CHAPTER XXVIII
IN WHICH DE SANCERRE’S ISLAND IS BESIEGED
“Pardieu, Monsieur le Comte, I’ll ne’er forget the scene!” remarked Jacques Barbier, puffing his pipe and lazily watching the smoke as the evening breeze tore it into shreds. Nearly a month had passed since the coureur de bois, with a wild turkey, had helped to make a single shot from de Sancerre’s musket worth its expenditure of powder and ball. During that period, Jacques Barbier, obedient, docile, knowing every secret of the woods and waters, had been a source of never-ending comfort to the French count. With a tactfulness which he would have been incompetent to employ a year before this crisis, de Sancerre had attached the Canadian youth to his fortunes without arousing the restless, reckless spirit of revolt which made a coureur de bois, in those wild times, an unreliable ally and a mutinous subordinate.
There were, however, other things besides de Sancerre’s diplomacy which had tended to keep Jacques Barbier contented with his lot for the time being. The necessity for obtaining food without betraying their hiding-place to savage men, hot upon their trail, had taxed the Canadian’s ingenuity and had aroused his pride as a woodsman. He had listened with close attention to de Sancerre’s tale, and had agreed with Doña Julia that the sun-worshippers would not abandon the quest of their goddess as long as their resources for her pursuit held out. By Barbier’s advice and assistance, de Sancerre had erected two small huts upon an insignificant island in the western branch of the great river’s mouth, and here they had passed several weeks in peace and plenty, weeks which had restored brilliancy to Doña Julia’s eyes and color to her cheeks and lips, while they had revived her champion’s spirits and had brought back mincing lightness to his step and gayety to his ready smile.
Their retreat had not been invaded by the degenerate savages along the river-banks. Now and then they would catch a glimpse upon the river of a distant canoe in which copper-colored sportsmen were attempting to lure the ugly catfish from the muddy waters of the turgid stream, and once, far to the northward, they observed a war-canoe putting out from the eastern shore and urged up-stream by paddles which glistened in the sunlight.
Once in awhile, Jacques Barbier would return from the forest, laden with game-birds, to tell a highly-colored story of redmen whose keen eyes he had avoided through the potency of his marvellous woodcraft. But the month of June, known to the sun-worshippers as the moon of watermelons, had reached a ripe age, and the island’s refugees found themselves well-housed, well-fed, and free, as far as they could observe, from the machinations of cruel foes. Sanguine by temperament and easily influenced by his environment, de Sancerre had put himself into opposition to the belief, held by Doña Julia and Jacques Barbier, that the sun-priests and their tools would descend to the gulf, by land or water, in search of Coyocop. He had eliminated from his mind the thought of peril at his back and had turned his face toward the sea, thinking only of succor from a passing ship.
It was with the hope that European sailors would come to them from the gulf that de Sancerre had fastened a piece of white canvas, which he had found among the débris of de la Salle’s encampment, to the top of the King’s Column. From where he sat at twilight in front of the rude hut occupied by Jacques Barbier and himself, de Sancerre could look across the narrow streak of water between his island and the main-land and see his signal of distress flapping lazily in the evening breeze. Now and then the bright, restless eyes of the coureur de bois would rest protestingly upon the white flag. To his mind, the rag was more likely to bring upon them enemies from the woods than friends from the lonely sea. Jacques Barbier hated the ocean with an intensity only equalled by the fervor of his love for the forest wilds.
On the evening to which reference is now made, the coureur de bois had grown unwontedly loquacious, as he smoked his evening pipe, and glanced alternately at Doña Julia and de Sancerre, as, hand clasped in hand, they listened to the usually taciturn Canadian’s account of the ceremonies attending the erection of the King’s Column and the Cross of Christ.
“Pardieu, Monsieur le Comte, I’ll ne’er forget the scene! We, that is your countrymen and mine, were mustered under arms, while behind us stood the Mohicans and Abenakis, with the squaws and pappooses whom they had brought with them to make trouble for us all. Père Membré, in full canonicals, looking like a saint just come to earth from Paradise, intoned a Latin chant. Then we all raised our voices and sang a hymn:
“‘The banners of Heaven’s King advance,
The mystery of the Cross shines forth.’