“St. Maturin help me!” he exclaimed, in a voice suggesting a parched throat. “Is it friend or foe? I thought, ma petite, that you had no kinsman within the radius of many miles.”
Striving by gestures to urge Doña Julia to conceal herself behind the King’s Column, de Sancerre, with his musket at his shoulder, stretched himself at full length upon the grass, and, while his heart beat with suffocating rapidity, watched with straining eyes a grove of leafy trees from which the ominous reply to his gun had been made. Suddenly in front of him, almost within a stone’s-throw, stood a tall, slender man, clad in the unseasonable costume of a Canadian courier de bois. He carried a smoking musket in his hand. At his belt dangled a hatchet, a bullet-pouch, and a bag of tobacco. In a leather case at his neck hung his only permanent friend, his pipe.
“St. Maturin be praised!” cried de Sancerre, springing to his feet and raising his musket to arm’s-length above his head. “’Tis that rebellious rascal, Jacques Barbier! Bienvenue, Jacques! In the name of all the saints at once, how came you here?”
“Gar!” exclaimed the lawless runner-of-the-woods, throwing himself at full length upon the grass, and gazing up at de Sancerre with a smile, hard to analyze, upon his sun-burned, handsome, self-willed face. “It is Monsieur le Comte! My eyes are quick, monsieur. I do not wonder that you stayed behind.”
Displaying his white teeth mischievously, the coureur de bois, a deserter from de la Salle’s band of Indians and outcasts, waved a brown hand toward the King’s Column.
Hot with anger at the insolence of the outlaw though he was, de Sancerre controlled his temper and said calmly, but in a tone of voice which had a restraining effect upon the bushranger:
“’Tis a long story, Jacques! I found a Spanish princess in a city built by devils. You’ve come to me in time to take a hand in a merry little war between the sun and moon. No, Jacques! You’re wrong. I can read your mind at once. You think the wilderness has robbed me of my wits. But come! There is much to do, and I must question you about my captain and why I find you here alone. Bring that nut-fattened turkey up the hill, and we will work and talk and make what plans we may.”
The outlaw, whose life had been one long protest against the authority of other men, arose from the ground, with lazy nonchalance, and gazed down at the wild-fowl which de Sancerre had shot. The Frenchman had turned away and was breaking his path through the long, dry grass toward the crest of the hill, from which Doña Julia had been watching a rencontre the outcome of which she had no way of predicting.
Jacques Barbier gazed alternately upward at the retreating figure of de Sancerre and downward at the wild turkey at his feet. Then, with a protesting smile upon his symmetrical, but half-savage, face, he bent down and raised the fat fowl to his shoulder and followed Monsieur le Comte toward the King’s Column. De Sancerre had gained for a time—short or long, as the case might be—an ally whose woodcraft was as brilliant as his lawlessness was incorrigible.
“Jubilate, señora,” cried the count, as he approached Doña Julia. “The saints have been more than kind! They have filled our larder, doubled our fighting force, and made me younger by ten years. But, señora, ’tis not a pious friend whom I have found! This same Jacques Barbier’s a devil, in his way. Wear this, my dagger, at your waist, ma chère! I know that you dare use it, should the need arise.”