I was about to speak again when I noticed a certain tense rigidity in the muscles that lay in beautiful coils and ridges along Tawannears' spine. Simultaneously came a gasp from Corlaer, behind me in the stern of the canoe.
"'Black Robe!'"
I craned my neck to peer over the Seneca's head. Ay, 'twas so. Behind Le Moyne, sitting as motionless as an image upon the hard, narrow thwart, his death's-head of a face turned full upon us was the famous Jesuit, Père Hyacinthe. His gnarled tortured fingers were telling the beads of the rosary that lay across his bony knees. His black soutane fell in straight, severe lines to his sandaled feet. I knew, though I could not see, the terrible scars that the torture-stake had left upon his body for once in the past he had shown them to me. I knew, too, the man's indomitable hatred of all things English, his overweening ambition, fortified by iron will and intense religious conviction, to win the whole Continent for Louis of France and the Church of Rome.
Of all those who labored with tireless devotion to substitute Latin civilization for Anglo-Saxon in the New World, there was none whose aims were more ardently or unselfishly served. Up and down the Wilderness Country he went, always toiling, reckless of hunger, of thirst, of cold, of physical peril. And the savages, with their instinct for the appropriate, had named him Black Robe. By it he was known to many thousands who had never seen him.
A strange man! A man whose mentality had been a little warped by suffering and hardship and over-much concentration upon ecstatic devotion. Fasting and contemplation, loneliness and self-flagellation, abnegation of all things physical, fire torment and knife torment—these had left their mark upon him. If he did harm, he also did good. He was of those fearless ones who carried the Christian faith to recesses of the Wilderness which will not be known to others until our sons' sons push the frontier a thousand leagues nearer to the sunset. He believed that he had no occasion to bother unduly for food, because God would feed him at need, and certes 'tis true he never died of starvation. A strange man! One to be judged without thought to creed or politics.
His face betrayed no emotion as our canoe drew alongside Le Moyne's, and a Marine corporal clutched the gunwale, but his eyes blazed with fanatical intelligence in the deep recesses of their bony sockets. He leaned forward and tapped Le Moyne's shoulder.
"Anti-Christ is come among us," he announced in sepulchral tones. "Here are sons of the English harlot."
Le Moyne frowned slightly. He was a plain soldier-statesman, and no doubt he found it sometimes difficult to accept the priest's high ways. Yet it speaks for Black Robe's influence that he dared not show resentment.
"What mean you, my father?" he asked curtly.
The Jesuit pointed an accusing finger at us.