“Good-night, monsieur,” faltered the girl, tears born of gratitude and physical weariness dimming the dark beauty of her eyes.
“Good-night,” he said, bending to touch her white hand with his lips. Then he drew himself erect, trembling as if the damp breeze from the river had chilled his overwrought frame. Suddenly he clasped the weeping girl to his breast, and his lips met hers in a kiss which crowned the miracle the saints had wrought for them.
“My love! My love!” whispered de Sancerre; and when he reached the moonlit night outside the hut again it seemed to him that the river and the forest had changed their outlines to his eyes and that he stood within the confines of a paradise. He seated himself upon the sloping margin of the stream, vainly attempting to recall his soaring thoughts to the homely exigencies of his grim environment. It was no paradise by which he was surrounded. A lonely flood finding its way to a lonely sea lay before his eyes, while at his back stood a pathless wilderness through which, even at this moment, black-hearted fanatics, skilled in woodcraft, might be following his trail. This dark thought, clouding the splendor of a dream begotten by a kiss, led de Sancerre, almost unconsciously, to take from the ground at his side the awkward musket with which chance had armed him. He longed to test its prowess as an ally, to prove to his troubled mind that dampness and neglect had not robbed the flintlock of its heritage. With no intention of giving way to the curiosity which assailed him, the Frenchman carefully loaded the gun with powder and ball and raised it affectionately to his shoulder. In that hour of peril and loneliness the musket seemed to be a friend speaking to him of de la Salle’s loyalty and persistence and of the certainty that his return from the gulf could not be long delayed.
Suddenly an uncanny premonition crept over de Sancerre, whose nervous energy had been exhausted by a day and night of strangely-contrasted emotions and by a physical strain whose reaction was now taking its revenge. Turning his back to the river, de Sancerre’s restless eyes swept the black, threatening line of the forest, behind which the moon was drooping. Presently his heart seemed to clutch his throat and the long barrel of the musket trembled as his hand shook for an instant. At the edge of the woods, two hundred yards beyond the camp, stood a white, naked thing, resembling in outline a man, but as shadowy and ghostly as a creature made of moonbeams. It stood erect for a moment and then bent down as if it would crawl back into the forest upon all fours.
Impulsively, de Sancerre covered the apparition with his gun and snapped the steel against the flint. A crash, echoing across the startled flood, and hurled back in anger by the bushes and the trees, made sudden war upon the silence of the stately night. When the smoke from the friendly gun—in good case to serve the Frenchman’s ends—had cleared away, de Sancerre saw no ghastly victim of his marksmanship lying in white relief against the black outline of the woods. “Mayhap,” he reflected, “my bullet passed through a shadow not of earth! Don Joseph? Perhaps I drew him back from hell with that dear kiss I won! But what mad thoughts are these? ’Twas but a gray wolf in the scrub, or a vision raised by my own weariness. At all events, ma petite,” he exclaimed, patting the smoking musket contentedly, “there’s now no doubt that you and I agree.”
A soft touch fell upon de Sancerre’s arm, and, turning, he looked into the white, agitated face of Doña Julia.
“Fear not, señora,” he exclaimed, earnestly. “Forgive me that I disturbed your rest. But it seemed best to me to try the temper of this clumsy gun. ’Tis always well to know how great may be the prowess of an ally whom you have gained.”
Her dark eyes were reading his face closely.
“They have not found us?” she asked, eagerly. “You did not shoot at men?”
“Only at a target made by dreams,” he answered, reassuringly. “I shot at the phantom of my hate, ma chère, and, lo! it brought my love to me.”