Anthony then hunched himself into the fanatical pose of an inspired medicine-man. Because he was a capital mimic, as most singers are, his words rang out in the same raving tones their own magician might have used.
Ouasicoude and Narrhetoba paused thunderstruck. They thought the manitou had thrown his mantle of sorcery over these aliens. They fell on their faces and did obeisance to the waterfall. Aquipaguetin was not so sure of the divine nature of Anthony's deed, but he was awed in spite of himself and lowered his club and bent his back, shedding tears of disappointment.
Who would profane a temple or destroy a shrine?
Certainly not Anthony, who had fled to it for sanctuary. The loveliness of the manitou's cascade and the power of its fall were as plain to him as to the savages. Why, then, should not the deity inspire him to prophecy as though he were a votary?
He had sacrificed himself to make the discovery of such useful natural features of the Great River as this waterfall might prove to be. Let it now reward him with a new lease on life that he might give his find to the Empire.
He thought of the brook in Picardy and of the wheels it set to going and he cried in ecstasy to this current of so much greater size:
"Some day, O laughing Water, white men shall put a harness upon you and drive you to work at turning a mill." His fancy set big factories up and down the shore. Yet his dream-workshops were not as huge as the immense roller-mills which now stand in substantial piles, row upon row, where once his imagination builded.
"Over these fertile lands of your sky-blue lakes shall spring up the white man's wheat." It was easy for him to think of the Mississippi shores dotted with farms; the valley conquered by the plow. But he could never have believed it if any one had told him of fields of a thousand acres each, of traction plows, of gasolene reapers, and of steam threshers; the inventions and triumphs of the agricultural Northwest.
"To you, O Miller-manitou, shall all the valleys bring their harvests as food to your grindstones." He imagined a line of French donkeys between panniers carrying wheat to the grinders. What would he have thought of a caterpillar truck and its trailers?
"Apprentices of genius shall teach you how to improve your hoppers and your stones." The Frenchman La Croix, an employee in the early mills along this site, proved to be, of all the clever workmen, the one who invented most of the superior processes which make these mills, where he studied, the models of the industrial world.