CHAPTER XXIII
IN WHICH DE SANCERRE UNDERGOES MANY VARIED
EMOTIONS
THE full moon of May, the moon of old corn, shone down upon a virgin forest bounding with the high pulse of a ripe spring-time. Its white splendor tiptoed along the outskirts of impenetrable thickets, or danced gayly down majestic glades, patrolled by oak and hickory, sassafras, and poplar trees. Presently, shunning a menacing morass, the silvery outriders of the moon’s array would file along a narrow bayou or charge en masse across the broad surface of a trembling lake. And while the triumphant moonlight took possession of a splendid province, the thousand voices of the forest murmured at midnight a welcome to the conqueror.
Panting for breath, and worn with the friction of their race for freedom through swamps and woods, de Sancerre and his companions, after long hours of hurried flight, paused to recover their strength, far to the southward of the City of the Sun. The marvellous endurance of Julia de Aquilar, whose urgency had granted to the enraged Noco no chance to protest against the fervor of their mad career, had put even the wiry, hardened frame of the lithe Frenchman to a stubborn test. Hand in hand de Sancerre and the Spanish girl had sped onward, followed by the grumbling crone, now breaking their way through vindictive underbrush, anon wetting their feet in marshy vales, again making progress beneath stately trees, avoiding the deep gloom of threatening recesses and following a moon-track, like hounds upon a scent. Behind them sat certain death; beyond them, a joyful promise lured them deeper and ever deeper into the primeval wilds.
Tottering and breathless, old Noco reached the crest of the tree-crowned hillock upon which Doña Julia and de Sancerre, gasping, speechless, but strong with renewed hope, stood awaiting her coming. Throwing her old bones upon the damp grass, Noco lay moaning for a time in senile misery. Youth, under the spurs of fear and hope, had led old age a cruel race. Noco had come into the forest to solve by moon-magic the secret of her grandson’s flight, and, lo! the wizard upon whom she relied had become a will-o’-the-wisp, in tattered velvets, using his diabolical power to kidnap Coyocop, the spirit of the sun.
“Lean against the tree-trunk, señora,” said de Sancerre to Doña Julia, his voice tripping over his breath as he spoke. “I fear old Noco has found our pace too hot. But, even now, I dare not rest. We must go on!”
Descending the hillock to the treacherous ooze which mirrored the moon in a multitude of pools, the Frenchman filled his bedraggled bonnet with cold water and returned quickly to Noco’s side. Bending down, he forced the panting beldame to drink deep of the refreshing draught. Then he poured a cold stream upon her drawn, dusky face and through the white hair above her wrinkled brow. The old hag’s beady eyes had watched his every movement. Had he not cast a spell upon the moon-kissed water with which he laved her head? Surely this revival of her strength, which raised her on the instant to her feet, was magical. Cruel though he might have been to her, the Brother of the Moon was making full reparation with his witchery for the suffering which she had undergone. Old Noco was more superstitious at midnight than at dawn, more a savage in the forest than in her city hut. The mocking gleam which her eyes had known so well the moonlight could not find, as she stood facing de Sancerre, gazing up at him with a question in her glance.
“Cabanacte?” she exclaimed, still short of breath.
“We will seek him by the river,” answered de Sancerre, pointing to a break in the forest which opened toward the east, as he drew the woman toward the hollow gum-tree against which the Spanish girl was seated, silently pouring out her soul in gratitude to Mother Mary and the saints.
“But there is no time,” complained the old woman. “They will miss Coyocop, and if they find us in the woods—ugh!” The grunt of horror to which Noco gave vent bore witness to how much cruelty her aged eyes had gazed upon.
“Listen, Doña Noco,” said de Sancerre sternly, as he extended his hand to Julia de Aquilar and, indulging in a courtly flourish wholly out of keeping with his environment, drew her to her feet, “we have set out to find Katonah and your grandson. Be true to Cabanacte and put your trust in Coyocop. Listen, señora,” and here de Sancerre bent down and addressed the old crone with impressive emphasis, “as we hurry on, ponder the words I speak; the City of the Sun is unworthy of the spirit sent from God. It is accursed. Its temple runs with blood, and its vile priests have sealed the city’s doom. Come; ’twas your grandson who found Coyocop. ’Tis Coyocop who shall now find Cabanacte.”
Onward through the moonlit forest the trio kept their course, tending always toward a noble river that might bear them, could they build a raft, to the vagrant camp of de la Salle, pitched somewhere further south. Wasting no breath in futile words, de Sancerre maintained a telling pace which carried them every moment further from a city of murder toward a stream where hunger menaced them.
For two long, heavy hours they struggled eastward across the treacherous margin of a river grown erratic from its weary longing for the sea. Now and then de Sancerre would turn to refresh his straining eyes with a vision of beauty, done in black and white against the moonlight, and, for all time, upon his heart. A word of encouragement would escape from his dry lips at intervals, and a smile of hope and gratitude would reward him for his prodigality of breath.
The want and hardship which confronted them, the chances of capture from savage tribes, of death from starvation, or swamp-begotten fever, although clear to de Sancerre’s mind, could not, in that glad hour, cast a shadow upon his buoyant spirits. “A half-done miracle is worse than none,” he had said to Doña Julia. It gave him renewed confidence in the future to feel that upon his own courage, pertinacity, and foresight would depend the happy outcome of a strange adventure which chance, at the outset, had made possible. It was pleasant to de Sancerre to reflect that he could now relieve the saints of all responsibility for the issue of events.
Nevertheless, the Frenchman uttered a word of gratitude to St. Maturin, who watches over fools, when, about two hours after midnight, he and his companions shook the forest from their weary shoulders and stood upon the curving shore of the River Colbert—known to later times as the Mississippi. De Sancerre’s quick eye saw at once that at this point Sieur de la Salle had, weeks before, made his camp for a night. By a short cut through the woods, the Frenchman had reached a point upon the river to gain which the canoes of the great explorer had labored for a day upon the winding stream. That the litter left upon the bank had not been abandoned by a party of roving Indians was proven beyond peradventure to do Sancerre by a discovery which electrified his pulse and renewed his admiration for the saint whom he had just invoked. As he hurried down the slope which fell gently from the forest to the stream, anxious to enter the deserted huts, made of reeds and leafy branches by expert hands to serve as shelter for a single night, de Sancerre’s torn shoes struck against an object which forced an exclamation of astonishment and delight from his ready tongue.
Gleaming in the moonlight at his feet, the long barrel of a flintlock musket pointed straight at a powder-horn and a bag of bullets, as if the weapon, lacking nourishment, prayed to be recharged. Bending down, de Sancerre raised the clumsy gun and examined its mechanism with the eagerness of a shipwrecked mariner toward whose raft the sea had tossed a chest which might, when opened, gladden his eyes with food.
Doña Julia and Noco stood behind the Frenchman watching his movements with eyes in which curiosity had conquered the heaviness of dire fatigue.
“This, Mademoiselle de Aquilar,” explained de Sancerre, balancing the heavy musket in his hand, “is the fusil ordinaire, or snaphance gun. I have heard young hotspurs in the low countries—who knew little of the rapier’s niceties—assert that, at close quarters, its butt-end is more deadly than a sword. Of its merits in a mêlée I am not ripe to speak, but I learned, while yet I lingered with Count Frontenac, to drive a bullet through a distant tree. The weapon has its use! You may thank the saints, mademoiselle, for this gun and powder-horn. ’Twill serve my turn if my captain’s careless redmen have left no eatables in yonder huts.”
“Ah, well I knew, monsieur, you had not come to me in vain!” exclaimed Doña Julia, a glad smile gleaming in her eloquent eyes, beneath which rested the dark shadows of physical exhaustion. “The saints have led your steps to where the musket lay!”
“Mais, oui! But tell not Noco this. Her ears must harken to another tale.”
Turning to gaze down at the silent beldame, the fiery brightness of whose busy eyes the strain of a forced march at midnight had not dimmed, ’though her face twitched with fatigue and her scrawny hands shook in the moonlight, de Sancerre said:
“The Brother of the Moon is glad, señora, for my god has put into my hands the thunder and the lightning—to call Cabanacte from the wilds and to smite the sun-priests if they follow us. To-morrow I will make the echoes of the forest lead your grandson to us here. But now we must have rest, for Coyocop is weary, and the dawn must find us up.”
St. Maturin, the friend of fools, still played de Sancerre’s game. As the Frenchman, followed by the women, to whom each step they took was now a hardship, entered the nearest hut, he saw at once that his withdrawal from de la Salle’s expedition, and the loss of Chatémuc and Katonah, had led the explorer to lighten his equipment by the contents of one canoe, intending, doubtless, to retake the stores upon his return should circumstances make them again of value to him. A boat-load of corn-meal and gunpowder had been stored in the hut in the hope that neither the weather nor roving savages would deprive the returning explorers of its use.
“Nom de Dieu!” cried the Frenchman, gayly, as he pointed to the godsend which made his light heart lighter. “There lie food and ammunition. ’Tis true, indeed, that Heaven has been kind to us! And so I leave you, Mademoiselle de Aquilar, to your prayers and sleep. I must make further search.”
Old Noco, who had paid out the last link of her energy, had made a shake-down of the meal-bags, and her labored breathing proved that her aged bones were finding the rest they craved. De Sancerre held Doña Julia’s cold, trembling hand in his and gazed upon her weary face for a long moment, whose very silence was eloquent with words he could not speak.
“Good-night, monsieur,” faltered the girl, tears born of gratitude and physical weariness dimming the dark beauty of her eyes.
“Good-night,” he said, bending to touch her white hand with his lips. Then he drew himself erect, trembling as if the damp breeze from the river had chilled his overwrought frame. Suddenly he clasped the weeping girl to his breast, and his lips met hers in a kiss which crowned the miracle the saints had wrought for them.
“My love! My love!” whispered de Sancerre; and when he reached the moonlit night outside the hut again it seemed to him that the river and the forest had changed their outlines to his eyes and that he stood within the confines of a paradise. He seated himself upon the sloping margin of the stream, vainly attempting to recall his soaring thoughts to the homely exigencies of his grim environment. It was no paradise by which he was surrounded. A lonely flood finding its way to a lonely sea lay before his eyes, while at his back stood a pathless wilderness through which, even at this moment, black-hearted fanatics, skilled in woodcraft, might be following his trail. This dark thought, clouding the splendor of a dream begotten by a kiss, led de Sancerre, almost unconsciously, to take from the ground at his side the awkward musket with which chance had armed him. He longed to test its prowess as an ally, to prove to his troubled mind that dampness and neglect had not robbed the flintlock of its heritage. With no intention of giving way to the curiosity which assailed him, the Frenchman carefully loaded the gun with powder and ball and raised it affectionately to his shoulder. In that hour of peril and loneliness the musket seemed to be a friend speaking to him of de la Salle’s loyalty and persistence and of the certainty that his return from the gulf could not be long delayed.
Suddenly an uncanny premonition crept over de Sancerre, whose nervous energy had been exhausted by a day and night of strangely-contrasted emotions and by a physical strain whose reaction was now taking its revenge. Turning his back to the river, de Sancerre’s restless eyes swept the black, threatening line of the forest, behind which the moon was drooping. Presently his heart seemed to clutch his throat and the long barrel of the musket trembled as his hand shook for an instant. At the edge of the woods, two hundred yards beyond the camp, stood a white, naked thing, resembling in outline a man, but as shadowy and ghostly as a creature made of moonbeams. It stood erect for a moment and then bent down as if it would crawl back into the forest upon all fours.
Impulsively, de Sancerre covered the apparition with his gun and snapped the steel against the flint. A crash, echoing across the startled flood, and hurled back in anger by the bushes and the trees, made sudden war upon the silence of the stately night. When the smoke from the friendly gun—in good case to serve the Frenchman’s ends—had cleared away, de Sancerre saw no ghastly victim of his marksmanship lying in white relief against the black outline of the woods. “Mayhap,” he reflected, “my bullet passed through a shadow not of earth! Don Joseph? Perhaps I drew him back from hell with that dear kiss I won! But what mad thoughts are these? ’Twas but a gray wolf in the scrub, or a vision raised by my own weariness. At all events, ma petite,” he exclaimed, patting the smoking musket contentedly, “there’s now no doubt that you and I agree.”
A soft touch fell upon de Sancerre’s arm, and, turning, he looked into the white, agitated face of Doña Julia.
“Fear not, señora,” he exclaimed, earnestly. “Forgive me that I disturbed your rest. But it seemed best to me to try the temper of this clumsy gun. ’Tis always well to know how great may be the prowess of an ally whom you have gained.”
Her dark eyes were reading his face closely.
“They have not found us?” she asked, eagerly. “You did not shoot at men?”
“Only at a target made by dreams,” he answered, reassuringly. “I shot at the phantom of my hate, ma chère, and, lo! it brought my love to me.”
Her dark eyes fell until their long black lashes rested against her white face.
“You love me, señor?” she whispered, in a voice which filled his soul with an ecstasy it had never known before.
And once again the waters of the listening river bore a love-tale to the distant gulf—a strange, sweet sequel to gossip which the waves had heard before.