With Sword and Crucifix by Edward S. Van Zile - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXIX
 IN WHICH THE GREAT SPIRIT COMES FROM THE SEA
 TO RECLAIM COYOCOP

COYOCOP’S prediction was fulfilled at dawn. The year which Doña Julia de Aquilar had passed in the City of the Sun had enabled her to read aright the minds of the sun-worshippers after their moonlit attack upon de Sancerre’s island had been repulsed. They had awaited the coming of their gleaming god, and had been rewarded by a sunrise whose splendor should have filled their childish souls with love and peace. But the mounting orb of day was greeted by its idolaters not with gentle hymns of praise, but with wild, warlike shouts, that echoed from the woods and across the flood with a grim, menacing persistence that sent a chill through the hearts of a maiden and her lover, and caused a dare-devil from the northern woods to look with care to the priming of his gun.

For the first time since Jacques Barbier, in a fit of temper caused by some fancied slight put upon him by the haughty de la Salle, had deserted the great explorer’s party, trusting confidently to his own skill as a woodsman to carry him safely back to Canada, the coureur de bois had regretted, momentarily, his reckless self-confidence. Had he remained with his captain, he might have been, at this time, half-way up the river toward the forests which he knew and loved; and here he was, at the dawn of a day made to give joy to a runner-of-the-woods, surrounded by gigantic, fierce-eyed warriors, already raising hoarse shouts of triumph for the easy victory which seemed to lie within their reach.

“Gar!” exclaimed Barbier, as he raised his gun to his shoulder. “Service with de la Salle was hard, but ’twas easier than death. But, then, ’tis time for me to die. When a wandering outcast from the Court of France comes here to tell me what will happen in the woods—and, pardieu, he told me true—there’s nothing left in life for poor Jacques Barbier!”

A few moments before the coureur de bois had elevated his musket, to begin a battle against overwhelming odds, de Sancerre had said farewell to a heavy-eyed, pale-lipped maiden, who had spent the night in prayer, fearful of the peril which the dawn would bring to a brave knight-errant who had grown dearer to her loving heart with every day that had passed. Well Doña Julia knew that captivity, not death, would be her lot should the sun-worshippers reach the island, but that they would grant mercy to de Sancerre she had no hope. The thought of life without the man whose love had come to her as the rarest gift which Heaven could bestow was a horror which drove the color from her face and robbed her voice of everything save sobs.

“Remember, sweetheart, if the worst should come to me,” said de Sancerre, with forced calmness, bending down to press his cold lips to her trembling hand, “that your brave, earnest heart has taught me how to live and how to die. Pray to the Virgin, who holds you in her care, to keep me always worthy of your love, ’though death should come between us for a time. Adieu, ma chère! God grant ’tis au revoir!”

The girl clung to his hand, wet with her tears, and strove in vain to speak, to put into halting words the love and despair which filled her soul. For an instant her white face looked up at him from the entrance to the hut, and de Sancerre bent forward and kissed her hot, dry lips.

A moment later he had crawled through the tall grass toward the eastern shore of the island and lay watching, once again, the two war-canoes of the black-haired, black-eyed, black-hearted savages who had turned from their adoration of the sun to begin anew their devil’s work. Suddenly a shower of feathered, reed-made arrows whizzed above the gleaming waves, deadly from the speed with which long acacia bows endowed them.

“Ma foi, the sun-wasps begin to sting!” exclaimed de Sancerre. At that instant he heard Jacques Barbier’s gun, warning the sun-worshippers’ land-force not to launch a canoe from the shore nearest to the island.

The Count and the Canadian, an hour before sunrise, had divided the store of bullets which remained to them, and had found that only a dozen shots from each musket stood between them and certain death.

“I know how a miser feels as he counts his gold,” soliloquized de Sancerre, as he aimed his gun at the canoe, from which a broadside of arrows had been launched at his coigne of vantage. “Here goes number one, ma petite! There are only eleven more to defend a Count of Languedoc from the life to come! Bon matin, monsieur!”

To de Sancerre’s chagrin and dismay, the brawny, brown paddler at whom he had aimed his musket had defied moon-magic at the dawn of day. The Count’s precious bullet had done no harm to the oncoming canoe, nor to the war-party which it held. Cold with the horrid possibilities opened up by his indifferent marksmanship, de Sancerre, with hands which trembled annoyingly, attempted to reload his gun in time to prevent the imminent landing of the howling bowmen. That his shot would have come too late the speed of the canoe made evident, when a crash, almost at his very ear, nearly deafened the astonished Frenchman for a time. Jacques Barbier, having checked momentarily by his marvellous skill with his musket the attack from the main-land, had come to de Sancerre’s defense in the nick of time. But the coureur de bois paid dearly for the support that he had given to the unnerved Frenchman. An arrow, shot by a dusky warrior more daring than his companions, had made answer to Jacques Barbier’s fatal bullet and had entered the Canadian’s breast just below his dangling tobacco-pipe.

“Mother Mary, that is enough!” groaned the coureur de bois, writhing upon the tousled grass by his horrified comrade’s side. “Courage, Monsieur le Comte! Let them have your charge! I have just life enough left to load my gun again. Wait! Your hand trembles! Bien! Fire!”

De Sancerre’s musket roared once again and his bullet found its way to the heart of a foe.

“Take my gun, monsieur,” gasped Barbier. “I made shift to load it—but, gar, this is death! Ugh!”

A hero at the end of his short, wild life, the coureur de bois lay dead upon the shore.

At that instant the waters of the gulf and the river’s mouth vibrated with the thunder of an explosion which, to the ears of the startled sun-worshippers upon the main-land and in the crowded war-boats, sounded like moon-magic gone mad with victory.

“Nom de Dieu, it is the cannon of a ship or my ears are haunted by Jacques Barbier’s gun!” exclaimed de Sancerre, eyeing the retreating canoes as he stealthily raised his head above the underbrush and then cast a searching glance toward the sun-kissed sea. To his amazement and joy, his gaze rested upon a clumsy carack, loaded deep, coming to anchor not half a mile below the island upon which he stood. A puff of smoke arose from the great ship’s bow at that moment, and again the astonished woods and waters reverberated with an uproar new to the ears of a hundred terrified warriors, who had come forth to recover a goddess and had been met with the awful chiding of the Great Spirit, who had sent a mighty vessel, larger than their wildest dreams had known, to carry Coyocop back again to God.

With his heart throbbing with many varied emotions, de Sancerre had reluctantly turned his grateful eyes from the sea, no longer a lonely, cruel waste of tossing waves, toward the forest to the westward, into which the land-forces of the disorganized sun-worshippers were scurrying in mad fear of an avenging deity, when he felt a light hand upon his arm, and, turning quickly, gazed down into the dark, glowing eyes of a maiden whose trust in the saints had not been betrayed.

“In the hut I knelt in prayer,” whispered Doña Julia, from whose face shone the light of a soul that had known deep sorrow and great joy, “when I heard my father’s voice, telling me that help was near. Oh, señor, the wonder of it all!”

“It looks to me a miracle, indeed!” exclaimed de Sancerre. “There seemed to be no hope when Barbier was hit! He died, señora, the death of a true man.”

Hand in hand, they stood for a time gazing down at the brave, liberty-loving runner of the woods, whose clean-cut, handsome face had kept its firm, symmetrical outlines through the agony of sudden death.

“Give me back again my dagger, sweetheart,” said de Sancerre, turning sadly away from a grim picture of manly vigor cut down in its youthful prime. “I did Jacques Barbier a cruel wrong! He was too brave a man to do a coward’s deed!”

“HE FELT A LIGHT HAND UPON HIS ARM, AND GAZED DOWN INTO THE
 DARK EYES OF THE MAIDEN”

“They’re manning a boat to come to us!” exclaimed the Frenchman a moment later, as he and Doña Julia turned again to gaze at the great carack, rising and falling upon the early morning tide. “It is a Spanish vessel, sweetheart!”

“Si, señor. There is no doubt of that! I cannot read the flag she flies, but ’tis some Spanish merchant-man bound west for Mexico.”

De Sancerre slipped an arm, covered with velvet rags, around the slender waist of the girl, whose sweet face had gained new beauty from the mighty miracle which the saints had wrought in her behalf.

“They heard our guns at dawn across the sea, and saw my canvas flapping in the breeze,” he said, musingly. “At last, by chance, the King of France has done me a good turn! He owed me one, señora. My sword has served him well, but when it made a slip, which love itself forgave, he turned his face away, and left me, sweetheart, with no land to call my own!”

Doña Julia looked up at her lover with a bright smile upon her curving lips, and her eloquent eyes told of a joyful heart, as she said:

“If so my countrymen in yonder boat are kind enough to take us, señor, to the West, we’ll find a province which belongs to me. If you will deign to make my realm the land of your adoption, I pledge my word to be a gracious queen.”

Falling to one knee, with the airy grace of a courtier who had never known the manners of the woods and wilds, de Sancerre pressed the girl’s hand to his smiling lips.

“Here, within sight of a column bearing the arms of France and Navarre,” he cried, gayly, “I forswear all allegiance to other kings than Love, and hereby pledge my life and heart and sword to the service of my queen, whose hand I kiss!”

The salt breeze from the playful sea, smiling beneath the bright June sun, brought to their ears at that moment the sound of a small boat scraping upon the beach, and the rumble of oars clattering against dry wood.

The sun was sinking toward the West, and the King’s Column, after a long interval of silence, spake complaining words to the Cross of Christ. “’Twill be more lonely for us now than heretofore,” grumbled the tall pillar, above which a shred of soiled canvas hung, heavy and limp, flapping lazily now and again against the wooden sides of the royal herald. “In yonder ship, whose sails resemble golden wings against the background of the deep, a man and maiden, seemingly most worthy of the blessings of this realm of mine, have taken flight and treated me with strange ingratitude. I marvel that they should in such wise spurn my royal master and the haughty arms of France.”

The Cross of Christ said nothing to soothe the wounded pride of the pompous pillar, towering above the humble emblem of an all-conquering faith in the crimson light of the waning day. Mayhap the Cross had no time, at that sad moment, to give to happy lovers, sailing through the glowing twilight toward a land of peace and joy. At its base lay a newly-made grave, within which slept the body of a youth who had loved God’s world and hated the tyranny of men.

THE END