Le Compt, who had been brought home with the terrified bridesmaids and laughed in her sleeve all day because she thought Gabriel and his men were the Puants, leaned against a wall and turned sick.  I have heard her say she never was so confused in her life as when she saw the driven horses, and the firearms, and those coarse-haired scalps hanging to Le Maudit Pensonneau’s belt.  The moon showed them all distinctly.  Manette had thought it laughable when she heard that Alexis Barbeau was shut up in his brick house at Prairie du Pont, with all the men and guns he could muster to protect his property; but now she wept indignantly about it.

The priest had been the first man in the street, having lain down in all his clothes except his cassock, and he heartily gave Celeste and the young men his blessing, and counseled everybody to go to bed again.  But Celeste reminded them that she was hungry, and as for the rescuers, they had ridden hard all day without a mouthful to eat.  So the whole town made a feast, everybody bringing the best he had to Barbeau’s house.  They spread the table and crowded around, leaning over each, other’s shoulders to take up bits in their hands and eat with and talk to the young people.  Gabriel’s mother sat beside him with her arm around him, and opposite was Celeste with her grandfather and grandmother, and all the party were ranged around.  The feathers had been blown out of their hair by that long chase, but their buckskins were soiled, and the hastily washed colors yet smeared their ears and necks.  Yet this supper was quite like a bridal feast.  Ah, my child, we never know it when we are standing in the end of the rainbow.  Gabriel and Celeste might live a hundred years, but they could never be quite as happy again.

Paul and Jacques Le Page sat down with the other young men, and the noise of tongues in Barbeau’s house could be heard out by the rigole.  It was like the swarming of wild bees.  Paul and Jacques had waited with the boat until nightfall.  They heard the firing when the Puants took Celeste, and watched hour after hour for some one to appear from the path; but at last concluding that Gabriel had been obliged to change his plan, they rowed back to Caho’.

Claudis Beauvois was the only person who did not sit up talking until dawn.  And nobody thought about him until noon the next day, when Captain Jean Saucier with a company of fusileers rode into the village from Fort Chartres.

That was the first time my mother ever saw Captain Saucier.  Your uncle Francois in Kaskaskia, he was also afterward Captain Saucier.  I was not born until they had been married fifteen years.  I was the last of their children.  So Celeste Barbeau was kidnaped the day before my mother met my father.