Gleaming in the moonlight at his feet, the long barrel of a flintlock musket pointed straight at a powder-horn and a bag of bullets, as if the weapon, lacking nourishment, prayed to be recharged. Bending down, de Sancerre raised the clumsy gun and examined its mechanism with the eagerness of a shipwrecked mariner toward whose raft the sea had tossed a chest which might, when opened, gladden his eyes with food.
Doña Julia and Noco stood behind the Frenchman watching his movements with eyes in which curiosity had conquered the heaviness of dire fatigue.
“This, Mademoiselle de Aquilar,” explained de Sancerre, balancing the heavy musket in his hand, “is the fusil ordinaire, or snaphance gun. I have heard young hotspurs in the low countries—who knew little of the rapier’s niceties—assert that, at close quarters, its butt-end is more deadly than a sword. Of its merits in a mêlée I am not ripe to speak, but I learned, while yet I lingered with Count Frontenac, to drive a bullet through a distant tree. The weapon has its use! You may thank the saints, mademoiselle, for this gun and powder-horn. ’Twill serve my turn if my captain’s careless redmen have left no eatables in yonder huts.”
“Ah, well I knew, monsieur, you had not come to me in vain!” exclaimed Doña Julia, a glad smile gleaming in her eloquent eyes, beneath which rested the dark shadows of physical exhaustion. “The saints have led your steps to where the musket lay!”
“Mais, oui! But tell not Noco this. Her ears must harken to another tale.”
Turning to gaze down at the silent beldame, the fiery brightness of whose busy eyes the strain of a forced march at midnight had not dimmed, ’though her face twitched with fatigue and her scrawny hands shook in the moonlight, de Sancerre said:
“The Brother of the Moon is glad, señora, for my god has put into my hands the thunder and the lightning—to call Cabanacte from the wilds and to smite the sun-priests if they follow us. To-morrow I will make the echoes of the forest lead your grandson to us here. But now we must have rest, for Coyocop is weary, and the dawn must find us up.”
St. Maturin, the friend of fools, still played de Sancerre’s game. As the Frenchman, followed by the women, to whom each step they took was now a hardship, entered the nearest hut, he saw at once that his withdrawal from de la Salle’s expedition, and the loss of Chatémuc and Katonah, had led the explorer to lighten his equipment by the contents of one canoe, intending, doubtless, to retake the stores upon his return should circumstances make them again of value to him. A boat-load of corn-meal and gunpowder had been stored in the hut in the hope that neither the weather nor roving savages would deprive the returning explorers of its use.
“Nom de Dieu!” cried the Frenchman, gayly, as he pointed to the godsend which made his light heart lighter. “There lie food and ammunition. ’Tis true, indeed, that Heaven has been kind to us! And so I leave you, Mademoiselle de Aquilar, to your prayers and sleep. I must make further search.”
Old Noco, who had paid out the last link of her energy, had made a shake-down of the meal-bags, and her labored breathing proved that her aged bones were finding the rest they craved. De Sancerre held Doña Julia’s cold, trembling hand in his and gazed upon her weary face for a long moment, whose very silence was eloquent with words he could not speak.