Once it rained, drenching us to the skin, and driving us to shelter in an island cove. Once a sudden storm swept the lake, and we barely made land in time to save us from wreck, Chevet’s canoe smashing 169 an ugly hole in its bow, and a soldier dislocating his shoulder in the struggle. The accident held us for some hours, and later, when once more afloat, retarded progress.
This misfortune served also to restore Monsieur Cassion to his natural ill temper, and led to a quarrel between himself and Chevet which might have ended seriously had I not intervened. The incident, however, left the Commissaire in ugly mood, and caused him to play the bully over his men. To me he was sullen, after an attempt at insolence, and sat glowering across the water, meditating revenge.
At last we left the chain of islands behind, and one morning struck out from the shore into the waste of waters, the prows of the canoes turned westward, the steersman guiding our course by the sun. For several hours we were beyond view of land, with naught to rest the eye upon save the gray sea, and then, when it was nearly night, we reached the shore, and beached our canoes at St. Ignace.
CHAPTER XIV
AT ST. IGNACE
So much had been said of St. Ignace, and so long had the name been familiar throughout New France, that my first view of the place brought me bitter disappointment. The faces of the others in our party pictured the same disillusion.
Hugo Chevet had been in these parts before on fur-trading expeditions, and ’twas probable that De Artigny had stopped there on one of his voyages with La Salle. But to all the others the place had been merely a name, and our imagination had invested it with an importance scarcely justified by what we saw as our canoes drew in toward the beach.
The miserable little village was upon a point of land, originally covered with heavy growth of forest. A bit of this had been rudely cut, the rotting stumps still standing, and from the timber a dozen rough log houses had been constructed facing the lake. A few rods back, on slightly higher land, was a log chapel, and a house, somewhat more pretentious than the others, in which the priests lodged. The whole aspect of the place was peculiarly desolate and depressing, 171 facing that vast waste of water, the black forest shadows behind, and those rotting stumps in the foreground.