“That is well thought of,” he answered, and struck a half circle under the boards.  Whether in this flourish he slashed anything he only learned by the stain on the knife, when the sloop was dropping down the bay.  But the Abenaqui girl knew what he had done, before the footsteps ceased.  She sat beside Saint-Castin on the platform, their feet resting on the ground within the boards.  No groan betrayed him, but her arms went jealously around his body, and her searching fingers found the cut in the buckskin.  She drew her blanket about him with a strength of compression that made it a ligature, and tied the corners in a knot.

“Is it deep, sagamore?”

“Not deep enough,” said Saint-Castin.  “It will glue me to my buckskins with a little blood, but it will not let me out of my troubles.  I wonder why I ran such a race from the English?  They might have had me, since they want me, and no one else does.”

“I will kiss you now, sagamore,” whispered the Abenaqui girl, trembling and weeping in the chaos of her broken reserve.  “I cannot any longer hold out against being your wife.”

She gave him her first kiss in the sacred darkness of the chapel, and under the picture of the pierced heart.  And it has since been recorded of her that the Baroness de Saint-Castin was, during her entire lifetime, the best worshiped wife in Acadia.

THE BEAUPORT LOUP-GAROU.

October dusk was bleak on the St. Lawrence, an east wind feeling along the river’s surface and rocking the vessels of Sir William Phips on tawny rollers.  It was the second night that his fleet sat there inactive.  During that day a small ship had approached Beauport landing; but it stuck fast in the mud and became a mark for gathering Canadians until the tide rose and floated it off.  At this hour all the habitants about Beauport except one, and even the Huron Indians of Lorette, were safe inside the fort walls.  Cattle were driven and sheltered inland.  Not a child’s voice could be heard in the parish of Beauport, and not a woman’s face looked through windows fronting the road leading up toward Montmorenci.  Juchereau de Saint-Denis, the seignior of Beauport, had taken his tenants with him as soon as the New England invaders pushed into Quebec Basin.  Only one man of the muster hid himself and stayed behind, and he was too old for military service.  His seignior might lament him, but there was no woman to do so.  Gaspard had not stepped off his farm for years.  The priest visited him there, humoring a bent which seemed as inelastic as a vow.  He had not seen the ceremonial of high mass in the cathedral of Upper Town since he was a young man.