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Now it was the little maid by love. Strange cat of the woods, Francette could be as riotous in her tenderness as in her enmity. In the bastions Dupre and Garcon and Gifford watched the scene with the grim quiet of men born in the wilderness, while at the portholes trapper and voyageur and the venturers from Grand Portage handled their guns and waited.
This terrace, which is on the western face of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, seems to have been intended originally for a gun-platform, but there is nothing there now to indicate that guns were ever mounted on it.
They are constructed upon a solid foundation of stone masonry resting upon concrete, while the walls themselves are built of a solid core of earth, faced with massive brick: the top is paved with tiles, and defended by a crenelated parapet. Bastions, some of which are fifty feet square, are built upon the outside at distances of about one hundred feet.
This trading post was quite an imposing military construction, with large bastions at the corners, its lofty walls being whitewashed and picketed. A cluster of lodges of Sioux Indians was pitched almost under the shadow of its wall. The party which Kit Carson had accompanied had arrived a few days before, and was encamped near by.
That edifice, which is quadrangular and open above, serving with its embrasures as a cavalier, defends two great bastions, or rather, towers, which stand one on either side of the gate at proper distances; and all is done with so much judgment, cost, and magnificence, that no one thought that for the future there could be executed any work of greater grandeur or better design, even as none such had been seen in the past.
In command of the Peñon d'Alger, as it was called by the Spaniards, was a valiant and veteran cavalier, by name Martin de Vargas. For twenty years, as we have said, the gold-and-crimson banner of Spain had floated from its crenulated bastions; since the days of Pedro Navarro it had held its own against all comers.
It was objected that, in designing these bastions, he multiplied the flanking lines and embrasures beyond what was either necessary or safe. But, observes the anonymous writer, all that his duty as architect demanded was that he should lay down a plan consistent with the nature of the ground, leaving details to practical engineers and military men.
At the first parleys the king had said, "I am disposed enough towards peace; I am willing to grant it to Languedoc and the other provinces. Already her independence was threatened on all sides; the bastions and new fortifications had to be demolished; no armed vessel of war might be stationed in her harbor. The peace of 1626, then, was but a preliminary to war.
Beyond the grey bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore. Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room.
It was a hundred and thirty-five feet wide and divided into various compartments. On the northwest and southeast corners were hexagonal bastions, in which were mounted a number of cannon. The walls of the building served as the walls of the rooms, all of which faced inwards on a plaza, after the general style of Mexican architecture.
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