“Monsieur de Tonty,” resumed Barbe, “do you remember Jeanne le Ber?”
“Mademoiselle, I never saw her.”
“She refused my uncle La Salle at Fort Frontenac, and I detested her for it. In the new church at Montreal she has had a cell made behind the altar. There she prays day and night. She wears only a blanket, but the nun who feeds her says her face is like an angel’s. Monsieur, Jeanne le Ber fell with her head bumping the floor,—and I understood her. She had a spirit fit to match with my uncle La Salle’s. She thought she was right. I forgave her then, for I know, monsieur, she loved my uncle La Salle.”
When Barbe had spoken such daring words she stepped inside her tent and dropped its curtain.
[III.]
HALF-SILENCE.
The October of the Mississippi valley—full of mild nights and mellow days and the shine of ripened corn—next morning floated all the region around Fort St. Louis in silver vapor. The two small cannon on the Rock began to roar salutes as soon as Tonty’s line of canoes appeared moving down the river.
To Barbe this was an enchanted land. She sat by the Demoiselle Bellefontaine and watched its populous beauty unfold. Blue lodge-smoke arose everywhere. Tonty pointed out the Shawnee settlement eastward, and the great town of the Illinois northwest of the Rock,—a city of high lodges shaped like the top of a modern emigrant wagon. He told where Piankishaws and Weas might be distinguished, how many Shawanoes were settled beyond the ravine back of the Rock, and how many thousand people, altogether, were collected in this principality of Monsieur de la Salle.