With doffed hat, he struck spurs into his nettlesome horse, and was gone; while the ringing notes of the bugle called the waiting column to attention.

I watched with deepening interest all that was taking place before me.  The heavy log-gates were unbarred, swung slowly inward, and left unguarded.  Captain Heald uttered a single stern word of command, and Captain Wells, with a squad of his Miamis pressing hard at his horse’s heels, rode slowly through the opening out into the flood of sunshine.  Captain Heald and Mr. Kinzie, side by side, with Mrs. Heald mounted upon a spirited bay horse a yard in their rear, followed close; and then to Lieutenant Helm’s grave order the sturdy column of infantrymen, heavily equipped and marching in column of fours, swept in solemn curve about the post of the gate, and filed out through the narrow entrance.  The regular tramp-tramp, the evident discipline, and the confident look of the men, impressed me.  While I was watching them, the small garrison band began suddenly to play, and the smiling soldier faces clouded as they glanced around in questioning surprise.

“Saint Guise!” ejaculated De Croix, uneasily; “it is the Dead March!”

I marked the sudden look of terrified astonishment in Mademoiselle’s eyes, and dropped my hand upon hers where it rested against the saddle-pommel.  Ensign Ronan spurred swiftly back down the column, with an angry face, and hushed the ill sound by a sharp order.

“Another tune, you fool, or none at all!” he said, peremptorily.  “The foul fiend himself must have assumed charge of our march to-day.”

As the column marched away, the groaning wagons one by one fell into line behind it, until at last our own turn came, and De Croix and I, each with a hand upon the bridle-rein of Mademoiselle’s spirited horse, rode between the gate-posts out to where we had full view of that stirring scene below.

It was a fair, bright morning, with hardly so much as a fleecy white cloud in all the expanse of sky; glorious sunlight was flashing its prismatic colors over a lake surface barely ruffled by the faintest breeze.  Never did Nature smile more brightly back into my eyes than then, as I gazed out over the broad plain where the glow of the summer reflected back in shimmering waves from the tawny prairie and glittering sand.  With all its desolation, it was a picture to be treasured long; nor has a single detail of it ever left my memory.

How vast the distances appeared through that clear, sun-illumined atmosphere, and how pronounced and distinctive were the varied colors spread to the full vista of the eye, contrasts of shine and shadow no human brush, however daring, would venture to depict on canvas.  A primitive land this, idealized by distance, vast in its wide, sweeping plains, its boundless sea, its leagues of glistening sand, and, bending over all, the deepest, darkest arch of blue that ever mirrored so fair a picture of the wilderness.