In due time, I know not how, the talk swung round again to lightness, for the Colonel loved a good story, and the priest had many which he told with wit in his quaint French accent.  As he was rising to take his leave, Pere Gibault put his hand on my head.

“I saw your Excellency’s son in the church this morning,” he said.

Colonel Clark laughed and gave me a pinch.

“My dear sir,” he said, “the boy is old enough to be my father.”

The priest looked down at me with a puzzled expression in his brown eyes.

“I would I had him for my son,” said Colonel Clark, kindly; “but the lad is eleven, and I shall not be twenty-six until next November.”

“Your Excellency not twenty-six!” cried Father Gibault, in astonishment.  “What will you be when you are thirty?”

The young Colonel’s face clouded.

“God knows!” he said.

Father Gibault dropped his eyes and turned to me with native tact.

“What would you like best to do, my son?” he asked.

“I should like to learn to speak French,” said I, for I had been much irritated at not understanding what was said in the streets.

“And so you shall,” said Father Gibault; “I myself will teach you.  You must come to my house to-day.”

“And Davy will teach me,” said the Colonel.

CHAPTER XV

DAYS OF TRIAL

But I was not immediately to take up the study of French.  Things began to happen in Kaskaskia.  In the first place, Captain Bowman’s company, with a few scouts, of which Tom was one, set out that very afternoon for the capture of Cohos, or Cahokia, and this despite the fact that they had had no sleep for two nights.  If you will look at the map,[1] you will see, dotted along the bottoms and the bluffs beside the great Mississippi, the string of villages, Kaskaskia, La Prairie du Rocher, Fort Chartres, St. Philip, and Cahokia.  Some few miles from Cahokia, on the western bank of the Father of Waters, was the little French village of St. Louis, in the Spanish territory of Louisiana.  From thence eastward stretched the great waste of prairie and forest inhabited by roving bands of the forty Indian nations.  Then you come to Vincennes on the Wabash, Fort St. Vincent, the English and Canadians called it, for there were a few of the latter who had settled in Kaskaskia since the English occupation.

[1] The best map which the editor has found of this district is in vol.  Vi, Part 11, of Winsor’s “Narrative and Critical History of America,” p. 721.

We gathered on the western skirts of the village to give Bowman’s company a cheer, and every man, woman, and child in the place watched the little column as it wound snakelike over the prairie on the road to Fort Chartres, until it was lost in the cottonwoods to the westward.

Things began to happen in Kaskaskia.  It would have been strange indeed if things had not happened.  One hundred and seventy-five men had marched into that territory out of which now are carved the great states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and to most of them the thing was a picnic, a jaunt which would soon be finished.  Many had left families in the frontier forts without protection.  The time of their enlistment had almost expired.