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Both spoke English well, knew everybody, and remembered all the faces and all the names, no easy thing in England, where the names and titles change so often. I know several Englishwomen who have had four different names. Lady Holland was also a friend of "Oncle Alphonse" and dined there often.
"I'm going to Clark at Kaskaskia to bring him yonder." He waved his hand eastward. "I am going to take Vincennes and kill Hamilton." "Well, ye're taking a mighty queer course, my boy, if ye ever expect to find Kaskaskia. Ye're already twenty miles too far south." "Carryin' his gun on the same shoulder all the time," said Oncle Jazon, "has made 'im kind o' swing in a curve like.
The roué in a mocking, strident voice, sent an irritating farewell after it with a lavish accompaniment of resounding kisses "Adieu, cher oncle! adieu, dear Jock bácsi! My respects to the little girls at home, and to the little dogs also. Au revoir! To our next merry meeting!" And he kept on sending after him whole handfuls of kisses.
We will pull to the wood yonder, and there we shall find some kind of game which has been forced to shelter from the high water." It was a cheerful view of a forlorn hope. Clark grasped the hand extended by Beverley and they looked encouragement into each other's eyes. Oncle Jazon volunteered to go in the pirogue. He was ready for anything, everything.
All the officers in the fort approved killing the prisoner, and it was difficult for Colonel Clark to prevent the men from making outrageous assaults upon him, so exasperated were they at sight of the scalp. Oncle Jazon proved to be one of the most refractory among those who demanded tomahawking and scalping as the only treatment due Long-Hair.
Oncle Jazon winked at the gray sky and puckered his mouth so that it looked like a nutgall on an old, dry leaf. "What's the diff'ence?" he demanded. "I'd jest as soon be kicked now as arter while; it's got to come anyhow." Kenton made no response. The thongs were torturing his arms and legs. Beverley was silent, but consciousness had returned, and with it a sense of despair.
What to see and hear, what to turn aside as a joke, what to insist upon with inflexible mastery, he knew by the fine instantaneous sense of genius. There were many men of Oncle Jazon's cast, true as steel, but refractory as flint, who could not be dominated by any person, no matter of what stamp or office. To them an order was an insult; but a suggestion pleased and captured them.
Indeed it was a delectable bit of humor from Oncle Jazon's point of view. "Don't get mad at the old man," said Kenton, plucking Beverley aside. "He's yer friend from his heels to his old scalped crown. Let him have his fun." Then lowering his voice almost to a whisper he continued: "I was in Vincennes for two days and nights spyin' around.
Oncle Jazon pounced upon the hand and gripped it in his own knotted fingers, gazing delightedly up into Clark's bronzed and laughing face. "Where'd I come frum? I come frum ever'wheres. Fust time I ever got lost in all my born days. Fve been a trompin' 'round in the water seems like a week, crazy as a pizened rat, not a knowin' north f'om south, ner my big toe f'om a turnip!
"For my part," said Kenton, "I am with ye, old boy, in anything ye want to do. But now ye've got to tell me everything. I see that ye're keeping something back. What is it?" He glanced sidewise slyly at Oncle Jazon. Beverley was frank to a fault; but somehow his heart tried to keep Alice all to itself. He hesitated; then "I broke my parole with Governor Hamilton," he said. "He forced me to do it.
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