Coyocop’s prediction was fulfilled at dawn. The year which Doña Julia de Aquilar had passed in the City of the Sun had enabled her to read aright the minds of the sun-worshippers after their moonlit attack upon de Sancerre’s island had been repulsed. They had awaited the coming of their gleaming god, and had been rewarded by a sunrise whose splendor should have filled their childish souls with love and peace. But the mounting orb of day was greeted by its idolaters not with gentle hymns of praise, but with wild, warlike shouts, that echoed from the woods and across the flood with a grim, menacing persistence that sent a chill through the hearts of a maiden and her lover, and caused a dare-devil from the northern woods to look with care to the priming of his gun.
For the first time since Jacques Barbier, in a fit of temper caused by some fancied slight put upon him by the haughty de la Salle, had deserted the great explorer’s party, trusting confidently to his own skill as a woodsman to carry him safely back to Canada, the coureur de bois had regretted, momentarily, his reckless self-confidence. Had he remained with his captain, he might have been, at this time, half-way up the river toward the forests which he knew and loved; and here he was, at the dawn of a day made to give joy to a runner-of-the-woods, surrounded by gigantic, fierce-eyed warriors, already raising hoarse shouts of triumph for the easy victory which seemed to lie within their reach.
“Gar!” exclaimed Barbier, as he raised his gun to his shoulder. “Service with de la Salle was hard, but ’twas easier than death. But, then, ’tis time for me to die. When a wandering outcast from the Court of France comes here to tell me what will happen in the woods—and, pardieu, he told me true—there’s nothing left in life for poor Jacques Barbier!”
A few moments before the coureur de bois had elevated his musket, to begin a battle against overwhelming odds, de Sancerre had said farewell to a heavy-eyed, pale-lipped maiden, who had spent the night in prayer, fearful of the peril which the dawn would bring to a brave knight-errant who had grown dearer to her loving heart with every day that had passed. Well Doña Julia knew that captivity, not death, would be her lot should the sun-worshippers reach the island, but that they would grant mercy to de Sancerre she had no hope. The thought of life without the man whose love had come to her as the rarest gift which Heaven could bestow was a horror which drove the color from her face and robbed her voice of everything save sobs.
“Remember, sweetheart, if the worst should come to me,” said de Sancerre, with forced calmness, bending down to press his cold lips to her trembling hand, “that your brave, earnest heart has taught me how to live and how to die. Pray to the Virgin, who holds you in her care, to keep me always worthy of your love, ’though death should come between us for a time. Adieu, ma chère! God grant ’tis au revoir!”
The girl clung to his hand, wet with her tears, and strove in vain to speak, to put into halting words the love and despair which filled her soul. For an instant her white face looked up at him from the entrance to the hut, and de Sancerre bent forward and kissed her hot, dry lips.
A moment later he had crawled through the tall grass toward the eastern shore of the island and lay watching, once again, the two war-canoes of the black-haired, black-eyed, black-hearted savages who had turned from their adoration of the sun to begin anew their devil’s work. Suddenly a shower of feathered, reed-made arrows whizzed above the gleaming waves, deadly from the speed with which long acacia bows endowed them.
“Ma foi, the sun-wasps begin to sting!” exclaimed de Sancerre. At that instant he heard Jacques Barbier’s gun, warning the sun-worshippers’ land-force not to launch a canoe from the shore nearest to the island.
The Count and the Canadian, an hour before sunrise, had divided the store of bullets which remained to them, and had found that only a dozen shots from each musket stood between them and certain death.
“I know how a miser feels as he counts his gold,” soliloquized de Sancerre, as he aimed his gun at the canoe, from which a broadside of arrows had been launched at his coigne of vantage. “Here goes number one, ma petite! There are only eleven more to defend a Count of Languedoc from the life to come! Bon matin, monsieur!”