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But the Abenaqui girl knew what he had done, before the footsteps ceased. She sat beside Saint-Castin on the platform, their feet resting on the ground within the boards. No groan betrayed him, but her arms went jealously around his body, and her searching fingers found the cut in the buckskin.
He could give them all rich dowers, and divorce them easily any day to a succeeding line of legal Abenaqui husbands. The lax code of the wilderness was irresistible to a Frenchman; but he was near enough in age and in texture of soul to this noble pagan to see at once, with her eyesight, how he had degraded the very vices of her people.
She was one of the Abenaqui tribe, and she had mostly discarded the picturesque attire. "The lady Madame Giffard sent me to say the girl is safe with her and will not be able to return to-night." "So much the better," growled Antoine, looking with hungry eyes on the fish browning before the coals. "Did she come and take her? I went with my husband to see the traders."
The girl had just finished her dipping when she looked up and met the steady gaze of Saint-Castin. He was in an anguish of dread that she would run. But her startled eyes held his image while three changes passed over her, terror and recognition and disapproval. He stepped more into view, a white-and-gold apparition, which scattered the Abenaqui children to their mothers' camp-fires.
What would happen if his daughter began to teach them, in a house by themselves, to do nothing but pray? Madockawando repeated that his son, the sagamore, and his father, the priest, had a good religion, but they might see for themselves what the Abenaqui tribe would come to when the women all set up for medicine squaws.
Druilletes went in a double character, as an envoy of the government at Quebec, and as an agent of his Abenaqui flock, who had been advised to petition for English assistance. See Hutchinson, Collection, 27. Mr. Savage thinks that this paper was by Winthrop.
But that inquisitive nobleman stooped to lift the tent flap, and the young man turned toward his waiting Indians and talked a moment in Abenaqui, when they went on in the direction of the river, carrying game and camp luggage. They thought, as he did, that this might be a lodge with which no man ought to meddle.
The daughter of Madockawando, the chief, was known to be coming from her winter retreat. Every Abenaqui in the tribe stood in awe of the maid. She did not rule them as a wise woman, but lived apart from them as a superior spirit. Baron La Hontan, on all fours, intruded his gay face on the inmates of the lodge. There were three of them.
Madockawando's daughter seized him by the wrist. "Is there any way out of the fort except through the gate?" "None," answered Saint-Castin. "Is there no way of getting over the wall?" "The ladder can be used." "Run, then, to the ladder! Be quick." "What is the matter?" demanded Saint-Castin. The Abenaqui girl dragged on him with all her strength as he reached for the iron door-latch.
The chapel of saplings and bark which first sheltered Father Petit's altar had been abandoned when Saint-Castin built a substantial one of stone and timber within the fortress walls, and hung in its little tower a bell, which the most reluctant Abenaqui must hear at mass time.
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