“Pierre, answer.  Where is Labarthe?”

“I told the master”—­

“Answer!”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he escape with you?”

Pierre rubbed his sleeve across his face.  “The master will not listen.  I do not know about Labarthe.  I saw him at camp yesterday morning.  The master saw him at the same time.  Then the master went to the swamp, and I went, too, with my Indian.  But I kept behind.  By and by I saw the canoe upside down, and the master’s cloak floating on the water; by that I knew that the master was drowned or had got away.  I thought he had gone to the Malhominis, and I wanted to go, too.  So I killed my Indian, and hid him in the grass.  I came by land.”

I rose on my elbow, careless of my shoulder.  “How could you kill the
Indian?  You had no weapon.”

Pierre stretched out his arms, knotted like an oak’s branches, and illustrated.  “I hugged him.  Once I broke the ribs of a bear.”

I lay and wagged my head like an old man who hears of warlocks and witch charms, and knows the tales to be true.  The stupefying simplicity of it!  If you want a thing, take it.  Pierre wanted to follow me, so he killed his guard and came.  That was all there was of it.  I looked at him long, my head still wagging.  He had done this sort of thing before.  I had never understood it.  It was this that I meant when I had called Pierre, dull of wit as he seemed, the most useful of my men.

I lay all day on my pallet, and Outchipouac served me with his own hands.

“It is thus that we treat those whom we delight to honor,” he said, and he held the gourd to my lips and wiped my face with a square of linen that some trader had left in camp.  He would give me no solid food, but dosed me with brewed herbs and great draughts of steaming broth.  The juggler looked into the lodge and would have tried his charms on me, but Outchipouac sent him away.

A storm rose toward night, and I heard the knocking of the rain on the skin roof above me, and thought of the woman traveling northward in the Iroquois canoes.  Starling was with her.  I lay with tight-clenched hands.

The storm swelled high.  I asked that the mat be dropped from before the door that I might see the lightning, and while I watched it Outchipouac slipped in.  He felt me over, and patted my moist skin approvingly.  Then he sat by my side and began to talk.

His talk at first was a chant, a saga, a recitation of the glories of his ancestors.  The Malhominis had been a proud race,—­now they were dwindled to this village of eighty braves.  He crooned long tales of famine, of tribal bickerings, of ambuscade and defeat; his voice rustled monotonously like wind in dried grass.

Then his tone rose.  He spoke of the present, its possibilities.  The Iroquois league was a scourge, a pestilence.  Could it be abolished, the western nations would return to health.  Security would reign, and tribal laws be respected.  The French would be friends, partners,—­never masters,—­and a golden age would descend upon the west.  It was the gospel that I had cried in the wilderness, but phrased in finer imagery than mine.  I felt the wooing of his argument, even as I had wooed others, and I listened silently and watched the lightning’s play.