Paganism dropped into their souls and hid away. The wild children of the waters and of the forests began to move sedately toward the mission, singing to native music the canticle they should rightly be using at that hour, "And come before His Presence with a song!"
All Indians love noise. They have a childish joy in racket. Music good or bad catches their fancy. A rollicking tune sometimes controls them when prayers fall useless. Any sort of a singer finds favor with a missionary. The careless mocking-bird in Anthony's throat was the Père Marquette's chief aid, as he struggled out of one danger into another in going from fort to fort.
Anthony Auguelle was a waif out of France, gay and sunny as his own province of Picardy, a runaway, a stowaway, an emigrant; one small item in the unlisted riffraff tumbling over the side of some square-rigged hulk onto the shores of the New World. He had been in turn the companion of pirates and priests, of scullions and captains.
When his fighting spirit and his doubled fists could not make him a place, his voice could win him bread. "Sing for your supper, Tony," was the command which any roustabout of a port might give him. Because of the joyousness of his chantey in response, he had cuddled warm in the shipping many a night between Havre and Quebec, and in the canoes between Quebec and Mackinaw, when others shivered neglected. The Picard du Gay they called him.
"To save his soul I will befriend the boy," was the priest's motive in attaching him to this expedition where there was much danger from savages. "To interest the Indians he ought to go with us," was the trader's idea.
The Tionnontateronnous Indians, whose name even the patient and ceremonious Jesuits felt obliged to shorten to Huron Indians for daily use, lived at Michilimakinac—dubbed Mackinaw—near the lake which was finally called Michigan instead of by its right name of Michihiganing. The Outaouasinagaux when hurried became Ottawas.
The Hurons were clever and had made friends with the French from the time of the founding of Quebec, foreseeing that peace, prosperity, and a helpful religion would come to them through the ministry of the Society of Jesus and the knowledge of the coureurs de bois, those French fur hunters and traders of the forests, who befriended the society's missionaries.
"We must have patience with untutored minds," the priest had said in days past, when, through all the changes made by Indian wars and the shifting of fishing-places and hunting-grounds, he had followed these Indians. "You traders in my wake must treat the natives justly."
So when, at the feast of the Virgin in the previous autumn, there had come to this settlement that soldier and explorer, that prince of traders, the Sieur Joliet, with papers from Frontenac, the governor of Canada, which commissioned him to take their priest, the Père Marquette, and to go upon a voyage in search of a Great River—that water Messipi—of which some Indians had heard, but which no white man had yet seen, the Père Marquette's grateful Hurons were all alert to help the adventurous plan.
"What is good for priests and traders is good for us; it gets us beads and iron knives."