The young Creole's ideas were not strange, his upbringing considered. He had stood in 1803, a boy of eight, beside his father on the Place d'Armes of New Orleans and watched the French flag descend slowly from the tall staff, and the Stars and Stripes ascend proudly in its place. He had seen the impotent tears and heard the impotent groans of the French Creoles when the new American governor, standing on the balcony of the cabildo, took possession, in the name of the United States, of the French province of Louisiana.
Daily since then, almost hourly, he had heard his father and his father's friends denounce the Americans as double-dyed traitors, who had bought Louisiana from France that they might hand it over to the still more detested Spaniards.
"Vipers of Americans!" he repeated, humming under his breath a refrain much in vogue:
"Americam coquin,
'Bille en nanquin,
Voleur du pain."
("American rogue, dressed in nankeen, bread-stealer.")
"It will soon be morning." He glanced up at the open sky, for he was breasting the surface of a small lake. "Good!" The pirogue slipped into another bayou at the upper end of the lagoon. The shadows here seemed thicker than ever after the starlit lake.
"Ugh!" ejaculated Marcel. An unseen log had lurched against the pirogue, upsetting it and throwing its occupant into the water. He sank, but rose in a flash and reached out, swimming, after pirogue and paddle.
But the log lurched forward again, snapping viciously, and before he could draw back, a huge alligator had seized his left forearm between his great jaws. The conical teeth sank deep in the flesh.
Marcel tugged under water at the knife in his belt. It seemed an eternity before he could draw it. A swift vision of the Great Chief's brooding eyes darted through his brain.
"For Louisiana!" The words burst involuntarily from his lips as the keen blade buried itself under the knotty scales deep in the monster's throat. The mighty jaws relaxed and dropped the limp and bloody arm.