“My father did not like to be talked to,” I answered, “except when he was drinking.”

He gave me a strange look.  Many the stroll I took with him afterwards, when he sought to relax himself from the cares which the campaign had put upon him.  This night was still and clear, the west all yellow with the departing light, and the mists coming on the river.  And presently, as we strayed down the shore we came upon a strange sight, the same being a huge fort rising from the waterside, all overgrown with brush and saplings and tall weeds.  The palisades that held its earthenwork were rotten and crumbling, and the mighty bastions of its corners sliding away.  Behind the fort, at the end farthest from the river, we came upon gravelled walks hidden by the rank growth, where the soldiers of his Most Christian Majesty once paraded.  Lost in thought, Clark stood on the parapet, watching the water gliding by until the darkness hid it,—­nay, until the stars came and made golden dimples upon its surface.  But as we went back to the camp again he told me how the French had tried once to conquer this vast country and failed, leaving to the Spaniards the endless stretch beyond the Mississippi called Louisiana, and this part to the English.  And he told me likewise that this fort in the days of its glory had been called Massacre, from a bloody event which had happened there more than three-score years before.

“Threescore years!” I exclaimed, longing to see the men of this race which had set up these monuments only to abandon them.

“Ay, lad,” he answered, “before you or I were born, and before our fathers were born, the French missionaries and soldiers threaded this wilderness.  And they called this river ’La Belle Riviere,’—­the Beautiful River.”

“And shall I see that race at Kaskaskia?” I asked, wondering.

“That you shall,” he cried, with a force that left no doubt in my mind.

In the morning we broke camp and started off for the strange place which we hoped to capture.  A hundred miles it was across the trackless wilds, and each man was ordered to carry on his back provisions for four days only.

“Herr Gott!” cried Swein Poulsson, from the bottom of a flatboat, whence he was tossing out venison flitches, “four day, und vat is it ve eat then?”

“Frenchies, sure,” said Terence; “there’ll be plenty av thim for a season.  Faith, I do hear they’re tinder as lambs.”

“You’ll no set tooth in the Frenchies,” the pessimistic McAndrew put in, “wi’ five thousand redskins aboot, and they lying in wait.  The Colonel’s no vera mindful of that, I’m thinking.”

“Will ye hush, ye ill-omened hound!” cried Cowan, angrily.  “Pitch him in the crick, Mac!”

Tom was diverted from this duty by a loud quarrel between Captain Harrod and five men of the company who wanted scout duty, and on the heels of that came another turmoil occasioned by Cowan’s dropping my drum into the water.  While he and McCann and Tom were fishing it out, Colonel Clark himself appeared, quelled the mutiny that Harrod had on his hands, and bade the men sternly to get into ranks.