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A few days after quitting the fort, Bounce and Gibault, who chanced to be riding considerably in advance of their companions, halted on the top of a ridge and began to scan the country before them. In the midst of their observations, Bounce broke the silence with a grunt. "Fat now?" inquired his companion. "What now?" replied Bounce contemptuously. "Use yer eyes now; d'ye see nothin'?"
While it was being made, Gibault sighed so deeply once or twice, that March suggested he must be in love. "So I is," sighed Gibault. "That's interesting," remarked March; "who with?" "Ay, that's it," said Bounce; "out with her name, lad. No one ought never to be ashamed o' bein' in love.
Bounce, and Big Waller, and Black Gibault, drew naturally together and speculated, after their own peculiar fashion, on every subject of thought within the reach of their capacities; and as Bounce's capacities embraced a pretty wide range, the "feelosophical" views he set forth upon that lovely Sabbath day were so varied, so eccentric, so graphic, and so apparently inexhaustible, that he effectually quelled Gibault's inveterate tendency, to jest, and filled Big Waller with deeper admiration than ever.
"I guess it was pretty much of a meddlin' jolly one," said Big Waller, smoking enthusiastically, and with an expression of intense satisfaction on his weather-beaten countenance. "An' profitable," observed Bounce gravely. "Ah! oui, ver' prof'table," echoed Gibault. "Dat is de main ting. We have git plenty skins, an' have bring hom' our own skins, w'ich I was not moche sure of one or two times."
He and Father Gibault, whose name is so beautifully and nobly connected with the stirring achievements of Colonel George Rogers Clark, were close friends and often companions.
Colonel Clark regarded the man intently. "The cause of liberty, both religious and civil, is our cause," Father Gibault continued. "Men have died for it, and will die for it, and it will prosper. Furthermore, Monsieur, my life has not known many wants. I have saved something to keep my old age, with which to buy a little house and an orchard in this peaceful place.
Big Waller immediately lifted his little friend in his huge arms, and tossed him into the centre of a thick soft bush, out of which he scrambled in time to see his comrade catch the deer by the horns, as it floated past, and drag it on shore. "Hoh! I vill pay you off von time," cried Gibault, laughing, and shaking his fist at Waller.
The crowning touch to their happiness was given by Clark when he told the priest, Pierre Gibault, in answer to a question as to whether the Catholic Church could be opened, that an American commander had nothing to do with any church save to defend it from insult, and that by the laws of the Republic his religion had as great privileges as any other.
"The Vild-Man-of-de-Vest! certainement!" muttered Black Gibault slowly, as he gazed at the creature before him, and quietly cocked his rifle to be ready for any emergency. Certainly the man upon whom our trapper had stumbled thus suddenly might have been styled the wild man of any region west, north, east, or south, with perfect propriety.
Xavier, when Father Gibault called the people together, and at the fort, when the British flag was hauled down and la banniere d'Alice Roussillon run up in its place. His expansive imagination did full credit to itself in exaggerating the importance of his part in handing the post over to the rebels. And what would Hamilton think of this? Would he consider it treason?
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