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Updated: June 1, 2025
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.
The other rooms in the house were mere tributaries to this baronial presence chamber. Madockawando and the dignitaries of the Abenaqui tribe made it their council hall, the white sagamore presiding. They were superior to rude western nations. It was Saint-Castin's plan to make a strong principality here, and to unite his people in a compact state. He lavished his inherited money upon them.
The Abenaqui girl did not talk with other women about what happened in the community. Dead saints crowded her mind to the exclusion of living sinners. All that she heard came by way of her companion, the stolid Etchemin, and when it was unprofitable talk it was silenced. They labored together all the chill April afternoon, bringing the chapel out of its winter desolation.
"Is it that you do not like me?" "No," she answered sincerely, probing her mind for the truth. "You yourself are different from our Abenaqui men." "Then why do you make me unhappy?" "I do not make you unhappy. I do not even think of you." Again she took to her hurried course, forgetting the pail of sap. Saint-Castin seized it, and once more followed her.
The sun had risen gorgeously, and there was a decided balminess in the air. He glanced at the insides of the huts. The furry skins had not been good conductors of flames, and the snow on the roofs had saved them. Beside the two dead Iroquois there was an Abenaqui woman and her child. In the huts that were intact, the frightened women and children had huddled.
She lifted the loose slab of the platform, and tried to thrust him into the earthen-floored box. "Hide yourself first," whispered Saint-Castin. They could hear feet running on the flinty approach. The chase was so close that the English might have seen them enter the chapel. "Get in, get in!" begged the Abenaqui girl. "They will not hurt me." "Hide!" said Saint-Castin, thrusting her fiercely in.
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."
Madockawando's daughter dipped her pail full of the clear water. The appreciative motion of her eyelashes and the placid lines of her face told how she enjoyed the limpid plaything. But Saint-Castin understood well that she had not come out to boil sap entirely for the love of it. Father Petit believed the time was ripe for her ministry to the Abenaqui women.
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.
In 1781 he returned to France, where he had an estate, and thenceforth disappeared from history. His son, by his Abenaqui Baroness, then took command of his fort and savage retainers, and after assisting in the defence of Port Royal, and making more than one onslaught on the English settlers of Massachusetts, he returned to Europe on the death of his father.
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