The red-fringed twilight had lost its glow, and the zenith had pinned a star upon its breast before Juan Rodriquez, still trembling at the miracle that he had seen, found courage to slink westward along the shore. Behind him dead men seemed to stalk, following his footsteps with grim persistence, while somewhere from the hills upon his right the eyes of angels searched his very soul. On across the beach he hurried, while the waters of the gulf turned black, and the dread silence of the night was broken only by the gossip of the waves, telling the sands a horrid secret that they had learned.

Alone with his thoughts, with the memory of dark crimes upon his soul, Juan strove through the long night to cast far behind him the haunted shore upon which angels came and went. The interplay of life and death had left him only this—the hope of wealth. Had he known that between him and the silver mines that he sought lay more than a thousand weary miles, he would have made a pillow of the sand in his despair.

CHAPTER X
IN WHICH THE CROSS IS CARRIED TO A CITY OF
IDOLATERS

“I have learned something of these proud pagans, Chatémuc. They are worshippers of fire; fruit ripe to pluck, to the greater glory of Mother Church.”

The Mohican grunted in acquiescence as he strode forward, a copper-colored giant by the side of the gray-garbed, undersized Franciscan.

Beneath budding trees and along a flower-haunted trail went de la Salle’s envoys to the children of the sun. It was high noon, and the god of the idolaters shone down upon those who would dethrone him as a deity with a kindly radiance behind which no malice lurked. Mayhap the warm-hearted luminary had grown weary of the human sacrifices offered up by his deluded worshippers, and was pleased to see the gentle Membré carrying a cross, symbol of a faith which demands for its altars no gifts but contrite hearts, toward a blood-stained city in which a savage cult still lay as a curse upon a race endowed by nature with many kindly traits.

Between Membré, the friar, and Chatémuc, the Mohican, had long existed a cordial friendship, based, in part, upon hardships and dangers shared together, but more especially upon the relationship existing between them of a missionary to a convert. Of the many native Americans who had become good children of Mother Church under the inspiring influence of the magnetic Franciscan none had been more faithful to his adopted religion than the stately Mohican, whose proud, reserved, but inherently enthusiastic temperament derived warmth and inspiration from the friar’s exalted soul. Of late years much of Zenobe Membré’s success as a proselyter had been due to long and earnest consultations held in the wilderness with Chatémuc, an Indian understanding Indians, and a Roman Catholic who spoke French.

Just in front of the Mohican and the Franciscan walked Katonah by the side of de Sancerre; a forest belle attended by a courtly swain. Used as he was to the startling contrasts which the exodus of Europeans to the New World had begotten in such abundance, the friar had been struck by the incongruity of this pair, who laughed and chatted just beyond him with a gayety born of the sunshine and the spring.

At the head of the little procession strode the soldierly Henri de Tonti, attended on either hand by a long-limbed child of the sun. The Italian veteran looked like a pygmy beside his tall, white-garbed, black-haired guides, who stalked along on his flanks with a stately grace which had aroused the enthusiastic admiration of de Sancerre, a cosmopolite who had in his time looked upon many well-formed warriors both in the Old World and the New.

“They worship fire, Chatémuc,” repeated the Franciscan, earnestly, after a moment’s silence. “Their god is the sun, and they have a priesthood whose duty it is to keep alive in their temple a blaze of logs, first lighted, generations back, by the sun itself.”