Upon this instant I blew my turkey call, long, and shrilly. From without came the sound as of a rushing multitude, mingled with yells, whoops, and howls. The Indians seemed suddenly cowed and gathered together in a huddled group.
"We are trapped!" called the chief, and made a leap for the door, followed by the rest. The savages without were fleeing also. Clark called out in loud and positive commands that they should be neither killed nor hindered.
"Let them run like the coward dogs they are," he said, "we care neither to capture their living nor to bury their dead carcasses."
In the midst of the excitement, reënforcements arrived from Cahokia, Légère having met a squad on their way to Kaskaskia. Clark now stationed guards all around the fort and the town, and ordered that the soldiers hold themselves in readiness to repulse a night attack. The Indians loitered all night in the bushes about the fort, and we could hear them arguing hotly. When morning came, they sent in a deputation of three to sue for peace, after which they hastily departed.
I shall not now relate an incident which happened later that night when some of the loitering Indians attempted to take terrible revenge on Ellen, whose warning to Clark they afterwards suspected, and from which it was my very good fortune to save her. Thus repaying twice over, since her life was twice as valuable as mine, the debt I owed her, and proving that I counted my own naught, as weighed against her safety and her honor.
CHAPTER XXI
For four days, a fine, thick rain had been descending persistently from the low, gray-blanketed sky, and a wet mist rose from the sodden earth to meet it. The soil reeked with dampness; it oozed from the walls of the stone or stuccoed houses, dripped from the sloping roofs of rambling porches, saturated one's clothes, and permeated one's blood. The Kaskaskia River, pushed out of its banks by its swollen tributaries, had overflowed all the bottoms, and banked the waters of the bayous up into the hills. The village was surrounded by water on three sides, and from the fort one could see nothing save the dreary waste of still, dull water. Even the reeds, canes, and grasses which ordinarily fringed the bayous, adding something of life and grace, were now submerged.
In all the village there was but one cheerful, wooing spot:—the room in the late Commandant's house, made bright by the presence of Ellen, and kept warm and cheery by the crackling logs piled high in the wide fireplace. Here Ellen gave gracious welcome to officer and private, priest and native, coureur de bois from Canada, trader from New Orleans, and scout from the eastern settlements—whoever might chance our way, so he deport himself gentlemanwise. And now, since the winter and the rains had settled upon us, since the Indian deputations had ceased to trouble us, and traders were rare, the town afforded the officers no other diversion than a twice daily visit to Queen Eleanor's audience chamber.
Colonel Clark, Captains Bowman, Montgomery, Harrod and I, with Légère and Dr. Lafonte occupied usually the inner circle around the fire, Ellen throned in our midst. My quill falls from my hand and I lose myself in the scenes which my memory recalls so vividly that almost I live them over again. Ellen's graceful head, outlined by dark ringlets, rests against the white bear skin which covers her chair; her slender hands are crossed in her lap, and her arched feet, in their gay moccasins, are half buried in the panther's skin thrown over her foot rest. The fire, of seasoned logs three feet in length, lights the low-ceiled stone room with a vivid glow and suffuses the atmosphere with a fragrant warmth. This glow of the flames plays becomingly on Ellen's rich, soft coloring, and even brings out the shadows made by the long lashes upon her cheeks. Also it shows plainly the varied colors and markings of the wild skins hung thick upon the wall, and the gay stripes in the heavy Indian mats upon the floor.