Voices rippled from chantey to roundelay and back to chantey again. The river carried the tune afar and the hills echoed and re-echoed it. From the forward canoe an excited arm pointed to Francis Vigo on the height. A full-throated, "Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!" rose to him.
He gave them a military salute.
They answered with cheers and burst into their best melody as they raced into port.
In the confusion of the shadowed landing torches began to glimmer. On the darker places of the river's brink lanterns bobbed. But a nimbus of golden light still shone around the gallant Vigo. And one by one, as they stepped ashore, the voyageurs ran up the slope to greet him—the hero of their hearts!
Doby gazed in amazement at the volatile Frenchmen surrounding him. "Judging by their enthusiasm, every one of these men might have followed him in battle. But they are most of them too young to have fought in 1779, as he did at the capture of Vincennes. They are honoring him for other things which he has done for them."
Truly they loved him for himself and the many brave deeds through which he had carried their kind.
Francis Vigo was a soldier of fortune—a man out of Spain. With one of his mother country's regiments he had come to the West Indies and to New Orleans; afterward on his own account he had traveled up the Mississippi to Fort St. Louis, where he joined a company of traders and was known as the "Merchant of St. Louis."
In his warehouse among his bundles of valuable skins he was the merchant prince who gave thirty thousand dollars—thirty thousand dollars in big Spanish doubloons—round golden doubloons—which he had bartered for and scared out of many a wicked Portuguese pirate who sneaked up the Mississippi to cheat him or to rob him—gave them to feed and equip the army of George Rogers Clark at a time when the Government had no money to finance anything.
Without the help which Vigo gave to Clark, the little American army could not have lived. Without the army the great Northwest could not have been won.
In pursuit of his business and in his joy of the wild, Vigo had often gone up and down the forest paths. He knew the country, was friendly with each trader, and could call every pirogue by its owner's name.