The colony's engineer, Sieur La Tour, had ordered each householder to put a palisade around his premises and to cut a ditch outside. The levee was made higher and stronger. The assistant engineer, young Pauger, was proud of the system of defense.
"Why so serious a face, my Tony?" he asked. "Are we not protected to please you?"
Anthony could not laugh. "This will be a very wet season."
"How do you know?"
"By the way the sky lowers, the manner in which the beasts take to the uplands, by the odors in the air, and"—here he wagged his head sagely like an oldest inhabitant—"and a feeling in my bones!"
Although Pauger was a hard-headed mathematician, he had faith in such uncanny "signs" as Anthony picked up from the Indians who lived in the open. He always acted upon them seriously. "We must get permission to go up the river and show the smaller outposts our manner of making a dike," he said. "Then will they be secure against the coming freshet."
As the pirogue, which was a tree-trunk hollowed out in boat shape, was being paddled to the north, Pauger inquired: "Why do you look behind us so often, Tony? Do you see any one?"
Anthony shook his head.
"Do you hear something?"