The boy tried again to sing it. Then he managed to whistle it.
"It is an odd sort of music, but I love it. This concert suits the weather better than one of our doleful, slow, wet-blanket hymns," he thought, as he, too, began to sway back and forth. "I can't understand the words. But by the way that buck clutches at his cherished top-knot to emphasize the ditty, it must be some sort of a scalp-song he is singing."
Distant Hurons heard the first notes, saw the movements of the dancers, and came loping up, ready to fall into the vortex of play.
"Never, never, did I hear anything of the kind before," the boy breathed hurriedly, enchanted by the novelty of the hour. "Prick up, my ears, prick up!" He still found the tune difficult.
Indian musical intervals are a little different from the intervals in the white man's conventional scale. It takes a quick ear to catch them. A white man needs to be young and adroit if he hopes to imitate a savage in a native dancing song.
A new note was added to the uproar as a gentle voice said, "Anthony," and an appealing hand was laid on the boy's sleeve. A black-gowned priest had stepped to his side. "Oh, Anthony, help me! My poor children do not know how they profane the church with that murderous song at its very door." The priest could understand the words of the scalp-song and he was filled with anxiety. "Quick! Think! What hymn can we adapt to that tune—that heathen tune? I cannot follow it as you are doing. What hymn can you sing to those measures? What hymn whose words they know? They must be diverted from scalping thoughts. Help me!" and the face of the priest, a Jesuit, young, handsome, pale with zeal, was bent upon his cavorting Indians in deep concern.
The lad, Anthony, called thus to his duty as choir-boy, answered almost at once: "Yes, Père Marquette, I will. Perhaps—perhaps—the Jubilate might do."
"Try it," begged the priest.
"Begin now," insisted a man who was the Jesuit's companion. He also was young, not more than thirty, and plainly a gentleman. He had the air of a soldier. That he was in full sympathy with the priest could be seen in the protecting stand he took beside the Père Marquette as though to make his vigorous body a shield for his slighter friend in case of trouble with the excited savages.
"Begin, Tony," he repeated, sharply. "Scalpsongs started in play may end in deadly earnest. A brutal dance can lead them back to ferocious rites and tangle us all in a massacre."