Book II.

FORT FRONTENAC.

1683 A. D.

I.

RIVAL MASTERS.

The gate of Fort Frontenac opened to admit several persons headed by a man who had a closely wrapped girl by his side. Before wooden palisades and walls of stone enclosed her, she turned her face to look across the mouth of Cataraqui River and at Lake Ontario rippling full of submerged moonlight. A magnified moon was rising. Farther than eye could reach it softened that northern landscape and provoked mystery in the shadows of the Thousand Islands.

South of the fort were some huts set along the margin of Ontario according to early French custom, which demanded a canoe highway in front of every man's door. West of these, half hid by forest, was an Indian village; and distinct between the two rose the huge white cross planted by Father Hennepin when he was first sent as missionary to Fort Frontenac.

An officer appeared beside the sentinel at the gate, and took off his hat before the muffled shape led first into his fortress. She bent her head for this civility and held her father's arm in silence. Canoemen and followers with full knowledge of the place moved on toward barracks or bakery. But the officer stopped their master, saying,--

"Monsieur le Ber, I have news for you."

"I have none for you," responded the merchant. "It is ever the same story,--men lost in the rapids and voyagers drenched to the skin. However, we had but one man drowned this time, and are only half dead of fatigue ourselves. Let us have some supper at once. What are your reports?"

"Monsieur, the Sieur de la Salle arrived here a few hours ago from the fort on the Illinois."

"The Sieur de la Salle?"

"Yes, monsieur."

"Why did you let him in?" demanded Le Ber, fiercely. "He hath no rights in this fortress now."

"His men were much exhausted, monsieur."

"He could have camped at the settlement."

"Monsieur, I wish to tell you at once that the last families have left the settlement."

"The Indians are yet there?"

"Yes, monsieur. But our settlers were afraid our Indians would join the other Iroquois."

"How many men had La Salle with him?"

"No more than half your party, monsieur. There was Jolycoeur--"

"I tell you La Salle has no rights in this fort," interrupted Le Ber. "If he meddles with his merchandise stored here which the government has seized upon, I will arrest him."

"Yes, monsieur. The Father Louis Hennepin has also arrived from the wilderness after great peril and captivity."

"Tell me that La Salle's man Tonty is here! Tell me that there is a full muster of all the vagabonds from Michillimackinac! Tell me that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois hath moved on Fort Frontenac!"

The merchant's voice ascended a pyramid of vexation.

"No, monsieur. Monsieur de Tonty is not here. And the Father Louis Hennepin[7] only rests a few days before the fatigue of descending the rapids to Montreal. It was a grief to him to find his mission and the settlement so decayed after only five years' absence."

"Why do you fret me with the decay of the mission and breaking up of the settlement? If I were here as commandant of this fort I might then be blamed for its ruin. Perhaps my associates made a mistake in retaining an officer who had served under La Salle."

The commandant made no retort, but said,--

"Monsieur, I had almost forgotten to tell you we have another fair demoiselle within our walls to the honor of Fort Frontenac. The Abbé Cavelier with men from Lachine, arrived this morning, his young niece being with him. There are brave women in Montreal."

"That is right,--that is right!" exclaimed the irritable merchant. "Call all the Cavelier family hither and give up the fortress. I heard the Abbé had ventured ahead of me."

"Monsieur le Ber, what can they do against the king and the governor? Both king and governor have dispossessed La Salle. I admitted him as any wayfarer. The Abbé Cavelier came with a grievance against his brother. He hath lost money by him the same as others."

"Thou shalt not be kept longer in the night air," said Le Ber, with sudden tenderness to his daughter. "There is dampness within these walls to remind us of our drenchings in the rapids."

"We have fire in both upper and lower rooms of the officers' quarters," said the commandant.

They walked toward the long dwelling, their shadows stretching and blending over the ground.

"Where have you lodged these men?" inquired Le Ber.

The officer pointed to the barrack end of the structure made of hewed timbers. The wider portion intended for commandant's headquarters was built of stone, with Norman eaves and windows. Near the barracks stood a guardhouse. The bakery was at the opposite side of the gateway, and beyond it was the mill. La Salle had founded well this stronghold in the wilderness. Walls of hewed stone enclosed three sides, nine small cannon being mounted thereon.[8] Palisades were the defence on the water side. Fort Frontenac was built with four bastions. In two of these bastions were vaulted towers which served as magazines for ammunition.[9] A well was dug within the walls.

"Have you no empty rooms in the officers' quarters?"

The moon threw silhouette palisades on the ground, and made all these buildings cut blocks of shadow. There was a stir of evening wind in the forest all around.

"The men are in the barracks. But Sieur de la Salle is in the officers' house."

"May I ask you, Commandant," demanded Le Ber, "where you propose to lodge my daughter whom I have brought through the perils of the rapids, and cannot now return with?"

"Mademoiselle le Ber is most welcome to my own apartment, monsieur, and I will myself come downstairs."

"One near mine for yourself, monsieur. But with the Abbé and his niece and the boy and La Salle and Father Hennepin, to say no more, can we have many empty rooms? Father Hennepin is lodged downstairs, but La Salle hath his old room overlooking the river."

"How does he appear, Commandant?"

"Worn in his garb and very thin visaged, but unmoved by his misfortunes as a man of rock. Any one else would be prostrate and hopeless."

"A madman," pronounced Le Ber.

Careless laughter resounded from the barracks. Some water creature made so distinct a splash and struggle in Cataraqui River that imagination followed the widening circles spreading from its body until an island broke their huge circumference.

"See that something be sent us from the bakehouse," said Le Ber to the commandant, before leading his daughter into the quarters. "My men have brought provisions from Montreal."

"We can give you a good supper, monsieur. Two young deer were brought in to-day. As for Monsieur de la Salle," the commandant added, turning back from the door of the barracks, "you will perhaps not meet him at all in the officers' quarters. He ate and threw himself down at once to sleep, and he is in haste to set forward to Quebec."

The bakehouse was illuminated by its oven fire which shone with a dull crimson through the open door, but failed to find out dusky corners where bales, barrels, and cook's tools were stored. The oven was built in the wall, of stone and cement. The cook, a skipping little fellow smocked in white and wearing a cap, said to himself as he raked out coals and threw them in the fireplace,--

"What a waste of good material is this, when they glow and breathe with such ardor to roast some worthy martyr!"

"The beginning of a martyr is a saint," observed a soldier of the garrison, putting his fur-covered head between door and door-post in the little space he opened. "We have a saint just landed at Fort Frontenac."

He stepped in and shut the door, to lounge with the cook while the order he brought was obeyed.

"Some of the best you have, with a tender cut of venison, for Jacques le Ber and his daughter. And some salt meat for his men in the barracks."

The cook made light skips across the floor and returned with venison.

"Well-timed, my child; for the coals are ready, and so are my cakes for the oven. Le Ber is soon served. Get upon your knees by the hearth and watch this cut broil, while I slice the larding for the sore sides of these fellows that labored through the rapids."

When you are housed in a garrison the cook becomes a potentate; the soldier went willingly down as assistant.

"Are all the demoiselles of Montreal coming to Fort Frontenac?" inquired the cook, skipping around a great block on which lay a slab of cured meat, and nicely poising his knife-tip over it.

"That I cannot tell you," replied the soldier, beginning to perspire before the coals. "Le Ber's men have been talking in the barracks about this daughter of his. He brought her almost by force out of his house, where she has taken to shutting herself in her own room."

"I have heard of this demoiselle," said the cook. "May the saints incline more women to shut themselves up at home!"

"She is his favorite child. He brought her on this dangerous voyage to wean her from too much praying."

"Too much praying!" exclaimed the cook.

"He desires to have her look more on the world, lest she should die of holiness," explained the soldier.

"Turn that venison," shouted the cook. "Was there ever a saint who liked burnt meat? I could lift this Jacques le Ber on a hot fork for dragging out a woman who inclined to stay praying in the house. Some men are stone blind to the blessings of Heaven!"

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Historians return Father Hennepin to France in 1681.

[8] Parkman.

[9] Manuscript relating to early history of Canada.

II.

A TRAVELLED FRIAR.

The lower room of the officers' lodging was filled with the light of a fire. To the hearth was drawn a half-circle of men, their central figure being a Récollet friar, so ragged and weather-stained that he seemed some ecclesiastical scarecrow placed there to excite laughter and tears in his beholders.

This group arose as Jacques le Ber entered with his daughter, and were eager to be of service to her.

"There is a fire lighted in the hall upstairs by which mademoiselle can sit," said the sergeant of the fort.

Le Ber conducted her to the top of a staircase which ascended the side of the room before he formally greeted any one present. He returned, unwinding his saturated wool wrappings and pulling off his cap of beaver skin. He was a swarthy man with anxious and calculating wrinkles between his eyebrows.

"Do I see Father Hennepin?" exclaimed Le Ber, squaring his mouth, "or is this a false image of him set before me?"

"You see Father Hennepin," the friar responded with dignity,--"explorer, missionary among the Sioux, and sufferer in the cause of religion."

"How about that hunger for adventure,--hast thou appeased it?" inquired Le Ber with freedom of manner he never assumed toward any other priest.

The merchant stood upon the hearth steaming in front of the tattered Récollet, who from his seat regarded his half-enemy with a rebuking eye impressive to the other men.

"Jacques le Ber, my son, while your greedy hands have been gathering money, the poor Franciscan has baptized heathen, discovered and explored rivers; he has lived the famished life of a captive, and come nigh death in many ways. I have seen a great waterfall five hundred feet high, whereunder four carriages might pass abreast without being wet. I have depended for food on what Heaven sent. Vast fish are to be found in the waters of that western land, and there also you may see beasts having manes and hoofs and horns, to frighten a Christian."

"And what profit doth La Salle get out of all this?" inquired Le Ber, spreading his legs before the fire as he looked down at Father Hennepin.

"What I have accomplished has been done for the spread of the faith, and not for the glory of Monsieur de la Salle, who has treated me badly."

"Does he ever treat any one well?" exclaimed Le Ber. "Does not every man in his service want to shoot him?"

"He has an over-haughty spirit, which breaks out into envy of men like me," admitted the good Fleming, whose weather-seamed face and plump lips glowed with conscious greatness before the fire. "I have decided to avoid further encounter with Monsieur de la Salle while we both remain at Fort Frontenac, for my mind is set on peace, and it is true where Monsieur de la Salle appears there can be no peace."

Jacques le Ber turned himself to face the chimney.

"Thou hast no doubt accomplished a great work, Father Hennepin," he said, with the immediate benevolence a man feels toward one who has reached his point of view. "When I have had supper with my daughter I will sit down here and beg you to tell me all that befell your wanderings, and what savages they were who received the faith at your hands, and how the Sieur de la Salle hath turned even a Récollet Father against himself."

"Perhaps Father Hennepin will tell about his buffalo hunt," suggested the sergeant of the fortress, "and how he headed a wounded buffalo from flight and drove it back to be shot."[10]

Father Hennepin looked down at patches of buffalo hide which covered holes in his habit. He remembered the trampling of a furious beast's hoofs and the twitch of its short sharp horn in his folds of flesh as it lifted him. He remembered his wounds and the soreness of his bones which lasted for months, yet his lips parted over happy teeth and he roared with laughter.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] In reality this was Father Membré's adventure.

III.

HEAVEN AND EARTH.

Jeanne le Ber sat down upon a high-backed bench before the fire in the upper room. This apartment was furnished and decorated only by abundant firelight, which danced on stone walls and hard dark rafters, on rough floor and high enclosure, of the stairway. At opposite sides of the room were doors which Jeanne did not know opened into chambers scarcely larger than the sleepers who might lodge therein.

She sat in strained thought, without unwrapping herself, though shudders were sent through her by damp raiment. When her father came up with the sergeant who carried their supper, he took off her cloak, smoothed her hair, and tenderly reproved her. He set the dishes on the bench between them, and persuaded Jeanne to eat what he carved for her,--a swarthy nurse whose solicitude astounded the soldier.

Another man came up and opened the door nearest the chimney, on that side which overlooked the fortress enclosure. He paused in descending, loaded with the commandant's possessions, to say that this bedroom was designed for mademoiselle, and was now ready.

"And thou must get to it as soon as the river's chill is warmed out of thy bones," said Le Ber. "I will sit and hear the worthy friar downstairs tell his strange adventures. The sound of your voice can reach me with no effort whatever. My bedroom will be next yours, or near by, and no harm can befall you in Fort Frontenac."

Jeanne kissed his cheek before he returned to the lower room, and when the supper was removed she sat drying herself by the fire.

The eager piety of her early girlhood, which was almost fantastic in its expression, had yet worked out a nobly spiritual face. She was a beautiful saint.

For several years Jeanne le Ber had refused the ordinary clothing of women. Her visible garment was made of a soft fine blanket of white wool, with long sleeves falling nearly to her feet. It was girded to her waist by a cord from which hung her rosary. Her neck stood slim and white above the top of this robe, without ornament except the peaked monk's hood which hung behind it.

This creature like a flame of living white fire stood up and turned her back to the ruddier logs, and clasped her hands across the top of her head. Her eyes wasted scintillations on rafters while she waited for heavenly peace to calm the strong excitement driving her.

The door of Jeanne's chamber stood open as the soldier had left it. At the opposite side of the room a similar door opened, and La Salle came out. He moved a step, toward the hearth, but stopped, and the pallor of a swoon filled his face.

"Sieur de la Salle," said Jeanne in a whisper. She let her arms slip down by her sides. The eccentric robe with its background of firelight cast her up tall and white before his eyes.

In the explorer's most successful moments he had never appeared so majestic. Though his dress was tarnished by the wilderness, he had it carefully arranged; for he liked to feel it fitting him with an exactness which would not annoy his thoughts.

No formal greeting preluded the crash of this encounter between La Salle and Jeanne le Ber. What had lain repressed by prayer and penance, or had been trodden down league by league in the wilds, leaped out with strength made mighty by such repression.

Voices in loud and merry conversation below and occasional laughter came up the open stairway and made accompaniment to this half-hushed duet.

"Jeanne," stammered La Salle.

"Sieur de la Salle, I was just going to my room."

She moved away from him to the side of the hearth, as he advanced and sat down upon the bench. Unconscious that she stood while he was sitting, as if overcome by sudden blindness he reached toward her with a groping gesture.

"Take hold of my hand, Sainte Jeanne."

"And if I take hold of your hand, Sieur de la Salle," murmured the girl, bending toward him though she held her arms at her sides, "what profit will it be to either of us?"

"I beg that you will take hold of my hand."

Her hand, quivering to each finger tip, moved out and met and was clasped in his. La Salle's head dropped on his breast.

Jeanne turned away her face. Voices and laughter jangled in the room below. In this silent room pulse answered pulse, and with slow encounter eyes answered the adoration of eyes. In terror of herself Jeanne uttered the whispered cry,--

"I am afraid!"

She veiled herself with the long sleeve of her robe.

"And of what should you be afraid when we are thus near together?" said La Salle. "The thing to be afraid of is losing this. Such gladness has been long coming; for I was a man when you were born, Sainte Jeanne."

"Let go my hand, Sieur de la Salle."

"Do you want me to let it go, Sainte Jeanne?"

"No, Sieur de la Salle."

Dropping her sleeve Jeanne faced heaven through the rafters. Tears stormed down her face, and her white throat swelled with strong repressed sobs. Like some angel caught in a snare, she whispered her up-directed wail,--

"All my enormity must now be confessed! Whenever Sieur de la Salle has been assailed my soul rose up in arms for him. Oh, my poor father! So dear has Sieur de la Salle been to me that I hated the hatred of my father. What shall I do to tear out this awful love? I have fought it through midnights and solitary days of ceaseless prayer. Oh, Sieur de la Salle, why art thou such a man? Pray to God and invoke the saints for me, and help me to go free from this love!"

"Jeanne," said La Salle, "you are so holy I dare touch no more than this sweet hand. It fills me with life. Ask me not to pray to God that he will take the life from me. Oh, Jeanne, if you could reach out of your eternity of devotion and hold me always by the hand, what a man I might be!"

She dropped her eyes to his face, saying like a soothing mother,--

"Thou greatest and dearest, there is a gulf between us which we cannot pass. I am vowed to Heaven. Thou art vowed to great enterprises. The life of the family is not for us. If God showed me my way by thy side I would go through any wilderness. But Jeanne was made to listen in prayer and silence and secrecy and anguish for the word of Heaven. The worst is,"--her stormy sob again shook her from head to foot,--"you will be at court, and beautiful women will love the great explorer. And one will shine; she will be set like a star as high as the height of being your wife. And Jeanne,--oh, Jeanne! here in this rough, new world,--she must eternally learn to be nothing!"

"My wife!" said La Salle, turning her hand in his clasp, and laying his cheek in her palm. "You are my wife. There is no court. There is no world to discover. There is only the sweet, the rose-tender palm of my wife where I can lay my tired cheek and rest."

Jeanne's fingers moved with involuntary caressing along the lowest curve of his face.

An ember fell on the hearth beside them, and Father Hennepin emphasized some point in his relation with a stamp of his foot.

"You left a glove at my father's house, Sieur de la Salle, and I hid it; I put my face to it. And when I burned it, my own blood seemed to ooze out of that crisping glove."

La Salle trembled. The dumb and solitary man was dumb and solitary in his love.

"Now we must part," breathed Jeanne. "Heaven is strangely merciful to sinners. I never could name you to my confessor or show him this formless anguish; but now that it has been owned and cast out, my heart is glad."

La Salle rose up and stood by the hearth. As she drew her hand from his continued hold he opened his arms. Jeanne stepped backward, her eyes swarming with motes of light. She turned and reached her chamber door; but as the saint receded from temptation the woman rose in strength. She ran to La Salle, and with a tremor and a sob in his arms, met his mouth with the one kiss of her life. As suddenly she ran from him and left him.

La Salle had had his sublime moment of standing at the centre of the universe and seeing all things swing around him, which comes to every one successful in embodying a vast idea. But from this height he looked down at that experience.

He stood still after Jeanne's door closed until he felt his own intrusion. This drove him downstairs and out of the house, regardless of Jacques le Ber, Father Hennepin, and the officers of the fortress, who turned to gaze at his transit.

Proud satisfaction, strange in a ruined man, appeared on the explorer's face. He felt his reverses as cobwebs to be brushed away. He was loved. The king had been turned against him. His enemies had procured Count Frontenac's removal, and La Barre the new governor, conspiring to seize his estate, had ruined his credit. But he was loved. Even on this homeward journey an officer had passed him with authority to take possession of his new post on the Illinois River. His discoveries were doubted and sneered at, as well as half claimed by boasting subordinates, who knew nothing about his greater views. Yet the only softener of this man of noble granite was a spirit-like girl, who regarded the love of her womanhood as sin.

La Salle stood in the midst of enemies. He stood considering merely how his will should break down the religious walls Jeanne built around herself, and how Jacques le Ber might be conciliated by shares in the profits of the West. Behind stretched his shadowed life, full of misfortune; good was held out to him to be withdrawn at the touch of his fingers. But this good he determined to have; and thinking of her, La Salle walked the stiffened frost-crisp ground of the fortress half the night.

IV.

A CANOE FROM THE ILLINOIS.

When Barbe Cavelier awoke next morning and saw around her the stone walls of Fort Frontenac instead of a familiar convent enclosure, she sat up in her bed and laughed aloud. The tiny cell echoed. Never before had laughter of young girl been heard there. And when she placed her feet upon the floor perhaps their neat and exact pressure was a surprise to battered planks used to the smiting tread of men.

Barbe proceeded to dress herself, with those many curvings of neck and figure, which, in any age, seem necessary to the fit sitting of a young maid in her garments. Her aquiline face glowed, full of ardent life.

Some raindrops struck the roof-window and ran down its panes like tears. When Barbe had considered her astounding position as the only woman in Fort Frontenac, and felt well compacted for farther adventures, she sprung upon the bunk, and stood with her head near the roof, looking out into the fortress and its adjacent world. Among moving figures she could not discern her uncle La Salle, or her uncle the Abbé, or even her brother. These three must be yet in the officers' house. Dull clouds were scudding. As Barbe opened the sash and put her head out the morning air met her with a chill. Fort Frontenac's great walls half hid an autumn forest, crowding the lake's distant border in measureless expanse of sad foliage. Eastward, she caught ghostly hints of islands on misty water. The day was full of depression. Ontario stood up against the sky, a pale greenish fleece, raked at intervals by long wires of rain.

But such influences had no effect on a healthy warm young creature, freed unaccountably from her convent, and brought on a perilous, delightful journey to so strange a part of her world.

She noticed a parley going forward at the gate. Some outsider demanded entrance, for the sentry disappeared between the towers and returned for orders. He approached the commandant who stood talking with Jacques le Ber, the merchant of Montreal. Barbe could see Le Ber's face darken. With shrugs and negative gestures he decided against the newcomer, and the sentinel again disappeared to refuse admission. She wondered if a band of Iroquois waited outside. Among Abbé Cavelier's complaints of La Salle was Governor la Barre's accusation that La Salle stirred enmity in the Iroquois by protecting the Illinois tribe they wished to exterminate.

"Even these Indians on the lake shore," meditated Barbe, "who settled there out of friendship to my uncle La Salle, may turn against him and try to harm him as every one does now that his fortunes are low. I would be a man faithful to my friend, if I were a man at all."

She watched for a sight of the withdrawing party on the lake, and presently a large canoe holding three men shot out beyond the walls. One stood erect, gazing back at the fort with evident anxiety. Neither the smearing medium of damp weather nor increasing distance could rob Barbe of that man's identity. His large presence, his singular carriage of the right arm, even his features sinking back to space, stamped him Henri de Tonty.

"He has come here to see my uncle La Salle, and they have refused to let him enter," she exclaimed aloud.

Stripping a coverlet from her berth she whipped the outside air with it until the crackle brought up a challenge from below.

Fort Frontenac was a seignorial rather than a military post, and its discipline had been lax since the governor's Associates seized it, yet a sentinel paced this morning before the officers' quarters. When he saw the signal withdrawn and a lovely face with dark eyelashes and a topknot of curls looking down at him, he could do nothing but salute it, and Barbe shut her window.

Dropping in excitement from the bunk, she ran across the upper room to knock at La Salle's door.

A boy stood basking in solitude by the chimney.

Her uncle La Salle's apartment seemed filled with one strong indignant voice, leaking through crevices and betraying its matter to the common hall.

"You may knock there until you faint of hunger," remarked the lad at the hearth. "I also want my breakfast, but these precious Associates will let us starve in the fort they have stolen before they dole us out any food. I would not mind going into the barracks and messing, but I have you also to consider."

"It is not anything to eat, Colin--it is pressing need of my uncle La Salle!"

"The Abbé has pressing need of our uncle La Salle. It was great relief to catch him here at Frontenac. I have heard every bit of the lecture: what amounts our uncle the Abbé has ventured in western explorations; and what a fruitless journey he has made here to rescue for himself some of the stores of this fortress; and what danger all we Caveliers stand in of being poisoned on account of my uncle La Salle, so that the Abbé can scarce trust us out of his sight, even with nuns guarding you."

To Barbe's continued knocking her guardian made the curtest reply. He opened the door, looked at her sternly, saying, "Go away, mademoiselle," and shut it tightly again.

She ran back to her lookout and was able to discern the same canoe moving off on the lake.

"Colin," demanded Barbe, wrapping herself, "You must run with me."

"Certainly, mademoiselle, and I trust you are making haste toward a table."

"We must run outside the fortress."

Though the boy felt it a grievance that he should follow instead of lead to any adventure, he dashed heartily out with her, intending to take his place when he understood the action. Rain charged full in their faces. The sentry was inclined to hold them at the fortress gate until he had orders, and Barbe's impatience darted from her eyes.

"You will get me into trouble," he said. "This gate has been swinging over-much lately."

"Let us out," persuaded Colin. "The Associates will not care what becomes of a couple of Caveliers."

"Where are you going?"

"My sister wishes to run to the Iroquois village," responded Colin, "and beg there for a little sagamite. We get nothing to eat in Fort Frontenac."

The soldier laughed.

"If you are going to the Iroquois village why don't you say your errand is to Catharine Tegahkouita? It is no sin to ask an Indian saint's prayers."

Barbe formed her lips to inquire, "Has Tegahkouita come to Fort Frontenac?" But this impulse passed into discreet silence, and the man let them out.

They ran along the palisades southward, Barbe keeping abreast of Colin though she made skimming dips as the swallow flies, and with a détour quite to the lake's verge, avoided the foundation of an outwork.

Father Hennepin's cross stood up, a huge white landmark between habitant settlement on the lake, and Indian village farther west but visible through the clearing. Ontario seemed to rise higher and top the world, its green curves breaking at their extremities into white spatter, the one boat in sight making deep obeisance to heaving water.

"Do you see a canoe riding yonder?" exclaimed Barbe to Colin, as they ran along wet sand.

"Any one may see a canoe riding yonder. Was it to race with that canoe we came out, mademoiselle?"

"Wave your arms and make signals to the men in it, Colin. They must be stopped. I am sure that one is Monsieur de Tonty, and they were turned away from the fortress gate. They have business with our uncle La Salle, and see how far they have gone before we could get out ourselves!"

"Why, then, did you follow?" demanded her brother, waving his arms and flinging his cap in the rain. "They may have business with our uncle La Salle, but they have no business with a girl. This was quite my affair, Mademoiselle Cavelier."

A maid whose feet were heavy with the mud of a once ploughed clearing could say little in praise of such floundering. She paid no attention to Colin's rebuke, but watched for the canoe to turn landward. Satisfied that it was heading toward them, Barbe withdrew from the border of the lake. She would not shelter herself in any deserted hut of the habitant village. Colin followed her in vexation to Father Hennepin's mission house, remonstrating as he skipped, and turning to watch the canoe with rain beating his face.

They found the door open. The floor was covered with sand blown there, and small stones cast by the hands of irreverent passing Indian boys. The chapel stood a few yards away, but this whole small settlement was dominated by its cross.[11]

Barbe and Colin were scarcely under this roof shelter before Tonty strode up to the door. He took off his hat with the left hand, his dark face bearing the rain like a hardy flower. Dangers, perpetual immersion in Nature, and the stimulus of vast undertakings had so matured Tonty that Barbe felt more awe of his buckskin presence than her memory of the fine young soldier in Montreal could warrant. She wanted to look at him and say nothing. Colin, who knew this soldier only by reputation, was eager to meet and urge him into Father Hennepin's house.

Tonty's reluctant step crunched sand on the boards. He kept his gaze upon Barbe and inquired,--

"Have I the honor, mademoiselle, to address the niece of Monsieur de la Salle?"

"The niece and nephew of Monsieur de la Salle," put forth Colin.

"Yes, monsieur. You may remember me as the young tiger-cat who sprung upon my uncle La Salle when you arrived with him from France."

"I never forgot you, mademoiselle. You so much resemble Monsieur de la Salle."

"It is on his account we have run out of the fort to stop you. He does not know you are here. I saw the sentinel close the gate against some one, and afterward your boat pushed out."

"And did you shake a signal from an upper window in the fort?"

"Monsieur, I could not be sure that you saw it, though I could see your boat."

"She made it very much her affair," observed Colin, with the merciless disapproval of a lad. "Monsieur de Tonty, there was no use in her trampling through sand and rain like a Huron witch going to some herb gathering. It was my business to do the errand of my uncle La Salle. When she goes back she will get a lecture and a penance, for all her sixteen years."

"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "I am distressed if my withdrawal from Fort Frontenac causes you trouble. I meant to camp here. I was determined to see Monsieur de la Salle."

"Monsieur," courageously replied Barbe, "you cause me no trouble at all. I thought you were returning to your fort on the Illinois. I did not stop to tell my brother, but made him run with me. It is a shame that the enemies of my uncle La Salle hold you out of Fort Frontenac."

"But very little would you get to eat there," consoled young Cavelier. "We have had nothing to break our fast on this morning."

"Then let us get ready some breakfast for you," proposed Tonty, as his men entered with the lading of the canoe. They had stopped at the doorstep, but Father Hennepin's hewed log house contained two rooms, and he pointed them to the inner one. There they let down their loads, one man, a surgeon, remaining, and the other, a canoeman, going out again in search of fuel.

"Monsieur, it would be better for us to hurry back to the fortress and call my uncle La Salle."

"Nothing will satisfy you, mademoiselle," denounced Colin. "Out you must come to stop Monsieur de Tonty. Now back you must go through weather which is not fitting for any demoiselle to face."

"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "if you return now it will be my duty to escort you as far as the fortress gate."

Barbe drew her wrappings over her face, as he had seen a wild sensitive plant fold its leaves and close its cups.

"I will retire to the chapel and wait there until my uncle La Salle comes," she decided, "and my brother must run to call him."

"You may take to sanctuary as soon as you please," responded Colin, "and I will attend to my uncle La Salle's business. But the first call I make shall be upon the cook in this camp."

FOOTNOTES:

[11] "He (La Salle) gave us a piece of ground 15 arpents in front by 20 deep, the donation being accepted by Monsieur de Frontenac, syndic of our mission." From Le Clerc.

V.

FATHER HENNEPIN'S CHAPEL.

Tonty held a buffalo robe over Barbe during her quick transit from cabin to church. Its tanned side was toward the weather, and its woolly side continued to comfort her after she was under shelter. Tonty bestowed it around her and closed the door again, leaving her in the dim place.

Father Hennepin's deserted chapel was of hewed logs like his dwelling. A rude altar remained, but without any ornaments, for the Récollet had carried these away to his western mission. Some unpainted benches stood in a row. The roof could be seen through rafters, and drops of rain with reiterating taps fell along the centre of the floor. A chimney of stones and cement was built outside the chapel, of such a size that its top yawned like an open cell for rain, snow, or summer sunshine. Within, it spread a generous hearth and an expanse of grayish fire-wall little marked by the blue incense which rises from burning wood.

Barbe looked briefly around the chapel. She laid the buffalo hide before the altar and knelt upon it.

Tonty returned with a load of fuel and busied himself at the fireplace. The boom of the lake, and his careful stirring and adjusting in ancient ashes, made a background to her silence. Yet she heard through her devotions every movement he made, and the low whoop peculiar to flame when it leaps to existence and seizes its prey.

A torrent of fire soon poured up the flue. Tonty grasped a brush made of wood shavings, remnant of Father Hennepin's housekeeping, and whirled dust and litter in the masculine fashion. When he left the chapel it glowed with the resurrected welcome it had given many a primitive congregation of Indians and French settlers, when the lake beat up icy winter foam.

Beside the fireplace was a window so high that its log sill met Barbe's chin as she looked out. Jutting roof and outer chimney wall made a snug spot like a sentry-box without. She dried her feet, holding them one at a time to the red hot glow, and glanced through this window at the mission house's sodden logs and crumbled chinking. The excitement of her sally out of Fort Frontenac died away. She felt distressed because she had come, and faint for her early convent breakfast.

She saw Tonty through the window carrying a dish carefully covered. He approached the broken pane, and Barbe eagerly helped him to unfasten the sash and swing it out. In doing this, Tonty held her platter braced by his iron-handed arm.

The fare was passed in to her without apology, and she received it with sincere gratitude, afterward drawing a bench near the fire and sitting down in great privacy and comfort.

The moccasins of a frontiersman could make no sound above flap of wind and pat of water. Tonty paced from window to chapel front, believing that he kept out of Barbe's sight. But after an interval he was amused to see, rising over the sill within, a topknot of curls, and eyes filled with the alert, shy spirit of the deer whose flesh she had just eaten.

For some reason this scrutiny of Barbe's made him regret that he had lain aside the gold and white uniform of France, and the extreme uses to which his gauntlets had been put. Entrenched behind logs she unconsciously poured the fires of her youth upon Tonty.

Not only was one pane in the sash gone, but all were shattered, giving easy access to his voice as he stood still and explained.

"Frontenac is a lonely post, mademoiselle. It is necessary for you to have a sentinel."

"Yes, monsieur; you are very good." Barbe accepted the fact with lowered eyelids. "Has my brother yet gone to call my uncle La Salle?"

"Yes, mademoiselle. As soon as we could give him some breakfast he set out."

"Colin is a gourmand. All very young people gormandize more or less," remarked Barbe, with a sense of emancipation from the class she condemned.

"I hope you could eat what I brought you?"

"It was quite delicious, monsieur. I ate every bit of it."

The boom of the lake intruded between their voices. Barbe's black eyelashes flickered sensitively upon her cheeks, and Tonty, feeling that he looked too steadily at her, dropped his eyes to his folded arms.

"Monsieur de Tonty," inquired Barbe, appealing to experience, "do you think sixteen years very young?"

"It is the most charming age in the world, mademoiselle."

"Monsieur, I mean young for maturing one's plan of life."

"That depends upon the person," replied Tonty. "At sixteen I was revolting against the tyranny which choked Italy. And I was an exile from my country before the age of twenty, mademoiselle."

Barbe gazed straight at Tonty, her gray eyes firing like opals with enthusiasm.

"And my uncle La Salle at sixteen was already planning his discoveries. Monsieur, I also have my plans. Many missionaries must be needed among the Indians."

"You do not propose going as a missionary among the Indians, mademoiselle?"

Barbe critically examined his smile. She evaded his query.

"Are the Indian women beautiful, Monsieur de Tonty?"

"They do not appear so to me, mademoiselle, though the Illinois are a straight and well-made race."

"You must find it a grand thing to range that western country."

"But in the midst of our grandeur the Iroquois threaten us even there. How would mademoiselle like to mediate between these invaders and the timid Illinois, suspected by one tribe and threatened by the other; to carry the wampum belt of peace on the open field between two armies, and for your pains get your scalp-lock around the fingers of a Seneca chief and his dagger into your side?"

"Oh, monsieur!" whispered Barbe, flushing with the wild pinkness of roses on the plains, "what amusements you do have in the great west! And is it a castle on a mountain, that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois?"

"A stockade on a cliff, mademoiselle."

Tonty felt impelled to put himself nearer this delicate head set with fine small ears and quartered by the angles of the window-frame. When she meditated, her lashes and brows and aquiline curves and gray tones flushing to rose were delightful to a wilderness-saturated man. But he held to his strict position as sentinel.

"Monsieur," said Barbe, "there is something on my mind which I will tell you. I was thinking of the new world my uncle La Salle discovered, even before you came to Montreal. Now I think constantly of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Monsieur, I dream of it,--I go in long journeys and never arrive; I see it through clouds, and wide rivers flow between it and me; and I am homesick. Yes, monsieur, that is the strangest thing,--I have cried of homesickness for Fort St. Louis of the Illinois!"

"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, his voice vibrating, "there is a stranger thing. It is this,--that a man with a wretched hand of iron should suddenly find within himself a heart of fire!"

When this confession had burst from him he turned his back without apology, and Barbe's forehead sunk upon the window-sill.

Within the chapel, drops from the cracked roof still fell in succession, like invisible fingers playing scales along the boards. Outside was the roar of the landlocked sea, and the higher music of falling rain. Barbe let her furtive eyes creep up the sill and find Tonty's large back on which she looked with abashed but gratified smiles.

"Mademoiselle," he begged without turning, "forgive what I have said."

"Certainly, monsieur," she responded. "What was it that you said?"

"Nothing, mademoiselle, nothing."

"Then, monsieur, I forgive you for saying nothing."

Tonty, in his larger perplexity at having made such a confession without La Salle's leave, missed her sting.

Nothing more was said through the window. Barbe moved back, and the stalwart soldier kept his stern posture; until La Salle, whose approach had been hidden by chimney and mission house, burst abruptly into view. As he came up, both he and Tonty opened their arms. Strong breast to strong breast, cheek touching cheek, spare olive-hued man and dark rich-blooded man hugged each other.

Barbe's convent lessons of embroidery and pious lore had included no heathen tales of gods or heroes. Yet to her this sight was like a vision of two great cloudy figures stalking across the world and meeting with an embrace.

VI.

LA SALLE AND TONTY.

When one of the men had been called from the mission house to stand guard, they came directly into the chapel, preferring to talk there in the presence of Barbe.

La Salle kissed her hand and her cheek, and she sat down before the fire, spreading the buffalo skin under her feet.

As embers sunk and the talk of the two men went on, she crept as low as this shaggy carpet, resting arms and head upon the bench. The dying fire made exquisite color in this dismal chapel.

"The governor's man, when he arrived to seize Fort St. Louis, gave you my letter of instructions, Tonty?"

"Yes, Monsieur de la Salle."

"Then, my lad, why have you abandoned the post and followed me? You should have stayed to be my representative. They have Frontenac. Crévecoeur was ruined for us. If they get St. Louis of the Illinois entirely into their hands they will claim the whole of Louisiana, these precious Associates."

Tonty, laying his sound arm across his commandant's shoulder, exclaimed, "Monsieur, I have followed you five hundred leagues to drag that rascal Jolycoeur back with me. He told at Fort St. Louis that this should be your last journey."

La Salle laughed.

"Let me tie Jolycoeur and fling him into my canoe, and I turn back at once. I can hold your claims on the Illinois against any number of governor's agents. Take the surgeon Liotot in Jolycoeur's place. Liotot came with me, anxious to return to France."

"Jolycoeur is no worse than the others, my Tonty, and he has had many opportunities. How often has my life been threatened!"

"He intends mischief, monsieur. If I had heard it before you set out, this journey need not have been made."

"Tonty," declared the explorer, "I think sometimes I carry my own destruction within myself. I will not chop nice phrases for these hounds who continually ruin my undertakings by their faithlessness. If a man must keep patting the populace, he can do little else. But I am glad you overtook me here. My Tonty, if I had a hundred men like you I could spread out the unknown wilderness and possess it as that child possesses that hide of buffalo."

Though their undertakings were united, and the Italian had staked his fortune in the Norman's ventures, La Salle always assumed, and Tonty from the first granted him, entire mastery of the West. Both looked with occupied eyes at Barbe, who felt her life enlarged by witnessing this conference.

"Monsieur, what aspect have affairs taken since you reached Fort Frontenac?"

"Worse, Tonty, than I dreaded when I left the Illinois. You know how this new governor stripped Fort Frontenac of men and made its unprotected state an excuse for seizing it, saying I had not obeyed the king's order to maintain a garrison. And you know how he and the merchants of Montreal have possessed themselves of my seigniory here. They have sold and are still busy selling my goods from this post, putting the money into their pockets. I spent nearly thirty-five thousand francs improving this grant of Frontenac. But worse than that, Tonty, they have ruined my credit both here and in France. Even my brother will no more lift a finger for me. The king is turned against me. The fortunes of my family--even the fortune of that child--are sucked down in my ruin."

Barbe noted her own bankruptcy with the unconcern of youth. Monsieur de Tonty's face, when you looked up at it from a rug beside the hearth, showed well its full rounded chin, square jaws, and high temples, the richness of its Italian coloring against the blackness of its Italian hair.

"They call me a dreamer and a madman, these fellows now in power, and have persuaded the king that my discoveries are of no account."

"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "do you remember the mouth of the great river?"[12]

Face glowed opposite face as they felt the log walls roll away from environing their vision. It was no longer the wash of the Ontario they heard, but the voice of the Mexican gulf. The yellow flood of Mississippi poured out between marsh borders. Again discharges of musketry seemed to shake the morasses beside a naked water world, the Te Deum to arise, and the explorer to be heard proclaiming,--

"In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God king of France and of Navarre, Fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one thousand and six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of his Majesty, which I hold in my hand and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers within the extent of the said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux, as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico."[13]

"Monsieur," exclaimed Tonty, "the plunderers of your fortune cannot take away that discovery or blot out the world you then opened. And what is Europe compared to this vast country? At the height of his magnificence Louis cannot picture to himself the grandeur of this western empire. France is but the palm of his hand beside it. It stretches from endless snow to endless heat; its breadth no man may guess. Nearly all the native tribes affiliate readily with the French. We have to dispute us only the English who hold a little strip by the ocean, the Dutch with smaller holding inland, and a few Spaniards along the Gulf."

"And all may be driven out before the arms of France," exclaimed La Salle. "These crawling merchants and La Barre,--soldier, he calls himself!--see nothing of this. Every man for his own purse among them. But thou seest it, Tonty. I see it. And we are no knights on a crusade. Nor are we unpractised courtiers shredding our finery away on the briers of the wilderness. This western enterprise is based on geographical facts. No mind can follow all the development of that rich land. It is an empire," declared La Salle, striding between hearth and chancel-rail, unconscious that he lifted his voice to the rafters of a sanctuary, "which Louis might drop France itself to grasp!"

"The king will be convinced of this, Monsieur de la Salle, when you again have his ear. When you have showed him what streams of commerce must flow out through a post stationed at the mouth of the Mississippi. France will then have a cord drawn half around this country."

"Tonty, if you could be commandant of every fort I build, navigator of every ship I set afloat, if you could live in every man who labors for me, if you could stand forever between those Iroquois wolves and the tribes we try to band for mutual protection, and at the same time, if you could always be at my side to ward off gun, knife, and poison,--you would make me the most successful man on earth."

"I have travelled five hundred leagues to ward poison away from you, monsieur. And you laugh at me."

"For your pains, I will dismiss Jolycoeur to-day, and take Liotot with me."

"And will you come here as soon as you dismiss him and let my men prepare your food?"

"Willingly. Fort Frontenac, with my rights in it denied, is no halting place for me. To-morrow I set out again to France, and you to the fort on the Illinois. But, Tonty--"

La Salle's face relaxed into tenderness as he laid his hands upon his friend's shoulders. The Italian's ardent temperament was the only agent which ever fused and made facile of tongue and easy of confidence that man of cold reserve known as La Salle. The Italian guessed what he had to say. They both glanced at Barbe and flushed. But the nebulous thought surrounding the name of Jeanne le Ber was never condensed to spoken word.

Tonty's sentinel opened the chapel door and broke up this council. He said an Indian stood there with him demanding to be admitted.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Relation of Henri de Tonty (cited in Margry, I). "Comme cette rivière se divise en trois chenaux, M. de la Salle fut descouvrér celuy de la droite, je fus à celuy du mileu et le Sieur d'Autray à celuy de la gauche."

[13] Abridged from Francis Parkman's version of La Salle's proclamation. The Procès Verbal is a long document.

VII.

AN ADOPTION.

"What does he want?" inquired Tonty.

"He is determined to speak with you, Monsieur de Tonty, from what I can gather out of his words."

"Let him wait in the mission house, then," said Tonty, "until Monsieur de la Salle has ended his business."

"I have ended," said La Salle. "It is time I ordered my men and baggage and canoes out of Fort Frontenac."

"Monsieur, remain, and let an order from you be taken to the gate."

"Some of those sulky fellows need my hand over them, Tonty. Besides, there are matters which must be definitely settled before I leave the fort. I have need to go myself, besides the obligation to deliver this runaway girl, on whom her uncle La Salle is always bringing penances."

Barbe sprung up and put herself in the attitude of accompanying him.

"Mademoiselle," said Tonty, "the rain is still falling. If Monsieur de la Salle can carry this hide over you, it will be some protection."

He took up the buffalo skin, and shook it to loosen any dust which might be clinging to the shag.

"Monsieur, you are very good," she answered. "But it is not necessary for me."

"Mademoiselle cares very little about a wetting," said La Salle. "She was born to be a princess of the backwoods. Call in your Indian before we go, Tonty. He may have some news for us."

Tonty spoke to the sentinel, whose fingers visibly held the door, and he let pass a tall Iroquois brave carrying such a bundle of rich furs as one of that race above the condition of squaw rarely deigned to lift. His errand was evidently peaceable. He paused and stood like a prince. Neither La Salle nor Tonty remembered his face, though both felt sure he came from the mission village of friendly Iroquois near Fort Frontenac.

"What does my brother want?" inquired La Salle, with sympathy he never showed to his French subordinates.

"He waits to speak to his white brother with the iron hand," answered the Iroquois.

"Have you brought us bad news?" again inquired La Salle.

"Good news."

"What is it?"

"It is only to my brother with the iron hand."

"Can you not speak in the presence of Monsieur de la Salle?" demanded Tonty.

With exquisite reserve the Indian stood silent, waiting the conditions he needed for the delivery of his message.

"It is nothing which concerns me," said La Salle to Tonty. He prepared to stalk into the weather with Barbe.

Tonty spoke a few words to the waiting savage, who heard without returning any sign, and then followed Barbe, stretching the buffalo hide above her head. When La Salle observed this he failed to ridicule his lieutenant, but took one side of the shaggy canopy in his own hold. It was impossible for the girl to go dry-shod, but Tonty directed her way over the best and firmest ground. They made a solemn procession, for not a word was spoken. When they came to the fortress gate, Tonty again bestowed the robe around her as he had done when she entered the chapel, and stood bareheaded while Barbe--whispering "Adieu, monsieur"--passed out of his sight.

"I have thought of this, Tonty," said La Salle as he entered; "when she is a few years older she shall come to the fort on the Illinois, if I again reap success."

"Monsieur de la Salle, I am bound to tell you it will be dangerous for me ever to see mademoiselle again."

"Monsieur de Tonty," responded the explorer with his close smile, "I am bound to tell you I think it will be the safest imaginable arrangement for her."

The gate closed behind him, and Tonty carried back an exhilarated face to the waiting Iroquois.

He entered Father Hennepin's chapel again, and the Indian followed him to the hearth.

They stood there, ready for conference, the small black savage eye examining Tonty's face with open approval.

"Now let me have your message," said the Italian. "Have I ever seen you before? What is your name?"

"Sanomp," answered the Iroquois. "My white brother with the iron hand has not seen me before."

He spread open on the bench Barbe had occupied a present of fine furs and dried meat.

"Why does my brother bring me these things?" inquired Tonty, realizing as he looked at the gift how much of this barbarian's wealth was bestowed in such an offering.

"Listen," said Sanomp.[14] He had a face of benevolent gravity,--the unhurried, sincere face of man living close to Nature. "It is a chief of the Seneca tribe who speaks to my white brother."

"I have met a chief of the Seneca tribe before," remarked Tonty, smiling. "It was in the country of the Illinois, and he wrapped my scalp-lock around his fingers."

Sanomp smiled, too, without haste, and continued his story.

"I left my people to live near the fort of my French brothers because it was told me the man with a hand of iron was here. When I came here the man with a hand of iron was gone. So I waited for him. Our lives are consumed in waiting for the best things. Five years have I stood by the mouth of Cataraqui. And this morning the man with a hand of iron passed before my face."

He spoke a mixture of French and Iroquois which enabled Tonty to catch his entire meaning.

"But this hand could not betray me from the lake, to eyes that had never seen me before," objected the Italian.

Advancing one foot and folding his arms in the attitude of a narrator, the Indian said,--

"Listen. At that time of life when a young Iroquois retires from his tribe to hide in the woods and fast until his okie[15] is revealed to him, four days and four nights the boy Sanomp lay on the ground, rain and dew, moonlight and sunlight passing over him. The boy Sanomp looked up, for an eagle dropped before his eyes. He then knew that the eagle was his okie, and that he was to be a warrior, not a hunter or medicine-man. But the eagle dropped before the feet of a soldier the image of my white brother, and the soldier held up a hand of yellow metal. The boy heard a voice coming from the vision that said to him, 'Warrior, this is thy friend and brother. Be to him a friend and brother. After thou hast seven times followed the war path go and wait by the mouth of Cataraqui until he comes.' So when I had seven times followed the war path I came, and my brother being passed by, I waited."

Tonty's square brown Italian face was no more sincere than the redder aquiline visage fronting him and telling its vision.

"My brother Sanomp comes in a good time," he remarked.

The Iroquois next took out his peace pipe and pouch of tobacco. While he filled the bowl and stooped for an ember, Tonty stripped the copper hand of its glove. He held it up before Sanomp as he received the calumet in the other. An aboriginal grunt of strong satisfaction echoed in the chapel.

"Hand of yellow metal," said Sanomp.

Tonty gravely smoked the pipe and handed it back to Sanomp. Sanomp smoked it, shook the ashes out and put it away.

Thus was the ceremony of adoption finished. Without more talk, the red friend and brother turned from his white friend and brother and went back to his own world.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Sanomp was suggested to the romancer by La Salle's faithful Shawanoe follower, Nika, and an Indian friend and brother in "Pontiac."

[15] Guardian Manitou. See Introduction to "Jesuits in North America."

VIII.

TEGAHKOUITA.

Barbe ran breathless up the stairway, glad to catch sight of her uncle the Abbé so occupied at the lower hearth that he took no heed of her return.

She had counted herself the only woman in Fort Frontenac, yet she found a covered figure standing in front of the chamber door next her own.

Though Barbe had never seen Catharine Tegahkouita[16] she knew this must be the Iroquois virgin who lived a hermit life of devotion in a cabin at Lachine, revered by French and Indians alike. How this saint had reached Fort Frontenac or in whose behalf she was exerting herself Barbe could not conjecture. Tegahkouita had interceded for many afflicted people and her prayers were much sought after.

The Indian girl kept her face entirely covered. No man knew that it was comely or even what its features were like. The chronicler tells us when she was a young orphan beside her uncle's lodge-fire her eyes were too weak to bear the light of the sun, and in this darkness began the devotion which distinguished her life. What was first a necessity, became finally her choice, and she shut herself from the world.

To Barbe, Tegahkouita was an object of religious awe tempered by that criticism in which all young creatures secretly indulge. She sat on the bench as if in meditation, but her eyes crept up and down that straight and motionless and blanket-eclipsed presence. She knew that Tegahkouita was good; was it not told of the Indian girl that she rolled three days in a bed of thorns, and that she often walked barefooted in ice and snow, to discipline her body? She was not afraid of Tegahkouita. But she wished somebody else would come into the room who could break the saint's death-like silence. Sainthood was a very safe condition, but Barbe found it impossible to admire the outward appearance of a living saint.

La Salle had stopped at the barracks to order out his men, and Colin who had taken to that part of the fort for amusement, watched their transfer with much interest.

Wind was conquering rain. It blew keenly from the southwest, and sung at the corners of Frontenac, whirling dead leaves like fugitive birds into the area of the fort. La Salle's men turned out of their quarters with reluctance to exchange safety and comfort for exposure and a leaky camp. The explorer stood and saw them pass before him bearing their various burdens, excepting one man who slouched by the door of the bakehouse as if he had stationed himself there to see that they passed in order out of the gate.

"Come here, you Jolycoeur," called La Salle, lifting his finger.

Jolycoeur, savagely hairy, approached with that look of sulky menace La Salle never appeared to see in his servants.

"Where is your load of goods?" inquired the explorer.

Jolycoeur lifted a quick look, and dropping it again, replied, "Sieur de la Salle, I was waiting for the cook to hand me out the dishes you ordered against you came back."

La Salle examined him through half-shut eyes. It was this man's constant duty to prepare his food. Tonty and his brother Jean had so occupied his morning that he had found no time for eating. A man inured to hardships can fast with very little thought about the matter, but he decided if Jolycoeur had not yet handled this meal he might hazard some last service from a man who had missed so many opportunities.

"Did you cook my breakfast?" he inquired.

"Sieur de la Salle, I dared not put my nose in the bakehouse. This cook is the worst man in Fort Frontenac."

The cook appearing with full hands in his door, La Salle said to Jolycoeur, "Carry those platters into the lodge," and he watched the minutest action of the man's elbows, walking behind him into the lower apartment of the dwelling. A table stood there on which Jolycoeur began to arrange the dishes with surly carelessness.

The explorer forgot him the moment they entered, for two people occupied this room in close talk. Challenging whatever ill Jacques le Ber and the Abbé Cavelier had prepared, La Salle advanced beyond the table with the chill and defiant bearing natural to him.

"Monsieur le Ber and I have been discussing this alliance you are so anxious to make with his family," spoke the Abbé.

The explorer met Le Ber's face full of that triumphant contempt which men strangely feel for other men who have fallen and become stepping-stones of fortune to themselves. He turned away without answer, and began to eat indifferently from the dishes Jolycoeur had left ready, standing beside the table while he ate.

"If Jacques le Ber were as anxious for the marriage as yourself,--but I told you this morning, my brother La Salle, what madness it must seem to all sane men,--it could not be arranged. His daughter hath refused to see you."

"My thanks are due to my brother the Abbé for his nice management of all my affairs," sneered La Salle. "I comprehend there is nothing which he will not endeavor to mar for me. It surely is madness which induces a man against all experience to confide in his brother."

Jean Cavelier replied with a shrug and a spread of the hands which said, "In such coin of gratitude am I always paid."

"Sieur de la Salle," volunteered Le Ber, rising and coming forward with natural candor, "it is not so long ago that your proposal would have made me proud, and the Abbé hath not ill managed it now. Monsieur, I wish my girl to marry. I have been ready for any marriage she would accept. She has indeed shown more liking for you than for any other man in New France. Monsieur, I would far rather have her married than bound to the life she leads. But if you were in a position to marry, Jeanne refuses your hand."

"Has she said this to you?" inquired La Salle.

"I have not seen her to-day," replied Le Ber. "She has the Iroquois virgin Tegahkouita with her. I brought Tegahkouita here because she was besought for some healing in our Iroquois lodges near the fort."

Jacques le Ber stopped. But La Salle calmly heard him thus claim everything pertaining to Fort Frontenac.

"We must do what we can to hold these unstable Indians," continued Le Ber. "Monsieur, before I could carry your proposal to Jeanne, she sends me Tegahkouita, as if they had some holy contrivance for reading people's minds. Your brother will confirm to you the words Tegahkouita brought."

"Mademoiselle le Ber will pray for you always, my brother La Salle. But she refuses even to see you."

"It is easy enough for Jeanne to put you in her prayers," remarked the discontented father, "she hath room enough there for all New France."

The man who had more than once sprung into the midst of hostile savages and carried their admiration by a word, now stood silent and musing. But his face expressed nothing except determination.

"You shall see her yourself," Jacques le Ber exclaimed, with the shrewdness of a man holding present advantage, yet gauging fully his antagonist's force. "You and I were once friends, Sieur de la Salle. I might obtain a worse match for my girl."

"I will see her," said La Salle, more in the manner of affirming his own wish than of accepting a concession.

He mounted the stairs, with Le Ber behind him, the Abbé Cavelier following Le Ber.

As the father expected, Tegahkouita stood as a bar in front of Jeanne's chamber door. Slightly spreading her blanketed arms this Indian girl of peculiar gifts said slowly and melodiously in a voice tuned by much low-spoken prayer, "Mademoiselle Jeanne le Ber says, 'Tell Sieur de la Salle I will pray for him always, but I must never see his face again.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[16] The romancer differs from the historian--Charlevoix, tome 2--who records that Catharine Tegahkouita died in 1678.

IX.

AN ORDEAL.

"When I have seen Mademoiselle le Ber," La Salle replied to the blanket of Tegahkouita, "I shall understand from herself what her wishes are in this matter."

"Sieur de la Salle cannot see her," spoke Tegahkouita. "She hath no word but this, and she will not see Sieur de la Salle again."

"I say he shall see her!" exclaimed the Montreal merchant, with asperity created by so many influences working upon his daughter. "He may look upon her this minute!"

Jeanne le Ber's presence in Fort Frontenac scarcely surprised Barbe, so great was her amazement at the attitude of her uncle La Salle. That he should be suing to Le Ber's daughter seemed as impossible as any rejection of his suit. She felt toward the saint she had pinched at convent that jealous resentment peculiar to women who desire to have the men of their families married, yet are never satisfied with the choice those men make. Even Barbe, however, considered it a sacrilegious act when Le Ber shook his daughter's door and demanded admittance.

Jeanne's complete silence, like a challenge, drew out his imperative force. He broke through every fastening and threw the door wide open.

The small, bare room, scarcely wider than its entrance, afforded no hiding-places. There was little to catch the eye, from rude berth to hooks in the ruder wall, from which the commandant's clothing had so lately been removed.

Jeanne, the focus of this small cell, had flown to its extremity. As the door burst from its fastenings, everybody in the outer room could see her standing against the wall with noble instinct, facing the breakers of her privacy, but without looking at them. Her eyes rested on her beads, which she told with rapid lips and fingers. A dormer window spread its background of light around her head.

The recoil of inaction which followed Le Ber's violence was not felt by Tegahkouita. With the swift silence of an Indian and the intuition of a devotee, she at once put herself in the sleeping cell, and kneeled holding up a crucifix before Jeanne. As this symbol of religion was lifted, Jeanne fell upon her knees.

Le Ber had not intended to enter, but indignation drove him on after Tegahkouita. He stood aside and did not approach his child,--a jealous, remorseful, anxious, irritated man.

La Salle could see Jeanne, though with giddy and indistinct vision. Her wool gown lay around her in carven folds, as she knelt like a victim ready for the headsman's axe.

One of the proudest and most reticent men who ever trod the soil of the New World was thus reduced to woo before his enemy and his kindred; to argue against those unseen forces represented by the Indian girl, and to fight death in his own body with every pleading respiration. For blindness was growing over his eyes. His lungs were tightened. When his back was turned in the room below, Jolycoeur had mixed a dish for him.

La Salle's hardihood was the marvel of his followers. A body and will of electric strength carried him thousands of miles through ways called impassable. Defeat could not defeat him. But this struggle with Jeanne le Ber was harder than any struggle with an estranged king, harder than again bringing up fortune from the depths of ruin, harder than tearing his breath of life from the reluctant air. He reared himself against the chimney-side, pressing with palms and stretched fingers for support, yet maintaining a roused erectness.

"Jeanne!" he spoke; and eyes less blind than his could detect a sinking of her figure at the sound, "I have this to say."

With a plunging gait which terrified Barbe by its unnaturalness, La Salle attempted to place himself nearer the silent object he was to move. As he passed through the doorway he caught at the sides, and then stretched out and braced one palm against the wall. Thus propped he proceeded, articulating thickly but with careful exactness.

"Jeanne, when I have again brought success out of failure, I shall demand you in marriage. Your father permits it."

Her trembling lips prayed on, and she gave no token of having heard him, except the tremor which shook even the folds of her gown.

Too proud to confess his peril and make its appeal to her, and suppressing before so many witnesses her tender name of Sainte, he labored on as La Salle the explorer with the statement of his case.

"Perhaps I cannot see you again for some years. I do not ask words--of acceptance now. It is enough--if you look at me."

La Salle leaned forward. His eyeballs appeared to swell and protrude as he strained sight for the slightest lifting of the veil before that self-restraining spirit.

Barbe's wailing suddenly broke all bounds in the outer room. "My uncle the Abbé! Look at my uncle La Salle! He cannot breathe--he is going to die! Somebody has poisoned or stabbed my uncle La Salle!"

Jean Cavelier with lower outcry ran to help the explorer. But even a brother and a priest has his limitations. La Salle pushed him off.

When Barbe saw this, she threw herself to the floor and hid her face upon the bench. Her kinsman and the hero of her childhood was held over the abyss of death in the hand of Jeanne le Ber, while those who loved him must set their teeth in silence.

But neither this childish judge, nor the father watching for any slight motion of eyelids which might direct all his future hopes and plans, knew what sickening moisture started from every pore of Jeanne le Ber. Still she lifted her fainting eyes only as high as the crucifix Tegahkouita held before her. Compared to her duty as she saw it, she must count as nothing the life of the man she loved.

The Indian girl's weak sight had no plummet for the face of this greater devotee. Passionately white, its lips praying fast, it stared at the crucifix. Cold drops ran down from the dew which beaded temples and upper lip. Sieur de la Salle--Sieur de la Salle was dying, and asking her for a look! The lifting of her eyelids, the least wavering of her sight, would sweep away the vows she had made to Heaven, and loosen her soul for its swift rush to his breast. To be the wife of La Salle! Her mutter became almost audible as she slid the beads between her fingers. God would keep her from this deadly sin.

The gigantic will of La Salle, become almost material and visible, fell upon her with a cry which must have broken any other endurance.

"Jeanne! look at me now--you _shall_ look at me now!"

Hoarse shouts of battle never tingled through blood as did the voice of this isolated man.

Jeanne's lips twitched on; she twisted her hands in tense knots against her neck, and her eyes maintained the level of the cross.

Silence--that fragment of eternity--then filled up the room, submerging strained ears. There were remote sounds, like the scream of wind cut by the angles of Fort Frontenac; but no sound which pierced the silence between La Salle and Jeanne le Ber.

He turned around and cast himself through the doorway with a lofty tread as if he were trying to mount skyward. The Abbé Cavelier extended both arms and kept him from stumbling over the settle which Barbe was baptizing with her anguish. She looked up with the distorted visage of one who weeps terribly, and saw the groping explorer led to the staircase. His feet plunged in the descent.

To this noise was added a distinct thud from Jeanne le Ber's room as her head struck the floor. She lay relaxed and prostrate, and her father lifted her up. Before rising to his feet with her he passed his hand piteously across her bruised forehead.

X.

HEMLOCK.

Jolycoeur, lounging with his shoulders against the barrack wall, gave furtive attention to La Salle as the explorer appeared within the fort. Even his eye was deceived by his master's bearing in giving him the signal to approach.

The wind was helpful to La Salle, but he only half met daylight and saw Jolycoeur taking strange shapes.

"Go to Father Hennepin's old mission house," he slowly commanded, "and send Monsieur de Tonty directly to me."

The man, not daring to disobey until he could take refuge in Fort Frontenac with the gates closed behind the explorer, went on this errand.

"What ails Sieur de la Salle?" inquired the cook, coming out of his bakehouse to get this news of a sentinel.

They both watched the Abbé Cavelier making vain efforts to get hold of his misdirected brother.

"Gone mad with pride," suggested the sentinel. "The less he prospers the loftier I have always heard he bears himself. Would the governor of New France climb the wind with a tread like that?"

Outside the gate La Salle's limbs failed. The laboring Abbé then dragged him along, and it seemed an immense détour he was obliged to make to pass the extended foundation.

"Now you will believe my words which I spoke this morning concerning the peril we all stand in," panted this sorely taxed brother. "The Cavelier family is destroyed. My brother La Salle--Robert--my child! Shall I give you absolution?"

"Not yet," gasped La Salle.

"If you had ever taken my advice, this miserable end had not come upon you."

"I am not ended," gasped La Salle.

"Oh, my brother," lamented Jean Cavelier, tucking up his cassock as he bent to the strain, "I have but one consolation in my wretchedness. This is better for you than the marriage you would have made. What business have you to ally yourself with Le Ber? What business have you with marriage at all? For my part, I would object to any marriage you had in view, but Le Ber's daughter was the worst marriage for you in New France."

"Tonty!" gasped La Salle. With the swiftness of an Indian, Tonty was flying across the clearing. The explorer's unwary messenger Jolycoeur he had left behind him bound with hide thongs and lying in Father Hennepin's inner room.

"Yes, yonder comes your Monsieur de Tonty who so easily gave up your post on the Illinois," panted the Abbé Cavelier. "Like all your worthless followers he hath no attachment to your person."

"There is more love in his iron hand," La Salle's paralyzing mouth flung out, "than in any other living heart!"

Needing no explanation from the Abbé, the commandant from Fort St. Louis took strong hold of La Salle and hurried him to the mission house. They faced the wind, and Tonty's cap blew off, his rings of black hair flaring to a fierce uprightness.

The surgeon ran out of the dwelling and met and helped them in, and thus tardily resistance to the poison was begun, but it had found its hardiest victim since the day of Socrates.

Tonty's iron hand brought out of Jolycoeur immediate confession of the poison he had used.

In an age when most cunning and deadly drugs were freely handled, and men who would not shed blood thought it no sin to take enemies neatly off the scene by the magic of a dish, Jolycoeur was not without knowledge of a plant called hemlock, growing ready to the hand of a good poisoner in the New World.

Noon stood in the sky, half shredding vapors, and lighting cool sparkles upon the lake. Afternoon dragged its mute and heavy hours westward.

Men left the mission house and entered it again, carrying wood or water.

The sun set in the lake, parting clouds before his sinking visage and stretching his rays like long arms of fire to smite the heaving water.

Twilight rose out of the earth and crept skyward, blotting all visible shore. Fort Frontenac stood an indistinct mass beside the Cataraqui, as beside another lake. Stars seemed to run and meet and dive in long ripples. The wash of water up the sand subsided in force as the wind sunk, leaving air space for that ceaseless tune breathed by a great forest.

Overhead, from a port of cloud, the moon's sail pushed out suddenly, less round than it had been the night before, and owning by such depression that she had begun tacking toward her third quarter. Fort and settlements again found their proportions, and Father Hennepin's cross stood clear and fair, throwing its shadow across the mission house.

Within the silent mission house warmth and redness were diffused from logs piled in the chimney.

The Abbé Cavelier's cassock rose and fell with that sleep which follows great anxiety and exhaustion. He reclined against the lowest step of a broken ladder-way which once ascended from corner to loft. The men, except one who stood guard outside in the shadow of the house, were asleep in the next room.

La Salle rested before the hearth on some of the skins Tonty had received from his Indian friend and brother. Whenever the explorer opened his eyes he saw Tonty sitting awake on the floor beside him.

"Sleep," urged La Salle.

"I shall not sleep again," said Tonty, "until I see you safely on your way toward France."

"This has been worse than the dose of verdigris I once got."

"Jolycoeur says he used hemlock," responded Tonty. "He accused everybody in New France of setting him on to the deed, but I silenced that."

"I had not yet dismissed him, Tonty. The scoundrel hath claims on me for two years' wages."

"He should have got his wages of me," exclaimed Tonty, "if this proved your death. He should have as many bullets as his body could hold."

"Tonty, untie the fellow and turn him out and discharge his wages for me with some of the skins you have put under me." La Salle rose on his elbow and then sat up. His face was very haggard, but the practical clear eye dominated it. "These fellows cannot balk me. I have lost all that makes life, except my friend. But I shall come back and take the great west yet! A man with a purpose cannot be killed, Tonty. He goes on. He must go on."