Helm had an eye to business, and turned M. Roussillon's knowledge of the Indians to valuable account, so that he soon had very pleasant relations with most of the tribes within reach of his agents. This gave a feeling of great security to the people of Vincennes. They pursued their narrow agricultural activities with excellent results and redoubled those social gayeties which, even in hut and cabin under all the adverse conditions of extreme frontier life, were dear to the volatile and genial French temperament.
Lieutenant Beverley found much to interest him in the quaint town; but the piece de resistance was Oncle Jazon, who proved to be both fascinating and unmanageable; a hard nut to crack, yet possessing a kernel absolutely original in flavor. Beverley visited him one evening in his hut—it might better be called den—a curiously built thing, with walls of vertical poles set in a quadrangular trench dug in the ground, and roofed with grass. Inside and out it was plastered with clay, and the floor of dried mud was as smooth and hard as concrete paving. In one end there was a wide fireplace grimy with soot, in the other a mere peep-hole for a window: a wooden bench, a bed of skins and two or three stools were barely visible in the gloom. In the doorway Oncle Jazon sat whittling a slender billet of hickory into a ramrod for his long flint-lock American rifle.
"Maybe ye know Simon Kenton," said the old man, after he and Beverley had conversed for a while, "seeing that you are from Kentucky—eh?"
"Yes, I do know him well; he's a warm personal friend of mine," said Beverley with quick interest, for it surprised him that Oncle Jazon should know anything about Kenton. "Do you know him, Monsieur Jazon?"
Oncle Jazon winked conceitedly and sighted along his rudimentary ramrod to see if it was straight; then puckering his lips, as if on the point of whistling, made an affirmative noise quite impossible to spell.
"Well, I'm glad you are acquainted with Kenton," said Beverley. "Where did you and he come together?"
Oncle Jazon chuckled reminiscently and scratched the skinless, cicatrized spot where his scalp had once flourished.
"Oh, several places," he answered. "Ye see thet hair a hangin' there on the wall?" He pointed at a dry wisp dangling under a peg in a log barely visible by the bad light. "Well, thet's my scalp, he! he! he!" He snickered as if the fact were a most enjoyable joke. "Simon Kenton can tell ye about thet little affair! The Indians thought I was dead, and they took my hair; but I wasn't dead; I was just a givin' 'em a 'possum act. When they was gone I got up from where I was a layin' and trotted off. My head was sore and ventrebleu! but I was mad, he! he! he!"
All this time he spoke in French, and the English but poorly paraphrases his odd turns of expression. His grimaces and grunts cannot even be hinted.
It was a long story, as Beverley received it, told scrappily, but with certain rude art. In the end Oncle Jazon said with unctuous self-satisfaction: