A hand of iron gripped his own.  And then, before Philip had found words to say, the master of Fort o’ God suddenly placed his arms about his shoulders and embraced him.  Their shoulders touched.  Their faces were close.  The two men who loved Jeanne d’Arcambal above all else on earth gazed for a silent moment into each other’s eyes.

“They have told me,” said D’Arcambal, softly.  “You have brought my Jeanne home through death.  Accept a father’s blessing, and with it—­this!”

He stepped back, and swept his arms about the great room.

“Everything—­everything—­would have gone with her,” he said.  “If you had let her die, I should have died.  My God, what peril she was in!  In saving her you saved me.  So you are welcome here, as a son.  For the first time since my Jeanne was a babe Fort o’ God offers itself to a man who is a stranger and its hospitality is yours so long as its walls hang together.  And as they have done this for upward of two hundred years, M’sieur Philip, we may conclude that our friendship is to be without end.”

He clasped Philip’s hands again, and two tears coursed down his gray cheeks.  It was difficult for Philip to restrain the joy his words produced, which, coming from the lips of Jeanne’s father, lifted him suddenly into a paradise of hope.  For many reasons he had come to expect a none too warm reception at Fort o’ God; he had looked ahead to the place with a grim sort of fear, scarcely definable; and here Jeanne’s father was opening his arms to him.  Pierre was unapproachable; Jeanne herself was a mystery, filling him alternately with hope and despair; D’Arcambal had accepted him as a son.  He could find no words adequate to his emotion; none that could describe his own happiness, unless it was in a bold avowal of his love for the girl he had saved.  And this his good sense told him not to make, at the present moment.

“Any man would have done as much for your daughter,” he said at last, “and I am happy that I was the fortunate one to render her assistance.”

“You are wrong,” said D’Arcambal, taking him by the arm.  “You are one out of a thousand.  It takes a man to go through the Big Thunder and come out at the other end alive.  I know of only one other who has done that in the last twenty years, and that other is Henry d’Arcambal himself.  We three, you, Jeanne, and I, have alone triumphed over those monsters of death.  All others have died.  It seems like a strange pointing of the hand of God.”

Philip trembled.

“We three!” he exclaimed.

“We three,” said the old man, “and for that reason you are a part of Fort o’ God.”