There was a store in the village kept by a great citizen,—­not a citizen of Kaskaskia alone, but a citizen of the world.  This, I am aware, sounds like fiction, like an attempt to get an effect which was not there.  But it is true as gospel.  The owner of this store had many others scattered about in this foreign country:  at Vincennes, at St. Louis, where he resided, at Cahokia.  He knew Michilimackinac and Quebec and New Orleans.  He had been born some thirty-one years before in Sardinia, had served in the Spanish army, and was still a Spanish subject.  The name of this famous gentleman was Monsieur Francois Vigo, and he was the Rothschild of the country north of the Ohio.  Monsieur Vigo, though he merited it, I had not room to mention in the last chapter.  Clark had routed him from his bed on the morning of our arrival, and whether or not he had been in the secret of frightening the inhabitants into making their wills, and then throwing them into transports of joy, I know not.

Monsieur Vigo’s store was the village club.  It had neither glass in the window nor an attractive display of goods; it was merely a log cabin set down on a weedy, sun-baked plot.  The stuffy smell of skins and furs came out of the doorway.  Within, when he was in Kaskaskia, Monsieur Vigo was wont to sit behind his rough walnut table, writing with a fine quill, or dispensing the news of the villages to the priest and other prominent citizens, or haggling with persistent blanketed braves over canoe-loads of ill-smelling pelts which they brought down from the green forests of the north.  Monsieur Vigo’s clothes were the color of the tobacco he gave in exchange; his eyes were not unlike the black beads he traded, but shrewd and kindly withal, set in a square saffron face that had the contradiction of a small chin.  As the days wore into months, Monsieur Vigo’s place very naturally became the headquarters for our army, if army it might be called.  Of a morning a dozen would be sitting against the logs in the black shadow, and in the midst of them always squatted an unsavory Indian squaw.  A few braves usually stood like statues at the corner, and in front of the door another group of hunting shirts.  Without was the paper money of the Continental Congress, within the good tafia and tobacco of Monsieur Vigo.  One day Monsieur Vigo’s young Creole clerk stood shrugging his shoulders in the doorway.  I stopped.

“By tam!” Swein Poulsson was crying to the clerk, as he waved a worthless scrip above his head.  “Vat is money?”

This definition the clerk, not being a Doctor Johnson, was unable to give offhand.

“Vat are you, choost?  Is it America?” demanded Poulsson, while the others looked on, some laughing, some serious.  “And vich citizen are you since you are ours?  You vill please to give me one carrot of tobacco.”  And he thrust the scrip under the clerk’s nose.

The clerk stared at the uneven lettering on the scrip with disdain.