Dollard stood near the brink of the river watching the rapids. His scouts had already encountered some canoes full of Iroquois coming down the Ottawa, and in a skirmish two of the enemy escaped. The main body, hastened by these refugees, must soon reach the Long Saut, unless they were determined utterly to reject and avoid the encounter, which it was scarcely in the nature of Iroquois to do.
No canoes yet appeared on the rapids, but against the river’s southward sweep rode a new little craft holding two women. Having crossed the current below and hugged the western shore, this canoe shot out before Dollard’s eyes as suddenly as an electric lancet unsheathed by clouds.
He blanched to his lips, and made a repellent gesture with both hands as if he could put back the woman of his love out of danger as swiftly and unaccountably as she put herself into it. But his only reasonable course was to drag up the canoe when Massawippa beached it.
The half-breed girl leaped out like a fawn and ran up the slope. Annahotaha came striding down to meet her, and as she caught him around the body he lifted his knife as if the impulse which drove the arm of Virginius had been reborn in a savage of the New World. Massawippa showed her white teeth in rapturous smiling. So absolute was her trust in him that she waited thus whatever act his superior wisdom must dictate. That unflinching smile brought out its answer on his countenance. A copper glow seemed to fuse his features into grotesquely passionate tenderness. He turned his back towards his braves and hugged the child to his breast, smoothing her wings of black hair and uttering guttural murmurs which probably expressed that superlative nonsense mothers talk in the privacy of civilized nurseries.
But Claire, pink as a rose from sun and wind, her head covered by a parchment bonnet of birch bark instead of the cap she lost at the island, her satin tatters carefully drawn together with fibers from porcupine quills and loosened from the girdle to flow around her worn moccasins, and radiant as in her loveliest moments, stretched her hands for Dollard’s help.
He lifted her out of the canoe and placed her upon the ground; he knelt before her and kissed both of her hands.
“Good-morning, monsieur!” said Claire, triumphantly. “You left no command against my following the expedition.”
That palpitating presence which we call life seemed to project itself beyond their faces and to meet. Her pinkness and triumph were instantly gone in the whiter heat of spiritual passion. She began to sob, and Dollard stood up strongly holding her in his arms.
“The paving-stone where you knelt—how I kissed it—how I kissed it!”