“Possibly, madame.”

“And you have seven children?”

“Four, madame.”

“On the whole, I like young men.”

“Then you reject my suit?” observed the unmoved wooer.

“I do not reject it, and I do not accept it, monsieur the colonel.  I consider it.”

This gracious promise of neutrality Colonel Menard carried away with him without again seeing Angelique; and he made his way through the streets of Kaskaskia, unconscious that his little son was following Rice Jones about with the invincible persistence of a Menard.

Young Pierre had been allowed to ride into the capital this thronging day under charge of his father’s body-servant and Jean Lozier.  The body-servant he sent out of his way with the ponies.  Jean Lozier tramped at his young seignior’s heels, glad of some duty which would excuse him to his conscience.

This was the peasant lad’s first taste of Kaskaskia.  He could hardly believe he was there.  The rapture of it at first shook him like a palsy.  He had risen while the whole peninsula was yet a network of dew, and the Mississippi’s sheet, reflecting the dawn, threw silver in his eyes.  All thoughts of his grandfather he put resolutely out of his mind; and such thoughts troubled him little, indeed, while that sea of humanity dashed around him.  The crash of martial music stirred the man in him.  And when he saw the governor’s carriage and the magnates of the Territory, heading the long procession; the festooned galleries, on which sat girls dressed in white, like angels, sending their slaves out with baskets of flowers to strew in the way; when he saw floating tableaux of men and scenes in the early history of the Territory,—­heroes whose exploits he knew by heart; and when he heard the shouting which seemed to fill the rivers from bluff to bluff, he was willing to wade through purgatory to pay for such a day.

Traffic moved with unusual force.  It was the custom for outdwelling men who had something to sell or to trade to reserve it until they came to a convention in Kasky, when they were certain to meet the best buyers.  All the up-river towns sent lines of vehicles and fleets of boats to the capital.  Kickapoo, Pottawatomie, and Kaskaskia Indians were there to see the white-man council, scattered immovably along the streets, their copper faces glistening in the sun, the buckskin fringes on their leggins scarcely stirring as the hours crept by.  Squaws stood in the full heat, erect and silent, in yellow or dark red garments woven of silky buffalo wool, and seamed with roebuck sinews.  Few of them had taken to civilized finery.  Their barbaric and simple splendor was a rebuke to poor white women.