Under the direction of Law, the walls of the old war house were strengthened with an inner row of palisades, supporting an embankment of earth and stone.  The overlap of the gate was extended into a re-entrant angle, and rude battlements were erected at the four corners of the inclosure.  The little stream of unfailing water was led through a corner of the fortress.  In the center of the inclosure they built the houses; a cabin for Law, one for the men, and a larger one to serve as store room and as trading place, should there be opportunity for trade.

It was in these rude quarters that Law and his companion established that which was the nearest approach to a home that either for the time might claim; and it was thus that both undertook once more that old and bootless human experiment of seeking to escape from one’s own self.  Silent now, and dutifully obedient enough was this erstwhile English beauty, Mary Connynge; yet often and often Law caught the question of her gaze.  And often enough, too, he found his own questioning running back up the water trails, and down the lakes and across the wide ocean, in a demand which, fiercer and fiercer as it grew, he yet remained too bitter and too proud to put to the proof by any means now within his power.  Strange enough, savage enough, hopeless enough, was this wild home of his in the wilderness of the Messasebe.

The smoke of the new settlement rose steadily day by day, but it gave signal for no watching enemy.  All about stretched the pale green ocean of the grasses, dotted by many wild flowers, nodding and bowing like bits of fragile flotsam on the surface of a continually rolling sea.  The little groves of timber, scattered here and there, sheltered from the summer sun the wild cattle of the plains.  The shorter grasses hid the coveys of the prairie hens, and on the marsh-grown bayou banks the wild duck led her brood.  A great land, a rich, a fruitful one, was this that lay about these adventurers.

A soberness had come over the habit of the master mind of this little colony.  His hand took up the ax, and forgot the sword and gun.  Day after day he stood looking about him, examining and studying in little all the strange things which he saw; seeking to learn as much as might be of the timorous savages, who in time began to straggle back to their ruined villages; talking, as best he might, through such interpreting as was possible, with savages who came from the west of the Messasebe, and from the South and from the far Southwest; hearing, and learning and wondering of a land which seemed as large as all the earth, and various as all the lands that lay beneath the sun—­that West, so glorious, so new, so boundless, which was yet to be the home of countless hearth-fires and the sites of myriad fields of corn.  Let others hunt, and fish, and rob the Indians of their furs, after the accepted fashion of the time; as for John Law, he must look about him, and think, and watch this growing of the corn.