Both nodded.
"Do they know he has had the fire-water moved away?"
They nodded again.
"Will they believe what he tells them?"
Emphatic bobs of both heads.
With the point of his sword Francis Vigo was drawing a map on the alluvial mud of the inlet. The Indians bent over it. The voyageurs exchanged dismayed glances.
Even before he saw the map it was not hard to guess, that the "merchant of Saint Louis," knowing how to turn greed into profit, had bought the lives of his three followers and had purchased the safety of his home town with the one thing he had to sell—the newly found fur tract.
"They agree to take the beaver dam," was the meaning of one voyageur's sigh.
"They go to it instead of to Vincennes," was the translation of the other's shrug.
Doby thought, "To their old bones, the certainty of furs to bring fire-water is better than the risk of a clash with the whites, who always defeat them."