“It’ll never be the same again.  Old Kaskaskia is gone.  Just when I am ready to go there, there is no Kaskaskia to go to.”

Jean sat down, and propped his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, as tender a spirit as ever brooded over ruin.  He thought he could bear the bereavement better if battle and fire had swept it away; but to see it lying drowned before him made his heart a clod.

Singly and in bunches the lantern-bearing boats came home to their shelter in the pecan-trees, leaving the engulfed plain to starlight.  No lamp was seen, no music tinkled there; in the water streets the evening wind made tiny tracks, and then it also deserted the town, leaving the liquid sheet drawn and fitted smoothly to place.  Nothing but water, north, west, and south; a vast plain reflecting stars, and here and there showing spots like burnished shields.  The grotesque halves of buildings in its foreground became as insignificant as flecks of shadow.  The sky was a clear blue dome, the vaporous folds of the Milky Way seeming to drift across it in indistinct light.

Now, above the flowing whisper of the inland sea, Jean Lozier could hear other sounds.  Thunder began in the north, and rolled with its cloud toward the point where Okaw and Mississippi met; shaggy lowered heads and flying tails and a thousand hoofs swept past him; and after them fleet naked men, who made themselves one with the horses they rode.  The buffalo herds were flying before their hunters.  He heard bowstrings twang, and saw great creatures stagger and fall headlong, and lie panting in the long grass.

Then pale blue wood smoke unfolded itself upward, and the lodges were spread, and there was Cascasquia of the Illinois.  Black gowns came down the northern trail, and a cross was set up.

The lodges passed into wide dormered homesteads, and bowers of foliage promised the fruits of Europe among old forest trees.  Jean heard the drum, and saw white uniforms moving back and forth, and gun barrels glistening, and the lilies of France floating over expeditions which put out to the south.  This was Kaskaskia.  The traffic of the West gathered to it.  Men and women crossed the wilderness to find the charm of life there; the waterways and a north trail as firm as a Roman road bringing them easily in.  Neyon de Villiers lifted the hat from his fine gray head and saluted society there; and the sulky figure of Pontiac stalked abroad.  Fort Gage, and the scarlet uniform of Great Britain, and a new flag bearing thirteen stripes swam past Jean’s eyes.  The old French days were gone, but the new American days, blending the gathered races into one, were better still.  Kaskaskia was a seat of government, a Western republic, rich and merry and generous and eloquent, with the great river and the world at her feet.  The hum of traffic came up to Jean.  He saw the beautiful children of gently nurtured mothers; he saw the men who moulded public opinion; he saw brawny white-clothed slaves; he saw the crowded wharf, the bridge with long rays of motes stretching across it from the low-lying sun.