“Are the Indian women beautiful, Monsieur de Tonty?”
“They do not appear so to me, mademoiselle, though the Illinois are a straight and well-made race.”
“You must find it a grand thing to range that western country.”
“But in the midst of our grandeur the Iroquois threaten us even there. How would mademoiselle like to mediate between these invaders and the timid Illinois, suspected by one tribe and threatened by the other; to carry the wampum belt of peace on the open field between two armies, and for your pains get your scalp-lock around the fingers of a Seneca chief and his dagger into your side?”
“Oh, monsieur!” whispered Barbe, flushing with the wild pinkness of roses on the plains, “what amusements you do have in the great west! And is it a castle on a mountain, that Fort St. Louis of the Illinois?”
“A stockade on a cliff, mademoiselle.”
Tonty felt impelled to put himself nearer this delicate head set with fine small ears and quartered by the angles of the window-frame. When she meditated, her lashes and brows and aquiline curves and gray tones flushing to rose were delightful to a wilderness-saturated man. But he held to his strict position as sentinel.
“Monsieur,” said Barbe, “there is something on my mind which I will tell you. I was thinking of the new world my uncle La Salle discovered, even before you came to Montreal. Now I think constantly of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Monsieur, I dream of it,—I go in long journeys and never arrive; I see it through clouds, and wide rivers flow between it and me; and I am homesick. Yes, monsieur, that is the strangest thing,—I have cried of homesickness for Fort St. Louis of the Illinois!”
“Mademoiselle,” said Tonty, his voice vibrating, “there is a stranger thing. It is this,—that a man with a wretched hand of iron should suddenly find within himself a heart of fire!”
When this confession had burst from him he turned his back without apology, and Barbe’s forehead sunk upon the window-sill.