“I crave your pardon,” he murmured, with the air of a courtier addressing a coquette in the Salon de Venus, while the mocking smile that his face so often wore gleamed in the half-light. “Then I am of the children of the moon?”
“At night ye come from out the shadows of the distant lands, ye white-faced offspring of your Queen, the Moon. The Sun, our God, has told us you would come. Be not afraid. We have rare gifts for you—and loving hearts.”
The harsh, guttural voice in which the aged crone spoke these gentle words added to the uncanny effect of her wrinkled, time-marked face, peering at the smiling Frenchman through the gloom.
“I bring you this,” she went on, still speaking in a mongrel Spanish patois, which de Sancerre found it difficult to interpret. “Remember what I say. The children of the sun send greeting to their brothers of the moon.”
She laid upon the dried grass of his bed a piece of white mulberry bark, upon which de Sancerre’s eyes rested indifferently for an instant. When he raised them again the hag had left his side, and he saw her pushing her way through an opening in the tree-limbs at the further end of the hut. For an instant her diminutive body stopped the gap in the wooden wall. Then, from where he lay, the Frenchman could catch a glimpse of moonbeams on the river through the opening that she had made.
For a moment this strange visitation affected de Sancerre unpleasantly. Surrounded, as their little party was, by unknown tribes with whom the wily Spaniards had had intercourse, the words of the old crone, cordial though they had been in their way, filled the Count with alarm. Furthermore, the ease with which she had made an undiscovered entrance to their hut emphasized the disquiet that he had begun to feel. Thorough soldier as he was, this seemingly harmless invasion of his leader’s quarters became to his mind a more menacing episode the more he weighed it in all its bearings.
Rising noiselessly from his resting-place, de Sancerre made his way between his sleeping comrades to the entrance to the hut. Stepping forth into the white night, he confronted Chatémuc, who still stood motionless in the same spot that he had occupied when La Salle and his companion had returned from the river. The Mohican, from long service with the explorer, had acquired a practical knowledge of the French tongue, but, as a general rule, he made use of it only in monosyllables.
“Chatémuc,” said de Sancerre, sternly, “your eyes are heavy with the moonlight or with sleep. You keep indifferent guard. Did you not see an aged witch who even now stood within the hut and roused me from my sleep?”
The tall Mohican gazed down upon the Frenchman with keen, searching eyes, which glowed at that moment with a fire that proved him innocent either of treason or stupidity. His stern, immobile face gave no indication of the astonishment which the Frenchman’s accusation must have caused him.
“There’s nothing stirring but the river and the leaves,” said Chatémuc, with grim emphasis, turning his shapely head slowly to sweep the landscape in all directions with eyes for which the forest had no mysteries.