Doby's rather cool blood began to run faster and his heart to pound with sympathetic interest as, scrambling for turns, the voyageurs fell upon Francis Vigo's neck, kissed his hands, and laughed aloud or wept outright in their delight at the meeting.
One old fellow, in an abandonment of affection, threw himself upon the ground and laid his forehead against the Spaniard's shoe, bathing it with his tears.
"O-o-h," cried Doby. "O-o-h! That is my voyageur! The one who brought my rifle! He was servant to Francis Vigo when they were both taken as spies at Vincennes, by the British Governor Hamilton. He told me so himself." Here the contagion of the old voyageur's devotion caught Doby and he had to swallow a sob or two. "It's perfectly right for him to be upset by memories. For when the Jesuit Father Gibault persuaded Hamilton to release Francis Vigo, this voyageur and that other old one went back with the Merchant of St. Louis to Colonel Clark at Kaskaskia and helped plan the attack which captured Vincennes." And Doby took off his cap and waved it and shouted with the best of them:
"Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!"
By the next morning's light, at call of reveille, these voyageurs, who had gathered from all points of the compass, made ready to set off for their various stations to begin their winter's work of trapping or of gathering skins from Indians and settlers.
In one of the canoes, in plain attire, sat Francis Vigo and the oldest voyageur—his one-time servant. In another canoe sat the second voyageur of Vigo's historic spying expedition and—looking very conscious of himself and of his newly acquired servant—Doby! bound on a secret errand in the service of his country!
"We need young blood for our nation's future growth," Francis Vigo had said overnight to Mr. Holman. "Give me your son for my assistant on this voyage for the Government. I will train him—make a patriot of him."
Now Mr. Holman knew that Francis Vigo was the one man in the great valley whom Gen. William Henry Harrison had trusted to influence the Indians and the voyageurs in the troubled times before the War of 1812; the one who could go back and forth with negotiations to the Indians' Prophetstown on the Tippecanoe. Both races put their faith and their national confidence in this man. He was their ideal of justice.
So Mr. Holman, whose entire stock of cash in hand was three Spanish dollars—those storied "pieces of eight"—did not hesitate, during his conversation with Francis Vigo, to lay these silver coins on the town blacksmith's anvil as an answer to the request for the boy's services.
The blacksmith had cut each one up into eight sections, like a pie. Two of these "bits" made a "quarter," and six of them equaled seventy-five cents.