"Friends, friends!" Celeste called out; for the young men in buckskin, with their booty of driven horses, were enough like Puants to be in danger of a volley. "It is Celeste. Gabriel Chartrant and his men have killed the Indians and brought me back."
"It is Celeste Barbeau! Gabriel Chartrant and his men have killed the
Indians and brought her back!" the word was passed on.
Her grandfather hung to her hand on one side of the horse, and her grandmother embraced her knees on the other. The old father was in his red nightcap and the old mother had pulled slippers on her bare feet. But without a thought of their appearance they wept aloud and fell on the neighbors' necks, and the neighbors fell upon each others' necks. Some kneeled down in the dust and returned thanks to the saints they had invoked. The auberge keeper and three old men who smoked their pipes steadily on his gallery every day took hold of hands and danced in a circle. Children who had waked to shriek with fear galloped the streets to proclaim at every window, "Celeste Barbeau is brought back!" The whole town was in a delirium of joy. Manette Le Compt, who had been brought home with the terrified bridesmaids and laughed in her sleeve all day because she thought Gabriel and his men were the Puants, leaned against a wall and turned sick. I have heard her say she never was so confused in her life as when she saw the driven horses, and the firearms, and those coarse-haired scalps hanging to Le Maudit Pensonneau's belt. The moon showed them all distinctly. Manette had thought it laughable when she heard that Alexis Barbeau was shut up in his brick house at Prairie du Pont, with all the men and guns he could muster to protect his property; but now she wept indignantly about it.
The priest had been the first man in the street, having lain down in all his clothes except his cassock, and he heartily gave Celeste and the young men his blessing, and counseled everybody to go to bed again. But Celeste reminded them that she was hungry, and as for the rescuers, they had ridden hard all day without a mouthful to eat. So the whole town made a feast, everybody bringing the best he had to Barbeau's house. They spread the table and crowded around, leaning over each, other's shoulders to take up bits in their hands and eat with and talk to the young people. Gabriel's mother sat beside him with her arm around him, and opposite was Celeste with her grandfather and grandmother, and all the party were ranged around. The feathers had been blown out of their hair by that long chase, but their buckskins were soiled, and the hastily washed colors yet smeared their ears and necks. Yet this supper was quite like a bridal feast. Ah, my child, we never know it when we are standing in the end of the rainbow. Gabriel and Celeste might live a hundred years, but they could never be quite as happy again.
Paul and Jacques Le Page sat down with the other young men, and the noise of tongues in Barbeau's house could be heard out by the rigolé. It was like the swarming of wild bees. Paul and Jacques had waited with the boat until nightfall. They heard the firing when the Puants took Celeste, and watched hour after hour for some one to appear from the path; but at last concluding that Gabriel had been obliged to change his plan, they rowed back to Caho'.
Claudis Beauvois was the only person who did not sit up talking until dawn. And nobody thought about him until noon the next day, when Captain Jean Saucier with a company of fusileers rode into the village from Fort Chartres.
That was the first time my mother ever saw Captain Saucier. Your uncle François in Kaskaskia, he was also afterward Captain Saucier. I was not born until they had been married fifteen years. I was the last of their children. So Celeste Barbeau was kidnaped the day before my mother met my father.
Glad as the Cahokians were to see them, the troops were no longer needed, for the Puants had gone. They were frightened out of the country. Oh, yes, all those Indians wanted was a good whipping, and they got it. Alexis Barbeau had come along with the soldiers from Prairie du Pont, and he was not the only man who had made use of military escort. Basil Le Page had come up from New Orleans in the last fleet of pirogues to Kaskaskia. There he heard so much about the Puants that he bought a swift horse and armed himself for the ride northward, and was glad when he reached Fort Chartres to ride into Cahokia with Captain Saucier.
You might say Basil Le Page came in at one end of Cahokia and Claudis
Beauvois went out at the other. For they knew one another directly,
and it was noised in a minute that Basil said to his cousins Paul and
Jacques:—
"What is that notorious swindler and gambler doing here? He left New Orleans suddenly, or he would be in prison now, and you will see if he stops here long after recognizing me."