Upon the morning following my discovery of the ring with the ancient setting, we entered one of the great war canoes in company with the Paracousi Emola and eight warriors, and set forth upon our journey to the sea. There was nothing to fear from the Spaniards, for the camp of Emola was in the country of Satouriona, and until we came again within sight of the battlements of Fort San Mateo, there was little danger of discovery; and even had we been attacked we should have been able to give a good account of ourselves. The River of May for a long distance was shallow, but of a great width and seemed like a vast morass. At noon on the following day we set into a current which speedily took us into a deeper channel, where the sand grasses no longer waved beside us. The paddles dipped deep and, as they sent the water gurgling musically astern, put us along down-stream at a fair brave rate.
By and by the Indians told us that Fort San Mateo was but four leagues below; and, as it lacked an hour to sunset, we hauled in our canoe to the bank to await the friendly cover of night before resuming our journey to the sea. But there was little need for precaution, for we saw no sign of human life. We stole along the shadow of the western shore, drifting down with the tide, which was ebbing strongly. At some time after midnight the sound of men’s voices singing a rough chorus came up to us on the wind; and in a while we crept out from behind a point of land to see the lights of Fort San Mateo, lurid and garish, come dancing down to us across the face of the star-sprinkled waters. The Spaniards were making merry, and the hoarse sound of their laughter blasphemed the sweetness of the night, and shivered the silence again and again with its echoes. They had no fear of attack. Had they not swept out of existence a whole nation from these new shores? We saw no sentries upon the bastions even, and passed fairly under the cannon, arousing no challenge or inquiry. When we had passed below the Fort, a desperate sadness fell upon me again at the sight of the familiar shore and hills at which she and I had looked together. I turned my head and looked back as I had on that morning when we went down to the sea to give battle to the Spaniards. I seemed to see her standing there again upon the battlements tall and lithe, looking fearlessly up at me as I told her my fears. The farewell, the tender tears in her eyes, the touch of her fingers, all—all were as real as though it had been but yesterday instead of two long months ago,—months of suffering which had made days into weeks and weeks into years. The pain came again fiercely to my breast and I caught my breath to ease it. The firm fingers of De Brésac closed upon my own as he whispered.
“Courage, mon brave! Courage!”
Ah me! The meaning of the travails through which we are brought to our better understanding are little known of men—nor will be through many generations of time. In a moment or so the pang was past, and in a sudden flash of unreason—Nature’s compensation for her sorrows—I felt again as I had felt before, that Mademoiselle was at that moment somewhere near—not cold in death—but breathing and living. All this in spite of the ring, the silent evidence of the truth of what had been spoken, which I felt at every breath, against my heart.
We had passed a little below the Fort and had drifted toward a bluff of dunes which jutted out into the stream almost athwart our course—for here the channel runs close to the shore. Upon this point grew a thatch of palmetto scrub and knot of stunted firs and pines, whose gnarled branches stretched this way and that, an impenetrable black tangle against the starlit sky. As we came nearer, the dark blur of the branches took a definite form, and we could mark their gentle sway in the breeze. We were bearing toward a sand bar which jutted well out toward the other shore and I would have spoken of it; but as I turned, Emola seized me by the arm, placing his hand upon his mouth in token of silence. He and the warriors were craning their heads toward the out-spreading branches. They sat mute as statues, saying no word. I could not make it out. Long as I stared I saw no sign or heard no movement save the rhythm of the swaying branches.
The silence was broken by one of the Indians beside me who uttered a hoarse sound in his throat, and lifting his head he passed his index finger grimly around his neck. We drifted in again with the current, and in a moment we understood. There, a horrid plaything for the wind of the sea, its clothing limp and loose, we saw a human body, swinging by the neck!
De Brésac started up. “Par la Mort!” he cried. “The infamous ones! Honest braves, fighting for their King, to be given this dog’s death! Come, Emola, land us here. It is too much, mon ami! He shall not hang so!” He was almost sobbing with the stress of his emotion.
The paddles swept us in to the beach and we climbed the dunes to where the body was hung. Over its head that villain had nailed a piece of white bark upon which had been burned the dreadful confession,
“Not As To Frenchmen
But As To Lutherans!”
Tenderly, as though he had been one of those we three most deeply mourned, we cut him down and tried to straighten his poor stiffened limbs. Then we carried him where the sand was soft and with the canoe paddles buried him out of sight. There were others, we knew, for the placard had said it, and three more we saw hung in the same way and bearing the same inscription. These we cut down and buried as we had buried the first, while Emola and his warriors stood by and gravely watched. Then silently as though the hand of death were upon our own hearts, we entered the canoe again and pushed onward.