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The wooden door-hinges creaked, and stumbling shins blundered against the benches. "What is this place?" spoke an English voice. "Let some one take his tinder-box and strike a light." "Have care," warned another. "We are only half a score in number. Our errand was to kidnap Saint-Castin from his hold, not to get ourselves ambushed by the Abenaquis."
"I am Saint-Castin," he said. "Yes, I have many times seen you, sagamore." Her voice, shaken a little by her heart, was modulated to such softness that the liquid gutturals gave him a distinct new pleasure. "I want to ask your pardon for my friend's rudeness, when you warmed and fed us in your lodge." "I did not listen to him." Her fingers sought the cross on her neck.
Saint-Castin barely tasted the offered meat; but La Hontan enjoyed it unabashed, warming himself while he ate, and avoiding any chance of a hint from his friend that the meal should be cut short. "My child," he said in lame Abenaqui to the Etchemin woman, while his sly regard dwelt on the blanket-robed statue opposite, "I wish you the best of gifts, a good husband."
"Father, I want to marry your daughter in the French way, with priest and contract, and make her the Baroness de Saint-Castin." Madockawando, on his part, smoked the matter fairly out. He put an arm on the sagamore's shoulder, and lamented the extreme devotion of his daughter.
This was the usual night scene at Pentegoet. Candle and firelight shone on her, on oak timbers, and settles made of unpeeled balsam, on plate and glasses which always heaped a table with ready food and drink, on moose horns and gun racks, on stores of books, on festoons of wampum, and usually on a dozen figures beside Saint-Castin.
She thought of ringing the chapel bell; but before any Abenaqui could reach the spot the single man in the fortress must be overpowered. Saint-Castin stood on his bachelor hearth, leaning an arm on the mantel. The light shone on his buckskin fringes, his dejected shoulders, and his clean-shaven youthful face.
The great Abenaqui's dignity would not allow him to drag in fuel to the fire, so he squatted nursing the ashes, and raked out a coal to light tobacco for himself and Saint-Castin. The white sagamore had never before come in full uniform to a private talk, and it was necessary to smoke half an hour before a word could be said.
Saint-Castin was a very energetic French trader, of noble birth, who had established himself at Pentegoet on Penobscot Bay a point which, after him, is now called Castine. Father Thury was the chief of the mission priests in the western part of Acadia, but though an ecclesiastic he seems to have exalted patriotism above religion.
The cannon protected fields and a town of lodges which Saint-Castin meant to convert into a town of stone and hewed wood houses as soon as the aboriginal nature conformed itself to such stability. Even now the village had left home and gone into the woods again. The Abenaqui women were busy there, inserting tubes of bark in pierced maple-trees, and troughs caught the flow of ascending sap.
"Withdraw your heels from this lodge," replied Saint-Castin impatiently. "You will embroil me with the tribe." "Why should it embroil you with the tribe," argued the merry sitter, "if we warm our heels decently at this ready fire until the Indians light our own? Any Christian, white or red, would grant us that privilege."
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