“Ma foi, my Chatémuc! You’re as proud and stubborn as de Groot, the Hollander. But follow me. I’ll show you a hole that proves I dreamed no dream.”
De Sancerre, behind whom stalked the stately Mohican, made his way hurriedly to the further side of the hut. Pointing to an opening between the logs, through which a small boy might have crawled, the Count said:
“Behold, monsieur, the yawning chasm in your reputation as a sentry! ’Twould not admit an army, but it might serve for a snake.”
Chatémuc had fallen upon his knees, and was examining the aperture and the trampled grass which led to it. Presently he arose and turned towards the Count.
“A woman,” he muttered. “Small. Light. Old.”
“Fine woodcraft, Chatémuc! You read the blazonry that crossed the drawbridge with great skill—after the castle has been captured. But let it pass. No harm’s been done, save that your pride has had a fall. And so I leave you to your watch again. If you loved me, Chatémuc, you’d keep old women from my midnight couch. I fear my sleep is lost.”
Stealing noiselessly past the motionless forms of La Salle, the friar, and the Italian captain, after his successful demonstration of Chatémuc’s negligence as a sentinel, de Sancerre approached his tumbled bed of leaves with weary step. A feeling of depression, a sudden realization of the horrid possibilities that his environment suggested, a sensation of impotent rebellion at the fate that had hurled him from the very centre of seventeenth-century civilization into the rude embrace of a horror-haunted wilderness, came suddenly upon the vivacious Frenchman, mocking at his stoical views of life and making of the satirical tendency of his mind a knife with which to cut himself.
“Nom de Dieu!” he muttered, as he gazed down upon the dry grass and leaves of his uninviting couch, “these be fine lodgings for a Count of Languedoc! At the worst, with Turenne, there was always Versailles at our rear.”
At that instant his heavy eyes lighted upon the slip of white bark which his recent caller had left with him as a token of good-will. De Sancerre bent down and, grasping the seemingly meaningless gift, gazed at it inquiringly. To his amazement, he made out in the darkness what seemed to him to be a bit of writing, scratched with a pointed instrument upon this fragment from a mulberry bush. Hastily, stealthily, making his way to the opening through which the donor of the gift had forced her exit, the Count leaned forward, and in the moonlight read, with wondering eyes, the name:
Julia de Aquilar