IN WHICH DE SANCERRE UNDERGOES MANY VARIED EMOTIONS
The full moon of May, the moon of old corn, shone down upon a virgin
forest bounding with the high pulse of a ripe spring-time. Its white
splendor tiptoed along the outskirts of impenetrable thickets, or
danced gayly down majestic glades, patrolled by oak and hickory,
sassafras, and poplar trees. Presently, shunning a menacing morass, the
silvery outriders of the moon’s array would file along a narrow bayou
or charge _en masse_ across the broad surface of a trembling lake. And
while the triumphant moonlight took possession of a splendid province,
the thousand voices of the forest murmured at midnight a welcome to the
conqueror.
Panting for breath, and worn with the friction of their race for
freedom through swamps and woods, de Sancerre and his companions, after
long hours of hurried flight, paused to recover their strength, far
to the southward of the City of the Sun. The marvellous endurance of
Julia de Aquilar, whose urgency had granted to the enraged Noco no
chance to protest against the fervor of their mad career, had put even
the wiry, hardened frame of the lithe Frenchman to a stubborn test.
Hand in hand de Sancerre and the Spanish girl had sped onward, followed
by the grumbling crone, now breaking their way through vindictive
underbrush, anon wetting their feet in marshy vales, again making
progress beneath stately trees, avoiding the deep gloom of threatening
recesses and following a moon-track, like hounds upon a scent. Behind
them sat certain death; beyond them, a joyful promise lured them deeper
and ever deeper into the primeval wilds.
Tottering and breathless, old Noco reached the crest of the
tree-crowned hillock upon which Doña Julia and de Sancerre, gasping,
speechless, but strong with renewed hope, stood awaiting her coming.
Throwing her old bones upon the damp grass, Noco lay moaning for a time
in senile misery. Youth, under the spurs of fear and hope, had led old
age a cruel race. Noco had come into the forest to solve by moon-magic
the secret of her grandson’s flight, and, lo! the wizard upon whom she
relied had become a will-o’-the-wisp, in tattered velvets, using his
diabolical power to kidnap Coyocop, the spirit of the sun.
“Lean against the tree-trunk, señora,” said de Sancerre to Doña Julia,
his voice tripping over his breath as he spoke. “I fear old Noco has
found our pace too hot. But, even now, I dare not rest. We must go on!”
Descending the hillock to the treacherous ooze which mirrored the
moon in a multitude of pools, the Frenchman filled his bedraggled
bonnet with cold water and returned quickly to Noco’s side. Bending
down, he forced the panting beldame to drink deep of the refreshing
draught. Then he poured a cold stream upon her drawn, dusky face and
through the white hair above her wrinkled brow. The old hag’s beady
eyes had watched his every movement. Had he not cast a spell upon the
moon-kissed water with which he laved her head? Surely this revival of
her strength, which raised her on the instant to her feet, was magical.
Cruel though he might have been to her, the Brother of the Moon was
making full reparation with his witchery for the suffering which she
had undergone. Old Noco was more superstitious at midnight than at
dawn, more a savage in the forest than in her city hut. The mocking
gleam which her eyes had known so well the moonlight could not find, as
she stood facing de Sancerre, gazing up at him with a question in her
glance.
“Cabanacte?” she exclaimed, still short of breath.
“We will seek him by the river,” answered de Sancerre, pointing to a
break in the forest which opened toward the east, as he drew the woman
toward the hollow gum-tree against which the Spanish girl was seated,
silently pouring out her soul in gratitude to Mother Mary and the
saints.
“But there is no time,” complained the old woman. “They will miss
Coyocop, and if they find us in the woods--ugh!” The grunt of horror to
which Noco gave vent bore witness to how much cruelty her aged eyes had
gazed upon.
“Listen, Doña Noco,” said de Sancerre sternly, as he extended his hand
to Julia de Aquilar and, indulging in a courtly flourish wholly out of
keeping with his environment, drew her to her feet, “we have set out
to find Katonah and your grandson. Be true to Cabanacte and put your
trust in Coyocop. Listen, señora,” and here de Sancerre bent down and
addressed the old crone with impressive emphasis, “as we hurry on,
ponder the words I speak; the City of the Sun is unworthy of the spirit
sent from God. It is accursed. Its temple runs with blood, and its vile
priests have sealed the city’s doom. Come; ’twas your grandson who
found Coyocop. ’Tis Coyocop who shall now find Cabanacte.”
Onward through the moonlit forest the trio kept their course, tending
always toward a noble river that might bear them, could they build a
raft, to the vagrant camp of de la Salle, pitched somewhere further
south. Wasting no breath in futile words, de Sancerre maintained a
telling pace which carried them every moment further from a city of
murder toward a stream where hunger menaced them.
For two long, heavy hours they struggled eastward across the
treacherous margin of a river grown erratic from its weary longing for
the sea. Now and then de Sancerre would turn to refresh his straining
eyes with a vision of beauty, done in black and white against the
moonlight, and, for all time, upon his heart. A word of encouragement
would escape from his dry lips at intervals, and a smile of hope and
gratitude would reward him for his prodigality of breath.
The want and hardship which confronted them, the chances of capture
from savage tribes, of death from starvation, or swamp-begotten fever,
although clear to de Sancerre’s mind, could not, in that glad hour,
cast a shadow upon his buoyant spirits. “A half-done miracle is worse
than none,” he had said to Doña Julia. It gave him renewed confidence
in the future to feel that upon his own courage, pertinacity, and
foresight would depend the happy outcome of a strange adventure
which chance, at the outset, had made possible. It was pleasant to
de Sancerre to reflect that he could now relieve the saints of all
responsibility for the issue of events.
Nevertheless, the Frenchman uttered a word of gratitude to St. Maturin,
who watches over fools, when, about two hours after midnight, he and
his companions shook the forest from their weary shoulders and stood
upon the curving shore of the River Colbert--known to later times as
the Mississippi. De Sancerre’s quick eye saw at once that at this point
Sieur de la Salle had, weeks before, made his camp for a night. By a
short cut through the woods, the Frenchman had reached a point upon
the river to gain which the canoes of the great explorer had labored
for a day upon the winding stream. That the litter left upon the bank
had not been abandoned by a party of roving Indians was proven beyond
peradventure to do Sancerre by a discovery which electrified his pulse
and renewed his admiration for the saint whom he had just invoked. As
he hurried down the slope which fell gently from the forest to the
stream, anxious to enter the deserted huts, made of reeds and leafy
branches by expert hands to serve as shelter for a single night,
de Sancerre’s torn shoes struck against an object which forced an
exclamation of astonishment and delight from his ready tongue.
Gleaming in the moonlight at his feet, the long barrel of a flintlock
musket pointed straight at a powder-horn and a bag of bullets, as if
the weapon, lacking nourishment, prayed to be recharged. Bending down,
de Sancerre raised the clumsy gun and examined its mechanism with the
eagerness of a shipwrecked mariner toward whose raft the sea had tossed
a chest which might, when opened, gladden his eyes with food.
Doña Julia and Noco stood behind the Frenchman watching his movements
with eyes in which curiosity had conquered the heaviness of dire
fatigue.
“This, Mademoiselle de Aquilar,” explained de Sancerre, balancing the
heavy musket in his hand, “is the _fusil ordinaire_, or snaphance gun.
I have heard young hotspurs in the low countries--who knew little of
the rapier’s niceties--assert that, at close quarters, its butt-end is
more deadly than a sword. Of its merits in a _mêlée_ I am not ripe to
speak, but I learned, while yet I lingered with Count Frontenac, to
drive a bullet through a distant tree. The weapon has its use! You may
thank the saints, mademoiselle, for this gun and powder-horn. ’Twill
serve my turn if my captain’s careless redmen have left no eatables in
yonder huts.”
“Ah, well I knew, monsieur, you had not come to me in vain!” exclaimed
Doña Julia, a glad smile gleaming in her eloquent eyes, beneath which
rested the dark shadows of physical exhaustion. “The saints have led
your steps to where the musket lay!”
“_Mais, oui!_ But tell not Noco this. Her ears must harken to another
tale.”
Turning to gaze down at the silent beldame, the fiery brightness of
whose busy eyes the strain of a forced march at midnight had not
dimmed, ’though her face twitched with fatigue and her scrawny hands
shook in the moonlight, de Sancerre said:
“The Brother of the Moon is glad, señora, for my god has put into my
hands the thunder and the lightning--to call Cabanacte from the wilds
and to smite the sun-priests if they follow us. To-morrow I will make
the echoes of the forest lead your grandson to us here. But now we must
have rest, for Coyocop is weary, and the dawn must find us up.”
St. Maturin, the friend of fools, still played de Sancerre’s game.
As the Frenchman, followed by the women, to whom each step they took
was now a hardship, entered the nearest hut, he saw at once that his
withdrawal from de la Salle’s expedition, and the loss of Chatémuc
and Katonah, had led the explorer to lighten his equipment by the
contents of one canoe, intending, doubtless, to retake the stores upon
his return should circumstances make them again of value to him. A
boat-load of corn-meal and gunpowder had been stored in the hut in
the hope that neither the weather nor roving savages would deprive the
returning explorers of its use.
“_Nom de Dieu!_” cried the Frenchman, gayly, as he pointed to the
godsend which made his light heart lighter. “There lie food and
ammunition. ’Tis true, indeed, that Heaven has been kind to us! And so
I leave you, Mademoiselle de Aquilar, to your prayers and sleep. I must
make further search.”
Old Noco, who had paid out the last link of her energy, had made a
shake-down of the meal-bags, and her labored breathing proved that her
aged bones were finding the rest they craved. De Sancerre held Doña
Julia’s cold, trembling hand in his and gazed upon her weary face for
a long moment, whose very silence was eloquent with words he could not
speak.
“Good-night, monsieur,” faltered the girl, tears born of gratitude and
physical weariness dimming the dark beauty of her eyes.
“Good-night,” he said, bending to touch her white hand with his lips.
Then he drew himself erect, trembling as if the damp breeze from the
river had chilled his overwrought frame. Suddenly he clasped the
weeping girl to his breast, and his lips met hers in a kiss which
crowned the miracle the saints had wrought for them.
“My love! My love!” whispered de Sancerre; and when he reached the
moonlit night outside the hut again it seemed to him that the river and
the forest had changed their outlines to his eyes and that he stood
within the confines of a paradise. He seated himself upon the sloping
margin of the stream, vainly attempting to recall his soaring thoughts
to the homely exigencies of his grim environment. It was no paradise
by which he was surrounded. A lonely flood finding its way to a lonely
sea lay before his eyes, while at his back stood a pathless wilderness
through which, even at this moment, black-hearted fanatics, skilled in
woodcraft, might be following his trail. This dark thought, clouding
the splendor of a dream begotten by a kiss, led de Sancerre, almost
unconsciously, to take from the ground at his side the awkward musket
with which chance had armed him. He longed to test its prowess as an
ally, to prove to his troubled mind that dampness and neglect had not
robbed the flintlock of its heritage. With no intention of giving way
to the curiosity which assailed him, the Frenchman carefully loaded the
gun with powder and ball and raised it affectionately to his shoulder.
In that hour of peril and loneliness the musket seemed to be a friend
speaking to him of de la Salle’s loyalty and persistence and of the
certainty that his return from the gulf could not be long delayed.
Suddenly an uncanny premonition crept over de Sancerre, whose nervous
energy had been exhausted by a day and night of strangely-contrasted
emotions and by a physical strain whose reaction was now taking its
revenge. Turning his back to the river, de Sancerre’s restless eyes
swept the black, threatening line of the forest, behind which the moon
was drooping. Presently his heart seemed to clutch his throat and the
long barrel of the musket trembled as his hand shook for an instant.
At the edge of the woods, two hundred yards beyond the camp, stood a
white, naked thing, resembling in outline a man, but as shadowy and
ghostly as a creature made of moonbeams. It stood erect for a moment
and then bent down as if it would crawl back into the forest upon all
fours.
Impulsively, de Sancerre covered the apparition with his gun and
snapped the steel against the flint. A crash, echoing across the
startled flood, and hurled back in anger by the bushes and the trees,
made sudden war upon the silence of the stately night. When the smoke
from the friendly gun--in good case to serve the Frenchman’s ends--had
cleared away, de Sancerre saw no ghastly victim of his marksmanship
lying in white relief against the black outline of the woods. “Mayhap,”
he reflected, “my bullet passed through a shadow not of earth! Don
Joseph? Perhaps I drew him back from hell with that dear kiss I won!
But what mad thoughts are these? ’Twas but a gray wolf in the scrub,
or a vision raised by my own weariness. At all events, _ma petite_,”
he exclaimed, patting the smoking musket contentedly, “there’s now no
doubt that you and I agree.”
A soft touch fell upon de Sancerre’s arm, and, turning, he looked into
the white, agitated face of Doña Julia.
“Fear not, señora,” he exclaimed, earnestly. “Forgive me that I
disturbed your rest. But it seemed best to me to try the temper of this
clumsy gun. ’Tis always well to know how great may be the prowess of an
ally whom you have gained.”
Her dark eyes were reading his face closely.
“They have not found us?” she asked, eagerly. “You did not shoot at
men?”
“Only at a target made by dreams,” he answered, reassuringly. “I shot
at the phantom of my hate, _ma chère_, and, lo! it brought my love to
me.”
Her dark eyes fell until their long black lashes rested against her
white face.
“You love me, señor?” she whispered, in a voice which filled his soul
with an ecstasy it had never known before.
And once again the waters of the listening river bore a love-tale to
the distant gulf--a strange, sweet sequel to gossip which the waves had
heard before.