“Mother of Mary! I fear me this is sacrilege,” muttered the friar, nervously seeking his breviary beneath the white uniform of a lost sun-worshipper. “Satis, superque! You’ll make my face, old woman, as black as Satan’s heart! The saints forgive me! Were not my life of value to the Church, I’d gladly die before I’d don this ghostly livery of sin.”
Meanwhile de Sancerre had been straining his weary eyes in the effort to scratch a message to de la Salle with his dagger’s-point upon a slip of white bark.
“The Spanish have tampered with a mighty nation,” he wrote. “I remain to learn the truth; to find a way to win them to our king. Camp where you are when you return. I’ll learn of your approach, rejoin you then, and bring you news most worthy your concern. Au revoir, mon capitaine! For France, with sword and crucifix!”
As he scrawled his signature beneath these words, Katonah glided silently to his side, a maiden whose grace was not destroyed by her unwonted garb, a costume enhancing the dark beauty of her proud, melancholy face. Her light hand rested gently upon his arm for a moment.
“The good father tells me that you would have me go,” she murmured in a voice of mingled resignation and regret. De Sancerre, handing her the slip of mulberry bark upon which he had scratched a message to his leader, smiled up into the yearning face of the lonely girl.
“Give this to our captain, Sieur de la Salle,” he said, sharply. “Fail not, Katonah! My life, I think, depends upon this scrawl.”
A smile flashed across the maiden’s mournful face as she pressed the bark to her bosom, heaving with a conflict of emotions to which no words of hers could give relief.
“His hand shall hold it ere the sun is up,” she said, simply. “Farewell!”
De Sancerre, looking up into the girl’s eyes felt, with amazement, the tears creeping into his. He bent his head and imprinted a kiss upon her slender, trembling hand, which felt like ice beneath his lips.
“Courage, ma petite!” he cried, with forced gayety. “You will return anon! And then, the river once again, and home—and friends—and—”