drifting clouds that trailed creeping
fantastic shadows across the marshy waste.

Alice walked along under cover of the slight landswell which then, more
plainly marked than it is now, formed the contour line of hummock upon
which the fort and village stood. A watery swale grown full of tall
aquatic weeds meandered parallel with the bluff, so to call it, and
there was a soft melancholy whispering of wind among the long blades
and stems. She passed the church and Father Beret's hut and continued
for some distance in the direction of that pretty knoll upon which the
cemetery is at present so tastefully kept. She felt shy now, as if to
run away and hide would be a great relief. Indeed, so relaxed were her
nerves that a slight movement in the grass and cat-tail flags near by
startled her painfully, making her jump like a fawn.

"Little friend not be 'fraid," said a guttural voice in broken French.
"Little friend not make noise."

At a glance she recognized Long-Hair, the Indian, rising out of the
matted marsh growth. It was a hideous vision of embodied cunning,
soullessness and murderous cruelty.

"Not tell white man you see me?" he grunted interrogatively, stepping
close to her. He looked so wicked that she recoiled and lifted her
hands defensively.

She trembled from head to foot, and her voice failed her; but she made
a negative sign and smiled at him, turning as white as her tanned face
could become.

In his left hand he held his bow, while in his right he half lifted a
murderous looking tomahawk.

"What new flag mean?" he demanded, waving the bow's end toward the fort
and bending his head down close to hers. "Who yonder?"

"The great American Father has taken us under his protection," she
explained. "We are big-knives now." It almost choked her to speak.

"Ugh! heap damn fools," he said with a dark scowl. "Little friend much
damn fool."

He straightened up his tall form and stood leering at her for some
seconds, then added:

"Little friend get killed, scalped, maybe."

The indescribable nobility of animal largeness, symmetry and strength
showed in his form and attitude, but the expression of his countenance
was absolutely repulsive--cold, hard, beastly.

He did not speak again, but turned quickly, and stooping low,
disappeared like a great brownish red serpent in the high grass, which
scarcely stirred as he moved through it.

Somehow that day made itself strangely memorable to Alice. She had been
accustomed to stirring scenes and sudden changes of conditions; but
this was the first time that she had ever joined actively in a public
movement of importance. Then, too, Long-Hair's picturesque and rudely
dramatic reappearance affected her imagination with an indescribable
force. Moreover, the pathetic situation in the love affair between Rene
and Adrienne had taken hold of her conscience with a disturbing grip.
But the shadowy sense of impending events, of which she could form no
idea, was behind it all. She had not heard of Brandywine, or Bunker
Hill, or Lexington, or Concord; but something like a waft of their
significance had blown through her mind. A great change was coming into
her idyllic life. She was indistinctly aware of it, as we sometimes are
of an approaching storm, while yet the sky is sweetly blue and serene.
When she reached home the house was full of people to whom M.
Roussillon, in the gayest of moods, was dispensing wine and brandy.

"Vive Zhorzh Vasinton!" shouted Oncle Jazon as soon as he saw her.

And then they all talked at once, saying flattering things about her.
Madame Roussillon tried to scold as usual; but the lively chattering of
the guests drowned her voice.

"I suppose the American commander will send a garrison here," some one
said to Father Gibault, "and repair the fort."

"Probably," the priest replied, "in a very few weeks. Meantime we will
garrison it ourselves."

"And we will have M. Roussillon for commander," spoke up Rene de
Ronville, who was standing by.

"A good suggestion," assented Father Gibault; "let us organize at once."

Immediately the word was passed that there would be a meeting at the
fort that evening for the purpose of choosing a garrison and a
commander. Everybody went promptly at the hour set. M. Roussillon was
elected Captain by acclamation, with Rene de Ronville as his
Lieutenant. It was observed that Oncle Jazon had resumed his dignity,
and that he looked into his cap several times without speaking.

Meantime certain citizens, who had been in close relations with
Governor Abbott during his stay, quietly slipped out of town, manned a
batteau and went up the river, probably to Ouiatenon first and then to
Detroit. Doubtless they suspected that things might soon grow too warm
for their comfort.

It was thus that Vincennes and Fort Sackville first acknowledged the
American Government and hoisted the flag which, as long as it floated
over the blockhouse, was lightly and lovingly called by everyone la
banniere d'Alice Roussillon.

Father Gibault returned to Fort Kaskaskia and a little later Captain
Leonard Helm, a jovial man, but past the prime of life, arrived at
Vincennes with a commission from Col. Clark authorizing him to
supersede M. Roussillon as commander, and to act as Indian agent for
the American Government in the Department of the Wabash. He was
welcomed by the villagers, and at once made himself very pleasing to
them by adapting himself to their ways and entering heartily into their
social activities.

M. Roussillon was absent when Captain Helm and his party came. Rene de
Ronville, nominally in command of the fort, but actually enjoying some
excellent grouse shooting with a bell-mouthed old fowling piece on a
distant prairie, could not be present to deliver up the post; and as
there was no garrison just then visible, Helm took possession, without
any formalities.

"I think, Lieutenant, that you'd better look around through the village
and see if you can scare up this Captain what's-his-name," said the new
commander to a stalwart young officer who had come with him. "I can't
think of these French names without getting my brain in a twist. Do you
happen to recollect the Captain's name, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir; Gaspard Roussillon it reads in Colonel Clark's order; but I
am told that he's away on a trading tour," said the young man.

"You may be told anything by these hair-tongued parlyvoos," Helm
remarked. "It won't hurt, anyway, to find out where he lives and make a
formal call, just for appearance sake, and to enquire about his health.
I wish you would try it, sir, and let me know the result."

The Lieutenant felt that this was a peremptory order and turned about
to obey promptly.

"And I say, Beverley, come back sober, if you possibly can," Helm added
in his most genial tone, thinking it a great piece of humor to suggest
sobriety to a man whose marked difference from men generally, of that
time, was his total abstinence from intoxicating drinks.

Lieutenant Fitzhugh Beverley was a Virginian of Virginians. His family
had long been prominent in colonial affairs and boasted a record of
great achievements both in peace and in war. He was the only son of his
parents and heir to a fine estate consisting of lands and slaves; but,
like many another of the restless young cavaliers of the Old Dominion,
he had come in search of adventure over into Kentucky, along the path
blazed by Daniel Boone; and when Clark organized his little army, the
young man's patriotic and chivalrous nature leaped at the opportunity
to serve his country under so gallant a commander.

Beverley was not a mere youth, although yet somewhat under thirty.
Educated abroad and naturally of a thoughtful and studious turn, he had
enriched his mind far beyond the usual limit among young Americans of
the very best class in that time; and so he appeared older than he
really was: an effect helped out by his large and powerful form and
grave dignity of bearing. Clark, who found him useful in emergencies,
cool, intrepid, daring to a fault and possessed of excellent judgement,
sent him with Helm, hoping that he would offset with his orderly
attention to details the somewhat go-as-you-please disposition of that
excellent officer.

Beverley set out in search of the French commander's house, impressed
with no particular respect for him or his office. Somehow Americans of
Anglo-Saxon blood were slow to recognize any good qualities whatever in
the Latin Creoles of the West and South. It seemed to them that the
Frenchman and the Spaniard were much too apt to equalize themselves
socially and matrimonially with Indians and negroes. The very fact that
for a century, while Anglo-Americans had been in constant bloody
warfare with savages, Frenchmen had managed to keep on easy and highly
profitable trading terms with them, tended to confirm the worst
implication. "Eat frogs and save your scalp," was a bit of contemptuous
frontier humor indicative of what sober judgement held in reserve on
the subject.

Intent upon his formal mission, Lieutenant Beverley stalked boldly into
the inclosure at Roussillon place and was met on the gallery by Madame
Roussillon in one of her worst moods. She glared at him with her hands
on her hips, her mouth set irritably aslant upward, her eyebrows
gathered into a dark knot over her nose. It would be hard to imagine a
more forbidding countenance; and for supplementary effect out popped
hunchback Jean to stand behind her, with his big head lying back in the
hollow of his shoulders and his long chin elevated, while he gawped
intently up into Beverley's face.

"Bon jour, Madame," said the Lieutenant, lifting his hat and speaking
with a pleasant accent. "Would it be agreeable to Captain Roussillon
for me to see him a moment?"

Despite Beverley's cleverness in using the French language, he had a
decided brusqueness of manner and a curt turn of voice not in the least
Gallic. True, the soft Virginian intonation marked every word, and his
obeisance was as low as if Madame Roussillon had been a queen; but the
light French grace was wholly lacking.

"What do you want of my husband?" Madame Roussillon demanded.

"Nothing unpleasant, I assure you, Madame," said Beverley.

"Well, he's not at home, Mo'sieu; he's up the river for a few days."

She relaxed her stare, untied her eyebrows, and even let fall her hands
from her shelf-like hips.

"Thank you, Madame," said Beverley, bowing again, "I am sorry not to
have seen him."

As he was turning to go a shimmer of brown hair streaked with gold
struck upon his vision from just within the door. He paused, as if in
response to a military command, while a pair of gray eyes met his with
a flash. The cabin room was ill lighted; but the crepuscular dimness
did not seem to hinder his sight. Beyond the girl's figure, a pair of
slender swords hung crossed aslant on the wall opposite the low door.

Beverley had seen, in the old world galleries, pictures in which the
shadowy and somewhat uncertain background thus forced into strongest
projection the main figure, yet without clearly defining it. The rough
frame of the doorway gave just the rustic setting suited to Alice's
costume, the most striking part of which was a grayish short gown
ending just above her fringed buckskin moccasins. Around her head she
had bound a blue kerchief, a wide corner of which lay over her crown
like a loose cap. Her bright hair hung free upon her shoulders in
tumbled half curls. As a picture, the figure and its entourage might
have been artistically effective; but as Beverley saw it in actual life
the first impression was rather embarrassing. Somehow he felt almost
irresistibly invited to laugh, though he had never been much given to
risibility. The blending, or rather the juxtaposition, of extremes--a
face, a form immediately witching, and a costume odd to
grotesquery--had made an assault upon his comprehension at once so
sudden and so direct that his dignity came near being disastrously
broken up. A splendidly beautiful child comically clad would have made
much the same half delightful, half displeasing impression.

Beverley could not stare at the girl, and no sooner had he turned his
back upon her than the picture in his mind changed like a scene in a
kaleidoscope. He now saw a tall, finely developed figure and a face
delicately oval, with a low, wide forehead, arched brows, a straight,
slightly tip-tilted nose, a mouth sweet and full, dimpled cheeks, and a
strong chin set above a faultless throat. His imagination, in casting
off its first impression, was inclined to exaggerate Alice's beauty and
to dwell upon its picturesqueness. He smiled as he walked back to the
fort, and even found himself whistling gayly a snatch from a rollicking
fiddle-tune that he had heard when a boy.




CHAPTER VI

A FENCING BOUT


A few days after Helm's arrival, M. Roussillon returned to Vincennes,
and if he was sorely touched in his amour propre by seeing his suddenly
acquired military rank and title drop away, he did not let it be known
to his fellow citizens. He promptly called upon the new commander and
made acquaintance with Lieutenant Fitzhugh Beverley, who just then was
superintending the work of cleaning up an old cannon in the fort and
mending some breaks in the stockade.

Helm formed a great liking for the big Frenchman, whose breezy freedom
of manner and expansive good humor struck him favorably from the
beginning. M. Roussillon's ability to speak English with considerable
ease helped the friendship along, no doubt; at all events their first
interview ended with a hearty show of good fellowship, and as time
passed they became almost inseparable companions during M. Roussillon's
periods of rest from his trading excursions among the Indians. They
played cards and brewed hot drinks over which they told marvelous
stories, the latest one invariably surpassing all its predecessors.

Helm had an eye to business, and turned M. Roussillon's knowledge of
the Indians to valuable account, so that he soon had very pleasant
relations with most of the tribes within reach of his agents. This gave
a feeling of great security to the people of Vincennes. They pursued
their narrow agricultural activities with excellent results and
redoubled those social gayeties which, even in hut and cabin under all
the adverse conditions of extreme frontier life, were dear to the
volatile and genial French temperament.

Lieutenant Beverley found much to interest him in the quaint town; but
the piece de resistance was Oncle Jazon, who proved to be both
fascinating and unmanageable; a hard nut to crack, yet possessing a
kernel absolutely original in flavor. Beverley visited him one evening
in his hut--it might better be called den--a curiously built thing,
with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in the
ground, and roofed with grass. Inside and out it was plastered with
clay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concrete
paving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in the
other a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins and
two or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorway
Oncle Jazon sat whittling a slender billet of hickory into a ramrod for
his long flint-lock American rifle.

"Maybe ye know Simon Kenton," said the old man, after he and Beverley
had conversed for a while, "seeing that you are from Kentucky--eh?"

"Yes, I do know him well; he's a warm personal friend of mine," said
Beverley with quick interest, for it surprised him that Oncle Jazon
should know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"

Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrod
to see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the point
of whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.

"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Where
did you and he come together?"

Oncle Jazon chuckled reminiscently and scratched the skinless,
cicatrized spot where his scalp had once flourished.

"Oh, several places," he answered. "Ye see thet hair a hangin' there on
the wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a log
barely visible by the bad light. "Well, thet's my scalp, he! he! he!"
He snickered as if the fact were a most enjoyable joke. "Simon Kenton
can tell ye about thet little affair! The Indians thought I was dead,
and they took my hair; but I wasn't dead; I was just a givin' 'em a
'possum act. When they was gone I got up from where I was a layin' and
trotted off. My head was sore and ventrebleu! but I was mad, he! he!
he!"

All this time he spoke in French, and the English but poorly
paraphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannot
even be hinted.

It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but with
certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous
self-satisfaction:

"Accidents will happen. I got my chance at that damned Indian who
skinned my head, and I jes took a bead on 'im with my old rifle. I
can't shoot much, never could, but I happened to hit 'im square in the
lef' eye, what I shot at, and it was a hundred yards. Down he tumbles,
and I runs to 'im and finds my same old scalp a hangin' to his belt.
Well, I lifted off his hair with my knife, and untied mine from the
belt, and then I had both scalps, he! he! he! You ask Simon Kenton when
ye see 'im. He was along at the same time, and they made 'im run the
ga'ntlet and pretty nigh beat the life out o' 'im. Ventrebleu!"

Beverley now recollected hearing Kenton tell the same grim story by a
camp-fire in the hills of Kentucky. Somehow it had caught a new spirit
in the French rendering, which linked it with the old tales of
adventure that he had read in his boyhood, and it suddenly endeared
Oncle Jazon to him. The rough old scrap of a man and the powerful youth
chatted together until sundown, smoking their pipes, each feeling for
what was best in the other, half aware that in the future they would be
tested together in the fire of wild adventure. Every man is more or
less a prophet at certain points in his life.

Twilight and moonlight were blending softly when Beverley, on his way
back to the fort, departing from a direct course, went along the
river's side southward to have a few moments of reflective strolling
within reach of the water's pleasant murmur and the town's indefinite
evening stir. Rich sweetness, the gift of early autumn, was on the air
blowing softly out of a lilac west and singing in the willow fringe
that hung here and there over the bank.

On the farther side of the river's wide flow, swollen by recent heavy
rains, Beverley saw a pirogue, in one end of which a dark figure swayed
to the strokes of a paddle. The slender and shallow little craft was
bobbing on the choppy waves and taking a zig-zag course among floating
logs and masses of lighter driftwood, while making slow but certain
headway toward the hither bank.

Beverley took a bit of punk and a flint and steel from his pocket,
relit his pipe and stood watching the skilful boatman conduct his
somewhat dangerous voyage diagonally against the rolling current. It
was a shifting, hide-and-seek scene, its features appearing and
disappearing with the action of the waves and the doubtful light
reflected from fading clouds and sky. Now and again the man stood up in
his skittish pirogue, balancing himself with care, to use a short pole
in shoving driftwood out of his way; and more than once he looked to
Beverley as if he had plunged head-long into the dark water.

The spot, as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards
below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The
bluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher,
with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed,
swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bank
and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the
river a great mass of drift-logs and sand had long ago formed a barrier
which split the stream so that one current came heavily shoreward on
the side next the town and swashed with its muddy foam, making a swirl
and eddy just below where Beverley stood.

The pirogue rounded the upper angle of this obstruction, not without
difficulty to its crew of one, and swung into the rapid shoreward rush,
as was evidently planned for by the steersman, who now paddled against
the tide with all his might to keep from being borne too far down
stream for a safe landing place.

Beverley stood at ease idly and half dreamily looking on, when suddenly
something caused a catastrophe, which for a moment he did not
comprehend. In fact the man in the pirogue came to grief, as a man in a
pirogue is very apt to do, and fairly somersaulted overboard into the
water. Nothing serious would have threatened (for the man could swim
like an otter) had not a floating, half submerged log thrust up some
short, stiff stumps of boughs, upon the points of which the man struck
heavily and was not only hurt, but had his clothes impaled securely by
one of the ugly spears, so that he hung in a helpless position, while
the water's motion alternately lifted and submerged him, his arms
beating about wildly.

When Beverley heard a strangling cry for help, he pulled himself
promptly together, flung off his coat, as if by a single motion, and
leaped down the bank into the water. He was a swimmer whose strokes
counted for all that prodigious strength and excellent training could
afford; he rushed through the water with long sweeps, making a
semicircle, rounding against the current, so as to swing down upon the
drowning man.

Less than a half-hour later a rumor by some means spread throughout the
town that Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley were drowned in the
Wabash. But when a crowd gathered to verify the terrible news it turned
out to be untrue. Gaspard Roussillon had once more distinguished
himself by an exhibition of heroic nerve and muscle.

"Ventrebleu! Quel homme!" exclaimed Oncle Jazon, when told that M.
Roussillon had come up the bank of the Wabash with Lieutenant Beverley
under one arm and Father Beret under the other, both men apparently
dead.

"Bring them to my house immediately," M. Roussillon ordered, as soon as
they were restored to consciousness; and he shook himself, as a big wet
animal sometimes does, covering everybody near him with muddy water.
Then he led the way with melodramatic strides.

In justice to historical accuracy there must be a trifling reform of
what appeared on the face of things to be grandly true. Gaspard
Roussillon actually dragged Father Beret and Lieutenant Beverley one at
a time out of the eddy water and up the steep river bank. That was
truly a great feat; but the hero never explained. When men arrived he
was standing between the collapsed forms, panting and dripping.
Doubtless he looked just as if he had dropped them from under his arms,
and why shouldn't he have the benefit of a great implication?

"I've saved them both," he roared; from which, of course, the ready
creole imagination inferred the extreme of possible heroic performance.

"Bring them to my house immediately," and it was accordingly done.

The procession, headed by M. Roussillon, moved noisily, for the French
tongue must shake off what comes to it on the thrill of every exciting
moment. The only silent Frenchman is the dead one.

Father Beret was not only well-nigh drowned, but seriously hurt. He lay
for a week on a bed in M. Roussillon's house before he could sit up.
Alice hung over him night and day, scarcely sleeping or eating until he
was past all danger. As for Beverley, he shook off all the effects of
his struggle in a little while. Next day he was out, as well and strong
as ever, busy with the affairs of his office. Nor was he less happy on
account of what the little adventure had cast into his experience. It
is good to feel that one has done an unselfish deed, and no young man's
heart repels the freshness of what comes to him when a beautiful girl
first enters his life.

Naturally enough Alice had some thoughts of Beverley while she was so
attentively caring for Father Beret. She had never before seen a man
like him, nor had she read of one. Compared with Rene de Ronville, the
best youth of her acquaintance, he was in every way superior; this was
too evident for analysis; but referred to the romantic standard taken
out of the novels she had read, he somehow failed; and yet he loomed
bravely in her vision, not exactly a knight of the class she had most
admired, still unquestionably a hero of large proportions.

Beverley stepped in for a few minutes every day to see Father Beret,
involuntarily lengthening his visit by a sliding ratio as he became
better acquainted. He began to enjoy the priest's conversation, with
its sly worldly wisdom cropping up through fervid religious sentiments
and quaint humor. Alice must have interested him more than he was fully
aware of; for his eyes followed her, as she came and went, with a
curious criticism of her half-savage costume and her springy,
Dryad-like suppleness, which reminded him of the shyest and gracefulest
wild birds; and yet a touch of refinement, the subtlest and best,
showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied a
strange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddly
attractive plumage. While she said little to him or to anyone else in
his presence, he became aware of the willfulness and joyous lightness
which played on her nature's changeable surface. He wondered at her
influence over Father Beret, whom she controlled apparently without
effort. But in due time he began to feel a deeper character, a broader
intelligence, behind her superficial sauvagerie; and he found that she
really had no mean smattering of books in the lighter vein.

A little thing happened which further opened his eyes and increased the
interest that her beauty and elementary charm of style aroused in him
gradually, apace with their advancing acquaintanceship.

Father Beret had got well and returned to his hut and his round of
spiritual duties; but Beverley came to Roussillon place every day all
the same. For a wonder Madame Roussillon liked him, and at most times
held the scolding side of her tongue when he was present. Jean, too,
made friendly advances whenever opportunity afforded. Of course Alice
gave him just the frank cordiality of hospitable welcome demanded by
frontier conditions. She scarcely knew whether she liked him or not;
but he had a treasury of information from which he was enriching her
with liberal carelessness day by day. The hungriest part of her mind
was being sumptuously banqueted at his expense. Mere intellectual
greediness drew her to him.

Naturally they soon threw off such troubling formalities as at first
rose between them, and began to disclose to each other their true
characteristics. Alice found in Beverley a large target for the
missiles of her clever and tantalizing perversity. He in turn practiced
a native dignity and an acquired superiority of manner to excellent
effect. It was a meeting of Greek with Greek in a new Arcadia. To him
here was Diana, strong, strange, simple, even crude almost to
naturalness, yet admirably pure in spirit and imbued with highest
womanly aspirations. To her Beverley represented the great outside area
of life. He came to her from wonderland, beyond the wide circle of
houseless woods and prairies. He represented gorgeous cities, teeming
parks of fashion, boulevards, salons, halls of social splendor, the
theater, the world of woman's dreams.

Now, there is an antagonism, vague yet powerful, generated between
natures thus cast together from the opposite poles of experience and
education: an antagonism practically equivalent to the most vigorous
attraction. What one knows the other is but half aware of; neither
knowledge nor ignorance being mutual, there is a scintillation of
exchange, from opposing vantage grounds, followed by harmless snaps of
thunder. Culture and refinement take on airs--it is the deepest
artificial instinct of enlightenment to pose--in the presence of
naturalness; and there is a certain style of ignorance which
attitudinizes before the gate of knowledge. The return to nature has
always been the dream of the conventionalized soul, while the simple
Arcadian is forever longing for the maddening honey of sophistication.

Innate jealousies strike together like flint and steel dashing off
sparks by which nearly everything that life can warm its core withal is
kindled and kept burning. What I envy in my friend I store for my best
use. I thrust and parry, not to kill, but to learn my adversary's
superior feints and guards. And this hint of sword play leads back to
what so greatly surprised and puzzled Beverley one day when he chanced
to be examining the pair of colechemardes on the wall.

He took one down, and handling it with the indescribable facility
possible to none save a practical swordsman, remarked:

"There's a world of fascination in these things; I like nothing better
than a bout at fencing. Does your father practice the art?"

"I have no father, no mother," she quickly said; "but good Papa
Roussillon does like a little exercise with the colechemarde."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it, I shall ask to teach him a trick or two,"
Beverley responded in the lightest mood. "When will he return from the
woods?"

"I can't tell you; he's very irregular in such matters," she said.
Then, with a smile half banter and half challenge, she added; "if you
are really dying for some exercise, you shall not have to wait for him
to come home, I assure you, Monsieur Beverley."

"Oh, it's Monsieur de Ronville, perhaps, that you will offer up as a
victim to my skill and address," he slyly returned; for he was
suspecting that a love affair in some stage of progress lay between her
and Rene.

She blushed violently, but quickly overcoming a combined rush of
surprise and anger, added with an emphasis as charming as it was
unexpected.

"I myself am, perhaps, swordsman enough to satisfy the impudence and
vanity of Monsieur Beverley, Lieutenant in the American army."

"Pardon me, Mademoiselle; forgive me, I beg of you," he exclaimed,
earnestly modulating his voice to sincerest beseechment; "I really did
not mean to be impudent, nor--"

Her vivacity cleared with a merry laugh.

"No apologies, I command you," she interposed. "We will have them after
I have taught you a fencing lesson."

From a shelf she drew down a pair of foils and presenting the hilts,
bade him take his choice.

"There isn't any difference between them that I know of," she said, and
then added archly; "but you will feel better at last, when all is over
and the sting of defeat tingles through you, if you are conscious of
having used every sensible precaution."

He looked straight into her eyes, trying to catch what was in her mind,
but there was a bewildering glamour playing across those gray,
opal-tinted wells of mystery, from which he could draw only a
mischievous smile-glint, direct, daring, irresistible.

"Well," he said, taking one of the foils, "what do you really mean? Is
it a challenge without room for honorable retreat?"

"The time for parley is past," she replied, "follow me to the
battle-ground."

She led the way to a pleasant little court in the rear of the cabin's
yard, a space between two wings and a vine-covered trellis, beyond
which lay a well kept vineyard and vegetable garden. Here she turned
about and faced him, poising her foil with a fine grace.

"Are you ready?" she inquired.

He tried again to force a way into the depths of her eyes with his; but
he might as well have attacked the sun; so he stood in a confusion of
not very well defined feelings, undecided, hesitating, half expecting
that there would be some laughable turn to end the affair.

"Are you afraid, Monsieur Beverley?" she demanded after a short waiting
in silence.

He laughed now and whipped the air with his foil.

"You certainly are not in earnest?" he said interrogatively. "Do you
really mean that you want to fence with me?"

"If you think because I'm only a girl you can easily beat me, try it,"
she tauntingly replied making a level thrust toward his breast.

Quick as a flash he parried, and then a merry clinking and twinkling of
steel blades kept time to their swift movements. Instantly, by the sure
sense which is half sight, half feeling--the sense that guides the
expert fencer's hand and wrist--Beverley knew that he had probably more
than his match, and in ten seconds his attack was met by a time thrust
in opposition which touched him sharply.

Alice sprang far back, lowered her point and laughed.

"Je vous salue, Monsieur Beverley!" she cried, with childlike show of
delight. "Did you feel the button?"

"Yes, I felt it," he said with frank acknowledgment in his voice, "it
was cleverly done. Now give me a chance to redeem myself."

He began more carefully and found that she, too, was on her best
mettle; but it was a short bout, as before. Alice seemed to give him an
easy opening and he accepted it with a thrust; then something happened
that he did not understand. The point of his foil was somehow caught
under his opponent's hilt-guard while her blade seemed to twist around
his; at the same time there was a wring and a jerk, the like of which
he had never before felt, and he was disarmed, his wrist and fingers
aching with the wrench they had received.

Of course the thing was not new; he had been disarmed before; but her
trick of doing it was quite a mystery to him, altogether different from
any that he had ever seen.

"Vous me pardonnerez, Monsieur," she mockingly exclaimed, picking up
his weapon and offering the hilt to him. "Here is your sword!"

"Keep it," he said, folding his arms and trying to look unconcerned,
"you have captured it fairly. I am at your mercy; be kind to me."

Madame Roussillon and Jean, the hunchback, hearing the racket of the
foils had come out to see and were standing agape.

"You ought to be ashamed, Alice," said the dame in scolding approval of
what she had done; "girls do not fence with gentlemen."

"This girl does," said Alice.

"And with extreme disaster to this gentleman," said Beverley, laughing
in a tone of discomfiture and resignation.

"Ah, Mo'sieu', there's nothing but disaster where she goes," complained
Madame Roussillon, "she is a destroyer of everything. Only yesterday
she dropped my pink bowl and broke it, the only one I had."

"And just to think," said Beverley, "what would have been the condition
of my heart had we been using rapiers instead of leather-buttoned
foils! She would have spitted it through the very center."

"Like enough," replied the dame indifferently. "She wouldn't wince,
either,--not she."

Alice ran into the house with the foils and Beverley followed.

"We must try it over again some day soon," he said; "I find that you
can show me a few points. Where did you learn to fence so admirably? Is
Monsieur Roussillon your master?"

"Indeed he isn't," she quickly replied, "he is but a bungling
swordsman. My master--but I am not at liberty to tell you who has
taught me the little I know."

"Well, whoever he is I should be glad to have lessons from him."

"But you'll never get them."

"Why?"

"Because."

"A woman's ultimatum."

"As good as a man's!" she bridled prettily; "and sometimes better--at
the foils for example. Vous--comprenez, n'est ce pas?"

He laughed heartily.

"Yes, your point reaches me," he said, "but sperat et in saeva victus
gladiatur arena, as the old Latin poet wisely remarks." The quotation
was meant to tease her.

"Yes, Montaigne translated that or something in his book," she
commented with prompt erudition. "I understand it."

Beverley looked amazed.

"What do you know about Montaigne?" he demanded with a blunt brevity
amounting to something like gruffness.

"Sh', Monsieur, not too loud," she softly protested, looking around to
see that neither Madame Roussillon nor Jean had followed them into the
main room. "It is not permitted that I read that old book; but they do
not hide it from me, because they think I can't make out its dreadful
spelling."

She smiled so that her cheeks drew their dimples deep into the
delicately tinted pink-and-brown, where wind and sun and wholesome
exercise had set the seal of absolute health, and took from a niche in
the logs of the wall a stained and dog-eared volume. He looked, and it
was, indeed, the old saint and sinner, Montaigne.

Involuntarily he ran his eyes over the girl from head to foot,
comparing her show of knowledge with the outward badges of abject
rusticity, and even wildness, with which she was covered.

"Well," he said, "you are a mystery."

"You think it surprising that I can read a book! Frankly I can't
understand half of this one. I read it because--well just because they
want me to read about nothing but sickly old saints and woe-begone
penitents. I like something lively. What do I care for all that
uninteresting religious stuff?"

"Montaigne IS decidedly lively in spots," Beverley remarked. "I
shouldn't think a girl--I shouldn't think you'd particularly enjoy his
humors."

"I don't care for the book at all," she said, flushing quickly, "only I
seem to learn about the world from it. Sometimes it seems as if it
lifted me up high above all this wild, lonely and tiresome country, so
that I can see far off where things are different and beautiful. It is
the same with the novels; and they don't permit me to read them either;
but all the same I do."

When Beverley, taking his leave, passed through the gate at Roussillon
place, he met Rene de Ronville going in. It was a notable coincidence
that each young man felt something troublesome rise in his throat as he
looked into the other's eyes.

A week of dreamy autumn weather came on, during which Beverley managed
to be with Alice a great deal, mostly sitting on the Roussillon
gallery, where the fading vine leaves made fairy whispering, and where
the tempered breeze blew deliciously cool from over the distant
multi-colored woods. The men of Vincennes were gathering their Indian
corn early to dry it on the cob for grating into winter meal. Many
women made wine from the native grapes and from the sweeter and richer
fruit of imported vines. Madame Roussillon and Alice stained their
hands a deep purple during the pressing season, and Beverley found
himself engaged in helping them handle the juicy crop, while around the
overflowing earthen pots the wild bees, wasps and hornets hummed with
an incessant, jarring monotony.

Jean, the hunchback, gathered ample stores of hickory nuts, walnuts,
hazel-nuts and pin-oak acorns. Indeed, the whole population of the
village made a great spurt of industry just before the falling of
winter; and presently, when every preparation had been completed for
the dreaded cold season, M. Roussillon carried out his long-cherished
plan, and gave a great party at the river house. After the most
successful trading experience of all his life he felt irrepressibly
liberal.

"Let's have one more roaring good time," he said, "that's what life is
for."




CHAPTER VII

THE MAYOR'S PARTY


Beverley was so surprised and confused in his mind by the ease with
which he had been mastered at swordplay by a mere girl, that he felt as
if just coming out of a dream. In fact the whole affair seemed unreal,
yet so vivid and impressive in all its main features, that he could not
emerge from it and look it calmly over from without. His experience
with women had not prepared him for a ready understanding and
acceptance of a girl like Alice. While he was fully aware of her
beauty, freshness, vivacity and grace, this Amazonian strength of hers,
this boldness of spirit, this curious mixture of frontier crudeness and
a certain adumbration--so to call it--of patrician sensibilities and
aspirations, affected him both pleasantly and unpleasantly. He did not
sympathize promptly with her semi-barbaric costume; she seemed not
gently feminine, as compared with the girls of Virginia and Maryland.
He resented her muscular development and her independent disposition.
She was far from coarseness, however, and, indeed, a trace of subtle
refinement, although not conventional, imbued her whole character.

But why was he thinking so critically about her? Had his selfishness
received an incurable shock from the button of her foil? A healthy
young man of the right sort is apt to be jealous of his physical
prowess--touch him there and he will turn the world over to right
himself in, his own admiration and yours. But to be beaten on his
highest ground of virility by a dimple-faced maiden just leaving her
teens could not offer Beverley any open way to recoupment of damages.

He tried to shake her out of his mind, as a bit of pretty and
troublesome rubbish, what time he pursued his not very exacting
military duties. But the more he shook the tighter she clung, and the
oftener he went to see her.

Helm was a good officer in many respects, and his patriotism was of the
best; but he liked jolly company, a glass of something strong and a
large share of ease. Detroit lay many miles northeastward across the
wilderness, and the English, he thought, would scarcely come so far to
attack his little post, especially now that most of the Indians in the
intervening country had declared in favor of the Americans. Recently,
too, the weather had been favoring him by changing from wet to dry, so
that the upper Wabash and its tributaries were falling low and would
soon be very difficult to navigate with large batteaux.

Very little was done to repair the stockade and dilapidated remnant of
a blockhouse. There were no sufficient barracks, a mere shed in one
angle serving for quarters, and the old cannon could not have been used
to any effect in case of attack. As for the garrison, it was a nominal
quantity, made up mostly of men who preferred hunting and fishing to
the merest pretense of military duty.

Gaspard Roussillon assumed to know everything about Indian affairs and
the condition of the English at Detroit. His optimistic eloquence
lulled Helm to a very pleasant sense of security. Beverley was not so
easy to satisfy; but his suggestions regarding military discipline and
a vigorous prosecution of repairs to the blockhouse and stockade were
treated with dilatory geniality by his superior officer. The soft
wonder of a perfect Indian summer glorified land, river and sky. Why
not dream and bask? Why not drink exhilarating toddies?

Meantime the entertainment to be given by Gaspard Roussillon occupied
everybody's imagination to an unusual extent. Rene de Ronville,
remembering but not heeding the doubtful success of his former attempt,
went long beforehand to claim Alice as his partenaire; but she flatly
refused him, once more reminding him of his obligations to little
Adrienne Bourcier. He would not be convinced.

"You are bound to me," he said, "you promised before, you know, and the
party was but put off. I hold you to it; you are my partenaire, and I
am yours, you can't deny that."

"No you are not my partenaire," she firmly said; then added lightly,
"Feu mon partenaire, you are dead and buried as my partner at that
dance."

He glowered in silence for a few moments, then said:

"It is Lieutenant Beverley, I suppose."

She gave him a quick contemptuous look, but turned it instantly into
one of her tantalising smiles.

"Do you imagine that?" she demanded.

"Imagine it! I know it," he said with a hot flush. "Have I no sense?"

"Precious little," she replied with a merry laugh.

"You think so."

"Go to Father Beret, tell him everything, and then ask him what he
thinks," she said in a calm, even tone, her face growing serious.

There was an awkward silence.

She had touched Rene's vulnerable spot; he was nothing if not a devout
Catholic, and his conscience rooted itself in what good Father Beret
had taught him.

The church, no matter by what name it goes, Catholic or Protestant, has
a saving hold on the deepest inner being of its adherents. No grip is
so hard to shake off as that of early religious convictions. The still,
small voice coming down from the times "When shepherds watched their
flocks by night," in old Judea, passes through the priest, the
minister, the preacher; it echoes in cathedral, church, open-air
meeting; it gently and mysteriously imparts to human life the
distinctive quality which is the exponent of Christian civilization.
Upon the receptive nature of children it makes an impress that forever
afterward exhales a fragrance and irradiates a glory for the saving of
the nations.

Father Beret was the humble, self-effacing, never-tiring agent of good
in his community. He preached in a tender sing-song voice the sweet
monotonies of his creed and the sublime truths of Christ's code. He was
indeed the spiritual father of his people. No wonder Rene's scowling
expression changed to one of abject self-concern when the priest's name
was suddenly connected with his mood. The confessional loomed up before
the eyes of his conscience, and his knees smote together, spiritually
if not physically.

"Now," said Alice, brusquely, but with sweet and gentle firmness, "go
to your fiancee, go to pretty and good Adrienne, and ask her to be your
partenaire. Refresh your conscience with a noble draught of duty and
make that dear little girl overflow with joy. Go, Rene de Ronville."

In making over what she said into English, the translation turns out to
be but a sonorous paraphrase. Her French was of that mixed creole sort,
a blending of linguistic elegance and patois, impossible to imitate.
Like herself it was beautiful, crude, fascinating, and something in it
impressed itself as unimpeachable, despite the broken and incongruous
diction. Rene felt his soul cowering, even slinking; but he fairly
maintained a good face, and went away without saying another word.

"Ciel, ciel, how beautiful she is!" he thought, as he walked along the
narrow street in the dreamy sunshine. "But she is not for me, not for
me."

He shook himself and tried to be cheerful. In fact he hummed a Creole
ditty, something about

  "La belle Jeanette, qu' a brise mon coeur."

Days passed, and at last the time of the great event arrived. It was a
frosty night, clear, sparkling with stars, a keen breath cutting down
from the northwest. M. Roussillon, Madame Roussillon, Alice and
Lieutenant Beverley went together to the river house, whither they had
been preceded by almost the entire population of Vincennes. Some fires
had been built outside; the crowd proving too great for the building's
capacity, as there had to be ample space for the dancers. Merry groups
hovered around the flaming logs, while within the house a fiddle sang
its simple and ravishing tunes. Everybody talked and laughed; it was a
lively racket of clashing voices and rhythmical feet.

You would have been surprised to find that Oncle Jazon was the fiddler;
but there he sat, perched on a high stool in one corner of the large
room, sawing away as if for dear life, his head wagging, his elbow
leaping back and forth, while his scalpless crown shone like the side
of a peeled onion and his puckered mouth wagged grotesquely from side
to side keeping time to his tuneful scraping.

When the Roussillon party arrived it attracted condensed attention. Its
importance, naturally of the greatest in the assembled popular mind,
was enhanced--as mathematicians would say, to the nth power--by the
gown of Alice. It was resplendent indeed in the simple, unaccustomed
eyes upon which it flashed with a buff silken glory. Matrons stared at
it; maidens gazed with fascinated and jealous vision; men young and old
let their eyes take full liberty. It was as if a queen, arrayed in a
robe of state, had entered that dingy log edifice, an apparition of
dazzling and awe-inspiring beauty. Oncle Jazon caught sight of her, and
snapped his tune short off. The dancers swung together and stopped in
confusion. But she, fortified by a woman's strongest bulwark, the sense
of resplendency, appeared quite unconscious of herself.

Little Adrienne, hanging in blissful delight upon Rene's strong arm,
felt the stir of excitement and wondered what was the matter, being too
short to see over the heads of those around her.

"What is it? what is it?" she cried, tiptoeing and tugging at her
companion's sleeve. "Tell me, Rene, tell me, I say."

Rene was gazing in dumb admiration into which there swept a powerful
anger, like a breath of flame. He recollected how Alice had refused to
wear that dress when he had asked her, and now she had it on. Moreover,
there she stood beside Lieutenant Beverley, holding his arm, looking up
into his face, smiling, speaking to him.

"I think you might tell me what has happened," said Adrienne, pouting
and still plucking at his arm. "I can't see a thing, and you won't tell
me."

"Oh, it's nothing," he presently answered, rather fretfully. Then he
stooped, lowered his voice and added; "it's Mademoiselle Roussillon all
dressed up like a bride or something. She's got on a buff silk dress
that Mo'sieu' Roussillon's mother had in France."

"How beautiful she must look!" cried the girl. "I wish I could see her."

Rene put a hand on each side of her slender waist and lifted her high,
so that her pretty head rose above the crowding people. Alice chanced
to turn her face that way just then and saw the unconventional
performance. Her eyes met those of Adrienne and she gave a nod of
smiling recognition. It was a rose beaming upon a gilliflower.

M. Roussillon naturally understood that all this stir and crowding to
see was but another demonstration of his personal popularity. He bowed
and waved a vast hand.

But the master of ceremonies called loudly for the dancers to take
their places. Oncle Jazon attacked his fiddle again with startling
energy. Those who were not to dance formed a compact double line around
the wall, the shorter ones in front, the taller in the rear. And what a
scene it was! but no person present regarded it as in any way strange
or especially picturesque, save as to the gown of Alice, which was now
floating and whirling in time to Oncle Jazon's mad music. The people
outside the house cheerfully awaited their turn to go in while an equal
number went forth to chat and sing around the fires.

Beverley was in a young man's seventh heaven. The angels formed a choir
circling around his heart, and their song brimmed his universe from
horizon to horizon.

When he called at Roussillon place, and Alice appeared so beautifully
and becomingly robed, it was another memorable surprise. She flashed a
new and subtly stimulating light upon him. The old gown, rich in
subdued splendor of lace and brocade, was ornamented at the throat with
a heavy band of pearls, just above which could be seen a trace of the
gold chain that supported her portrait locket. There, too, with a not
unbecoming gleam of barbaric colors, shone the string of porcupine
beads to which the Indian charmstone hidden in her bosom was attached.
It all harmonized with the time, the place, the atmosphere. Anywhere
else it would have been preposterous as a decorative presentment, but
here, in this little nook where the coureurs de bois, the half-breeds,
the traders and the missionaries had founded a centre of assembly, it
was the best possible expression in the life so formed at hap-hazard,
and so controlled by the coarsest and narrowest influences. To Fitzhugh
Beverley, of Beverley Hall, the picture conveyed immediately a sweet
and pervading influence.

Alice looked superbly tall, stately and self-possessed in her
transforming costume, a woman of full stature, her countenance gravely
demure yet reserving near the surface the playful dimples and
mischievous smiles so characteristic of her more usual manner. A sudden
mood of the varium et mutabile semper femina had led her to wear the
dress, and the mood still illuminated her.

Beverley stood before her frankly looking and admiring. The underglow
in her cheeks deepened and spread over her perfect throat; her eyes met
his a second, then shyly avoided him. He hardly could have been sure
which was master, her serenity or her girlish delight in being
attractively dressed; but there could be no doubt as to her
self-possession; for, saving the pretty blush under his almost rude
gaze of admiration, she bore herself as firmly as any fine lady he
remembered.

They walked together to the river house, she daintily holding up her
skirts, under the insistent verbal direction of Madame Roussillon, and
at the same time keeping a light, strangely satisfying touch on his
arm. When they entered the room there was no way for Beverley to escape
full consciousness of the excitement they aroused; but M. Roussillon's
assumption broke the force of what would have otherwise been extremely
embarrassing.

"It is encouraging, very encouraging," murmured the big man to Beverley
in the midst of the staring and scrambling and craning of necks, "to
have my people admire and love me so; it goes to the middle of my
heart." And again he bowed and waved his hand with an all-including
gesture, while he swept his eyes over the crowd.

Alice and Beverley were soon in the whirl of the dance, forgetful of
everything but an exhilaration stirred to its utmost by Oncle Jazon's
music.

A side remark here may be of interest to those readers who enjoy the
dream that on some fortunate day they will invade a lonely nook, where
amid dust and cobwebs, neglected because unrecognized, reposes a
masterpiece of Stradivari or some other great fiddle-maker. Oncle Jazon
knew nothing whatever about old violins. He was a natural musician,
that was all, and flung himself upon his fiddle with the same
passionate abandon that characterizes a healthy boy's assault when a
plum pudding is at his mercy. But his fiddle was a Carlo Bergonzi; and
now let the search be renewed, for the precious instrument was
certainly still in Vincennes as late as 1819, and there is a vague
tradition that Governor Whitcomb played on it not long before he died.
The mark by which it may be identified is the single word "Jazon" cut
in the back of its neck by Oncle Jazon himself.

When their dance was ended Alice and Beverley followed the others of
their set out into the open air while a fresh stream of eager dancers
poured in. Beverley insisted upon wrapping Alice in her mantle of
unlined beaver skin against the searching winter breath. They did not
go to the fire, but walked back and forth, chatting until their turn to
dance should come again, pausing frequently to exchange pleasantries
with some of the people. Curiously enough both of them had forgotten
the fact that other young men would be sure to ask Alice for a dance,
and that more than one pretty creole lass was rightfully expecting a
giddy turn with the stalwart and handsome Lieutenant Beverley.

Rene de Ronville before long broke rudely into their selfish dream and
led Alice into the house. This reminded Beverley of his social duty,
wherefore seeing little Adrienne Bourcier he made a rush and secured
her at a swoop from the midst of a scrambling circle of mutually
hindered young men.

"Allons, ma petite!" he cried, quite in the gay tone of the occasion,
and swung her lightly along with him.

It was like an eagle dancing with a linnet, or a giant with a fairy,
when the big Lieutenant led out la petite Adrienne, as everybody called
her. The honor of Beverley's attention sat unappreciated on Adrienne's
mind, for all her thoughts went with her eyes toward Rene and Alice.
Nor was Beverley so absorbed in his partner's behalf that he ever for a
moment willingly lost sight of the floating buff gown, the shining
brown hair and the beautiful face, which formed, indeed, the center of
attraction for all eyes.

Father Beret was present, sharing heartily in the merriment of his
flock. Voices greeted him on all sides with intonations of tender
respect. The rudest man there was loyal to the kind-hearted priest, and
would as soon have thought of shooting him as of giving him any but the
most reverent attention. It is to be noted, however, that their
understanding of reverence included great freedom and levity not
especially ecclesiastical in its nature. Father Beret understood the
conditions around him and had the genius to know what not to hear, what
not to see; but he never failed when a good word or a fatherly touch
with his hand seemed worth trying on a sheep that appeared to be
straying dangerously far from the fold. Upon an occasion like this
dance at the river house, he was no less the faithful priest because of
his genial sympathy with the happiness of the young people who looked
to him for spiritual guidance.

It was some time before Beverley could again secure Alice for a dance,
and he found it annoying him atrociously to see her smile sweetly on
some buckskin-clad lout who looked like an Indian and danced like a
Parisian. He did not greatly enjoy most of his partners; they could not
appeal to any side of his nature just then. Not that he at all times
stood too much on his aristocratic traditions, or lacked the virile
traits common to vigorous and worldly-minded men; but the contrast
between Alice and the other girls present was somehow an absolute bar
to a democratic freedom of the sort demanded by the occasion. He met
Father Beret and passed a few pleasant words with him.

"They have honored your flag, my son, I am glad to see," the priest
said, pointing with a smile to where, in one corner, the banner that
bore Alice's name was effectively draped.

Beverley had not noticed it before, and when he presently got
possession of Alice he asked her to tell him the story of how she
planted it on the fort, although he had heard it to the last detail
from Father Beret just a moment ago. They stood together under its
folds while she naively sketched the scene for him, even down to her
picturesquely disagreeable interview with Long-Hair, mention of whom
led up to the story of the Indian's race with the stolen dame jeanne of
brandy under his arm on that memorable night, and the subsequent
services performed for him by Father Beret and her, after she and Jean
had found him in the mud beyond the river.

The dancing went on at a furious pace while they stood there. Now and
again a youth came to claim her, but she said she was tired and begged
to rest awhile, smiling so graciously upon each one that his rebuff
thrilled him as if it had been the most flattering gift of tender
partiality, while at the same time he suspected that it was all for
Beverley.

Helm in his most jovial mood was circulating freely among those who
formed the periphery of the dancing-area; he even ventured a few clumsy
capers in a cotillion with Madame Godere for partner. She danced well;
but he, as someone remarked, stumbled all over himself.

There was but one thing to mar the evening's pleasure: some of the men
drank too much and grew boisterous. A quarrel ended in a noisy but
harmless fight near one of the fires. M. Roussillon rushed to the spot,
seized the combatants, tousled them playfully, as if they had been
children, rubbed their heads together, laughed stormily and so restored
the equilibrium of temper.

It was late when fathers and mothers in the company began to suggest
adjournment. Oncle Jazon's elbow was tired and the enthusiasm generated
by his unrecognized Bergonzi became fitful, while the relaxing crowd
rapidly encroached upon the space set apart for the dancers. In the
open lamps suspended here and there the oil was running low, and the
rag wicks sputtered and winked with their yellow flames.

"Well," said M. Roussillon, coming to where Alice and Beverley stood
insulated and isolated by their great delight in each other's company,
"it's time to go home."

Beverley looked at his watch; it was a quarter to three!

Alice also looked at the watch, and saw engraved and enameled on its
massive case the Beverley crest, but she did not know what it meant.
There was something of the sort in the back of her locket, she
remembered with satisfaction.

Just then there was a peculiar stir in the flagging crowd. Someone had
arrived, a coureur de bois from the north. Where was the commandant?
the coureur had something important for him.

Beverley heard a remark in a startled voice about the English getting
ready for a descent upon the Wabash valley. This broke the charm which
thralled him and sent through his nerves the bracing shock that only a
soldier can feel when a hint of coming battle reaches him.

Alice saw the flash in his face.

"Where is Captain Helm? I must see him immediately. Excuse me," he
said, abruptly turning away and looking over the heads of the people;
"yonder he is, I must go to him."

The coureur de bois, Adolphe Dutremble by name, was just from the head
waters of the Wabash. He was speaking to Helm when Beverley came up. M.
Roussillon followed close upon the Lieutenant's heels, as eager as he
to know what the message amounted to; but Helm took the coureur aside,
motioning Beverley to join them. M. Roussillon included himself in the
conference.

After all it was but the gossip of savages that Dutremble communicated;
still the purport was startling in the extreme. Governor Hamilton, so
the story ran, had been organizing a large force; he was probably now
on his way to the portage of the Wabash with a flotilla of batteaux,
some companies of disciplined soldiers, artillery and a strong body of
Indians.

Helm listened attentively to Dutremble's lively sketch, then
cross-questioned him with laconic directness.

"Send Mr. Jazon to me," he said to M. Roussillon, as if speaking to a
servant.

The master Frenchman went promptly, recognizing Captain Helm's right to
command, and sympathizing With his unpleasant military predicament if
the news should prove true.

Oncle Jazon came in a minute, his fiddle and bow clamped under his arm,
to receive a verbal commission, which sent him with some scouts of his
own choosing forthwith to the Wabash portage, or far enough to
ascertain what the English commander was doing.

After the conference Beverley made haste to join Alice; but he found
that she had gone home.

"One hell of a fix we'll be in if Hamilton comes down here with a good
force," said Helm.

Beverley felt like retorting that a little forethought, zeal and
preparation might have lessened the prospective gloom. He had been
troubled all the time about Helm's utter lack of military precaution.
True, there was very little material out of which that optimistic
officer could have formed a body of resistance against the army
probably at Hamilton's command; but Beverley was young, energetic,
bellicose, and to him everything seemed possible; he believed in
vigilance, discipline, activity, dash; he had a great faith in the
efficacy of enthusiasm.

"We must organize these Frenchmen," he said; "they will make good
fighters if we can once get them to act as a body. There's no time to
be lost; but we have time enough in which to do a great deal before
Hamilton can arrive, if we go at it in earnest."

"Your theory is excellent, Lieutenant, but the practice of it won't be
worth a damn," Helm replied with perfect good nature. "I'd like to see
you organize these parly-voos. There ain't a dozen of 'em that wouldn't
accept the English with open arms. I know 'em. They're good hearted,
polite and all that; they'll hurrah for the flag; that's easy enough;
but put 'em to the test and they'll join in with the strongest side,
see if they don't. Of course there are a few exceptions. There's Jazon,
he's all right, and I have faith in Bosseron, and Legrace, and young
Ronville."

"Roussillon--" Beverley began.

"Is much of a blow-hard," Helm interrupted with a laugh. "Barks loud,
but his biting disposition is probably not vicious."

"He and Father Beret control the whole population at all events," said
Beverley.

"Yes, and such a population!"

While joining in Captain Helm's laugh at the expense of Vincennes,
Beverley took leave to indulge a mental reservation in favor of Alice.
He could not bear to class her with the crowd of noisy, thoughtless,
mercurial beings whom he heard still singing gay snatches and calling
to one another from distance to distance, as they strolled homeward in
groups and pairs. Nor could the impending danger of an enforced
surrender to the English and Indians drive from his mind her beautiful
image, while he lay for the rest of the night between sleeping and
waking on his primitive bed, alternately hearing over again her every
phrase and laugh, and striving to formulate some definite plan for
defending the town and fort. His heart was full of her. She had
surprised his nature and filled it, as with a wonderful, haunting song.
His youth, his imagination, all that was fresh and spontaneously gentle
and natural in him, was flooded with the magnetic splendor of her
beauty. And yet, in his pride (and it was not a false pride, but rather
a noble regard for his birthright) he vaguely realized how far she was
from him, how impossible.




CHAPTER VIII

THE DILEMMA OF CAPTAIN HELM


Oncle Jazon, feeling like a fish returned to the water after a long and
torturing captivity in the open air, plunged into the forest with
anticipations of lively adventure and made his way toward the Wea
plains. It was his purpose to get a boat at the village of Ouiatenon
and pull thence up the Wabash until he could find out what the English
were doing. He chose for his companions on this dangerous expedition
two expert coureurs de bois, Dutremble and Jacques Bailoup. Fifty miles
up the river they fell in with some friendly Indians, well known to
them all, who were returning from the portage.

The savages informed them that there were no signs of an English
advance in that quarter. Some of them had been as far as the St. Joseph
river and to within a short distance of Detroit without seeing a white
man or hearing of any suspicious movements on the part of Hamilton. So
back came Oncle Jazon with his pleasing report, much disappointed that
he had not been able to stir up some sort of trouble.

It was Helm's turn to laugh.

"What did I tell you?" he cried, in a jolly mood, slapping Beverley on
the shoulder. "I knew mighty well that it was all a big story with
nothing in it. What on earth would the English be thinking about to
march an army away off down here only to capture a rotten stockade and
a lot of gabbling parly-voos?"

Beverley, while he did not feel quite as confident as his chief, was
not sorry that things looked a little brighter than he had feared they
would turn out to be. Secretly, and without acknowledging it to
himself, he was delighted with the life he was living. The Arcadian
atmosphere of Vincennes clothed him in its mists and dreams. No matter
what way the weather blew its breath, cold or warm, cloudy or fair,
rain or snow, the peace in his soul changed not. His nature seemed to
hold all of its sterner and fiercer traits in abeyance while he
domiciled himself absolutely within his narrow and monotonous
environment. Since the dance at the river house a new content, like a
soft and diffused sweetness, had crept through his blood with a vague,
tingling sense of joy.

He began to like walking about rather aimlessly in the town's narrow
streets, with the mud-daubed cabins on either hand. This simple life
under low, thatched roofs had a charm. When a door was opened he could
see a fire of logs on the ample hearth shooting its yellow tongues up
the sooty chimney-throat. Soft creole voices murmured and sang, or
jangled their petty domestic discords. Women in scant petticoats,
leggings and moccasins swept snow from the squat verandas, or fed the
pigs in little sties behind the cabins. Everybody cried cheerily: "Bon
jour, Monsieur, comment allez-vous?" as he went by, always accompanying
the verbal salute with a graceful wave of the hand.

When he walked early in the morning a waft of broiling game and
browning corn scones was abroad. Pots and kettles occupied the hearths
with glowing coals heaped around and under. Shaggy dogs whined at the
doors until the mensal remnants were tossed out to them in the front
yard.

But it was always a glimpse of Alice that must count for everything in
Beverley's reckonings, albeit he would have strenuously denied it. True
he went to Roussillon place almost every day, it being a fixed part of
his well ordered habit, and had a talk with her. Sometimes, when Dame
Roussillon was very busy and so quite off her guard, they read together
in a novel, or in certain parts of the odd volume of Montaigne. This
was done more for the sweetness of disobedience than to enjoy the
already familiar pages.

Now and again they repeated their fencing bout; but never with the
result which followed the first. Beverley soon mastered Alice's tricks
and showed her that, after all, masculine muscle is not to be
discounted at its own game by even the most wonderful womanly strength
and suppleness. She struggled bravely to hold her vantage ground once
gained so easily, but the inevitable was not to be avoided. At last,
one howling winter day, he disarmed her by the very trick that she had
shown him. That ended the play and they ran shivering into the house.

"Ah," she cried, "it isn't fair. You are so much bigger than I; you
have so much longer arms; so much more weight and power. It all counts
against me! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" She was rosy with the
exhilarating exercise and the biting of the frosty breeze. Her beauty
gave forth a new ray.

Deep in her heart she was pleased to have him master her so superbly;
but as the days passed she never said so, never gave over trying to
make him feel the touch of her foil. She did not know that her eyes
were getting through his guard, that her dimples were stabbing his
heart to its middle.

"You have other advantages," he replied, "which far overbalance my
greater stature and stronger muscles." Then after a pause he added:
"After all a girl must be a girl."

Something in his face, something in her heart, startled her so that she
made a quick little move like that of a restless bird.

"You are beautiful and that makes my eyes and my hand uncertain," he
went on. "Were I fencing with a man there would be no glamour."

He spoke in English, which he did not often do in conversation with
her. It was a sign that he was somewhat wrought upon. She followed his
rapid words with difficulty; but she caught from them a new note of
feeling. He saw a little pale flare shoot across her face and thought
she was angry.

"You should not use your dimples to distract my vision," he quickly
added, with a light laugh. "It would be no worse for me to throw my hat
in your face!"

His attempt at levity was obviously weak; she looked straight into his
eyes, with the steady gaze of a simple, earnest nature shocked by a
current quite strange to it. She did not understand him, and she did.
Her fine intuition gathered swiftly together a hundred shreds of
impression received from him during their recent growing intimacy. He
was a patrician, as she vaguely made him out, a man of wealth, whose
family was great. He belonged among people of gentle birth and high
attainments. She magnified him so that he was diffused in her
imagination, as difficult to comprehend as a mist in the morning
air--and as beautiful.

"You make fun of me," she said, very deliberately, letting her eyes
droop; then she looked up again suddenly and continued, with a certain
naive expression of disappointment gathering in her face. "I have been
too free with you. Father Beret told me not to forget my dignity when
in your company. He told me you might misunderstand me. I don't care; I
shall not fence with you again." She laughed, but there was no joyous
freedom in the sound.

"Why, Alice--my dear Miss Roussillon, you do me a wrong; I beg a
thousand pardons if I've hurt you," he cried, stepping nearer to her,
"and I can never forgive myself. You have somehow misunderstood me, I
know you have!"

On his part it was exaggerating a mere contact of mutual feelings into
a dangerous collision. He was as much self-deceived as was she, and he
made more noise about it.

"It is you who have misunderstood me," she replied, smiling brightly
now, but with just a faint, pitiful touch of regret, or self-blame
lingering in her voice. "Father Beret said you would. I did not believe
him; but--"

"And you shall not believe him," said Beverley. "I have not
misunderstood you. There has been nothing. You have treated me kindly
and with beautiful friendliness. You have not done or said a thing that
Father Beret or anybody else could criticise. And if I have said or
done the least thing to trouble you I repudiate it--I did not mean it.
Now you believe me, don't you, Miss Roussillon?"

He seemed to be falling into the habit of speaking to her in English.
She understood it somewhat imperfectly, especially when in an earnest
moment he rushed his words together as if they had been soldiers he was
leading at the charge-step against an enemy. His manner convinced her,
even though his diction fell short.

"Then we'll talk about something else," she said, laughing naturally
now, and retreating to a chair by the hearthside. "I want you to tell
me all about yourself and your family, your home and everything."

She seated herself with an air of conscious aplomb and motioned him to
take a distant stool.

There was a great heap of dry logs in the fireplace, with pointed
flames shooting out of its crevices and leaping into the gloomy,
cave-like throat of the flue. Outside a wind passed heavily across the
roof and bellowed in the chimney-top.

Beverley drew the stool near Alice, who, with a charred stick, used as
a poker, was thrusting at the glowing crevices and sending showers of
sparks aloft.

"Why, there wouldn't be much to tell," he said, glad to feel secure
again. "Our home is a big old mansion named Beverley Hall on a hill
among trees, and half surrounded with slave cabins. It overlooks the
plantation in the valley where a little river goes wandering on its
way." He was speaking French and she followed him easily now, her eyes
beginning to fling out again their natural sunny beams of interest. "I
was born there twenty-six years ago and haven't done much of anything
since. You see before you, Mademoiselle, a very undistinguished young
man, who has signally failed to accomplish the dream of his boyhood,
which was to be a great artist like Raphael or Angelo. Instead of being
famous I am but a poor Lieutenant in the forces of Virginia."

"You have a mother, father, brothers and sisters?" she interrogated.
She did not understand his allusion to the great artists of whom she
knew nothing. She had never before heard of them. She leaned the poker
against the chimney jamb and turned her face toward him.

"Mother, father, and one sister," he said, "no brothers. We were a
happy little group. But my sister married and lives in Baltimore. I am
here. Father and mother are alone in the old house. Sometimes I am
terribly homesick." He was silent a moment, then added: "But you are
selfish, you make me do all the telling. Now I want you to give me a
little of your story, Mademoiselle, beginning as I did, at the first."

"But I can't," she replied with childlike frankness, "for I don't know
where I was born, nor my parents' names, nor who I am. You see how
different it is with me. I am called Alice Roussillon, but I suppose
that my name is Alice Tarleton; it is not certain, however. There is
very little to help out the theory. Here is all the proof there is. I
don't know that it is worth anything."

She took off her locket and handed it to him.

He handled it rather indifferently, for he was just then studying the
fine lines of her face. But in a moment he was interested.

"Tarleton, Tarleton," he repeated. Then he turned the little disc of
gold over and saw the enameled drawing on the back,--a crest clearly
outlined.

He started. The crest was quite familiar.

"Where did you get this?" he demanded in English, and with such blunt
suddenness that she was startled. "Where did it come from?"

"I have always had it."

"Always? It's the Tarleton crest. Do you belong to that family?"

"Indeed I do not know. Papa Roussillon says he thinks I do."

"Well, this is strange and interesting," said Beverley, rather to
himself than addressing her. He looked from the miniature to the crest
and back to the miniature again, then at Alice. "I tell you this is
strange," he repeated with emphasis. "It is exceedingly strange."

Her cheeks flushed quickly under their soft brown and her eyes flashed
with excitement.

"Yes, I know." Her voice fluttered; her hands were clasped in her lap.
She leaned toward him eagerly. "It is strange. I've thought about it a
great deal."

"Alice Tarleton; that is right; Alice is a name of the family. Lady
Alice Tarleton was the mother of the first Sir Garnett Tarleton who
came over in the time of Yardley. It's a great family. One of the
oldest and best in Virginia." He looked at her now with a gaze of
concentrated interest, under which her eyes fell. "Why, this is
romantic!" he exclaimed, "absolutely romantic. And you don't know how
you came by this locket? You don't know who was your father, your
mother?"

"I do not know anything."

"And what does Monsieur Roussillon know?"

"Just as little."

"But how came he to be taking you and caring for you? He must know how
he got you, where he got you, of whom he got you? Surely he knows--"

"Oh, I know all that. I was twelve years old when Papa Roussillon took
me, eight years ago. I had been having a hard life, and but for him I
must have died. I was a captive among the Indians. He took me and has
cared for me and taught me. He has been very, very good to me. I love
him dearly."

"And don't you remember anything at all about when, where, how the
Indians got you?"

"No." She shook her head and seemed to be trying to recollect
something. "No, I just can't remember; and yet there has always been
something like a dream in my mind, which I could not quite get hold of.
I know that I am not a Catholic. I vaguely remember a sweet woman who
taught me to pray like this: 'Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be
Thy name.'"

And Alice went on through the beautiful and perfect prayer, which she
repeated in English with infinite sweetness and solemnity, her eyes
uplifted, her hands clasped before her. Beverley could have sworn that
she was a shining saint, and that he saw an aureole.

"I know," she continued, "that sometime, somewhere, to a very dear
person I promised that I never, never, never would pray any prayer but
that. And I remember almost nothing else about that other life, which
is far off back yonder in the past, I don't know where,--sweet,
peaceful, shadowy; a dream that I have all but lost from my mind."

Beverley's sympathy was deeply moved. He sat for some minutes looking
at her without speaking. She, too, was pensive and silent, while the
fire sputtered and sang, the great logs slowly melting, the flames
tossing wisps of smoke into the chimney still booming to the wind.

"I know, too, that I am not French," she presently resumed, "but I
don't know just how I know it. My first words must have been English,
for I have always dreamed of talking in that language, and my dimmest
half recollections of the old days are of a large, white house, and a
soft-voiced black woman, who sang to me in that language the very
sweetest songs in the world."

It must be borne in mind that all this was told by Alice in her creole
French, half bookish, half patois, of which no translation can give any
fair impression.

Beverley listened, as one who hears a clever reader intoning a strange
and captivating poem. He was charmed. His imagination welcomed the
story and furnished it with all that it lacked of picturesque
completeness. In those days it was no uncommon thing for a white child
to be found among the Indians with not a trace left by which to restore
it to its people. He had often heard of such a case. But here was Alice
right before him, the most beautiful girl that he had ever seen,
telling him the strangest story of all. To his mind it was clear that
she belonged to the Tarleton family of Virginia. Youth always concludes
a matter at once. He knew some of the Tarletons; but it was a widely
scattered family, its members living in almost every colony in America.
The crest he recognized at a glance by the dragon on the helmet with
three stars. It was not for a woman to bear; but doubtless it had been
enameled on the locket merely as a family mark, as was often done in
America.

"The black woman was your nurse, your mammy," he said. "I know by that
and by your prayer in English, as well as by your locket, that you are
of a good old family."

Like most Southerners, he had strong faith in genealogy, and he held at
his tongue's tip the names of all the old families. The Carters, the
Blairs, the Fitzhughs, the Hansons, the Randolphs, the Lees, the
Ludwells, the Joneses, the Beverleys, the Tarletons--a whole catalogue
of them stretched back in his memory. He knew the coat of arms
displayed by each house. He could repeat their legends.

"I wish you could tell me more," he went on. "Can't you recollect
anything further about your early childhood, your first
impressions--the house, the woman who taught you to pray, the old black
mammy? Any little thing might be of priceless value as evidence."

Alice shrugged her shoulders after the creole fashion with something of
her habitual levity of manner, and laughed. His earnestness seemed
disproportioned to the subject, as she fancied he must view it,
although to her it had always been something to dream over. It was
impossible for her to realize, as he did, the importance of details in
solving a problem like that involved in her past history. Nor could she
feel the pathos and almost tragic fascination with which her story had
touched him.

"There is absolutely nothing more to tell," she said. "All my life I
have tried to remember more, but it's impossible; I can't get any
further back or call up another thing. There's no use trying. It's all
like a dream--probably it is one. I do have such dreams. In my sleep I
can lift myself into the air, just as easy, and fly back to the same
big white house that I seem to remember. When you told me about your
home it was like something that I had often seen before. I shall be
dreaming about it next!"

Beverley cross-questioned her from every possible point of view; he was
fascinated with the mystery; but she gave him nothing out of which the
least further light could be drawn. A half-breed woman, it seemed, had
been her Indian foster-mother; a silent, grave, watchful guardian from
whom not a hint of disclosure ever fell. She was, moreover, a Christian
woman, had received her conversion from an English-speaking Protestant
missionary. She prayed with Alice, thus keeping in the child's mind a
perfect memory of the Lord's prayer.

"Well," said Beverley at last, "you are more of a mystery to me, the
longer I know you."

"Then I must grow every day more distasteful to you."

"No, I love mystery."

He went away feeling a new web of interest binding him to this
inscrutable maiden whose life seemed to him at once so full of idyllic
happiness and so enshrouded in tantalizing doubt. At the first
opportunity he frankly questioned M. Roussillon, with no helpful
result. The big Frenchman told the same meager story. The woman was
dying in the time of a great epidemic, which killed most of her tribe.
She gave Alice to M. Roussillon, but told him not a word about her
ancestry or previous life. That was all.

A wise old man, when he finds himself in a blind alley, no sooner
touches the terminal wall than he faces about and goes back the way he
came. Under like circumstances a young man must needs try to batter the
wall down with his head. Beverley endeavored to break through the web
of mystery by sheer force. It seemed to him that a vigorous attempt
could not fail to succeed; but, like the fly in the spider's lines, he
became more hopelessly bound at every move he made. Moreover against
his will he was realizing that he could no longer deceive himself about
Alice. He loved her, and the love was mastering him body and soul. Such
a confession carries with it into an honest masculine heart a sense of
contending responsibilities. In Beverley's case the clash was
profoundly disturbing. And now he clutched the thought that Alice was
not a mere child of the woods, but a daughter of an old family of
cavaliers!

With coat buttoned close against the driving wind, he strode toward the
fort in one of those melodramatic moods to which youth in all climes
and times is subject. It was like a slap in the face when Captain Helm
met him at the stockade gate and said:

"Well, sir, you are good at hiding."

"Hiding! what do you mean, Captain Helm?" he demanded, not in the
mildest tone.

"I mean, sir, that I've been hunting you for an hour and more, over the
whole of this damned town. The English and Indians are upon us, and
there's no time for fooling. Where are all the men?"

Beverley comprehended the situation i

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