Alice of Old Vincennes Part 27

"Oh, my dear Gaspard!" she cried as she lunged forward. "Gaspard, Gaspard!" Her voice fairly lifted the roof; her great weight, hurled with such force, overturned everybody, and all of them tumbled in a heap, the rotund and solid dame sitting on top.

"Ouf! not so impetuous, my dear," puffed M. Roussillon, freeing himself from her unpleasant pressure and scrambling to his feet. "Really you must have fared well in my absence, Madame, you are much heavier." He laughed and lifted her up as if she had been a child, kissing her resonantly.

His gun had fallen with a great clatter. He took it from the floor and examined it to see if it had been injured, then set it in a corner.

"I am afraid we have been making too much noise," said Alice, speaking very low. "There is a patrol guard every night now. If they should hear you--"

"Shh!" whispered M. Roussillon, "we will be very still. Alice, is there something to eat and a drop of wine handy? I have come many miles; I am tired, hungry, thirsty,--ziff!"

Alice brought some cold roast venison, a loaf, and a bottle of claret.

These she set before him on a little table.

"Ah, this is comfort," he said after he had gulped a full cup. "Have you all been well?"

Then he began to tell where he had been, what he had seen, and the many things he had done. A Frenchman must babble while he eats and drinks. A little wine makes him eloquent. He talks with his hands, shoulders, eyes. Madame Roussillon, Alice and Jean, wrapped in furs, huddled around him to hear. He was very entertaining, and they forgot the patrol until a noise startled them. It was the low of a cow. They laughed and the master of the house softened his voice.

M. Roussillon had been the guest of a great Indian chieftain, who was called the "Gate of the Wabash," because he controlled the river. The chief was an old acquaintance and treated him well.

"But I wanted to see you all," Gaspard said. "I was afraid something might have happened to you. So I came back just to peep in. I can't stay, of course; Hamilton would kill me as if I were a wolf. I can remain but an hour and then slip out of town again before daylight conies. The rain and darkness are my friends."

He had seen Simon Kenton, who said he had been in the neighborhood of Vincennes acting as a scout and spy for Clark. Presently and quite casually he added:

"And I saw Lieutenant Beverley, too. I suppose you know that he has escaped from Hamilton, and--" Here a big mouthful of venison interfered.

Alice leaned toward him white and breathless, her heart standing still.

Then the door, which had been left unbarred, was flung open and, along with a great rush of wind and rain, the patrol guard, five in number, sprang in.

M. Roussillon reached his gun with one hand, with the other swung a tremendous blow as he leaped against the intruders. Madame Roussillon blew out the light. No cave in the depth of earth was ever darker than that room. The patrolmen could not see one another or know what to do; but M. Roussillon laid about him with the strength of a giant. His blows sounded as if they smashed bones. Men fell heavily thumping on the floor where he rushed along. Some one fired a pistol and by its flash they all saw him; but instantly the darkness closed again, and before they could get their bearings he was out and gone, his great hulking form making its way easily over familiar ground where his would-be captors could have proceeded but slowly, even with a light to guide them. There was furious cursing among the patrolmen as they tumbled about in the room, the unhurt ones trampling their prostrate companions and striking wildly at each other in their blindness and confusion. At last one of them bethought him to open a dark lantern with which the night guards were furnished. Its flame was fluttering and gave forth a pale red light that danced weirdly on the floors and walls.

Alice had s.n.a.t.c.hed down one of her rapiers when the guards first entered. They now saw her facing them with her slender blade leveled, her back to the wall, her eyes s.h.i.+ning dangerously. Madame Roussillon had fled into the adjoining room. Jean had also disappeared. The officer, a subaltern, in charge of the guard, seeing Alice, and not quickly able to make out that it was a woman thus defying him, crossed swords with her. There was small s.p.a.ce for action; moreover the officer being not in the least a swordsman, played awkwardly, and quick as a flash his point was down. The rapier entered just below his thread with a dull chucking stab. He leaped backward, feeling at the same time a pair of arms clasp his legs. It was Jean, and the Lieutenant, thus unexpectedly tangled, fell to the floor, breaking but not extinguis.h.i.+ng the guard's lantern as he went down. The little remaining oil spread and flamed up brilliantly, as if eager for conflagration, sputtering along the uneven boards.

"Kill that devil!" cried the Lieutenant, in a strangling voice, while trying to regain his feet. "Shoot! Bayonet!"

In his pain, rage and haste, he inadvertently set his hand in the midst of the blazing oil, which clung to the flesh with a seething grip.

"h.e.l.l!" he screamed, "fire, fire!"

Two or three bayonets were leveled upon Alice. Some one kicked Jean clean across the room, and he lay there curled up in his hairy night-wrap looking like an enormous porcupine.

At this point a new performer came upon the stage, a dark-robed thing, so active that its outlines changed elusively, giving it no recognizable features. It might have been the devil himself, or some terrible unknown wild animal clad somewhat to resemble a man, so far as the startled guards could make out. It clawed right and left, hurled one of them against the wall, dashed another through the door into Madame Roussillon's room, where the good woman was wailing at the top of her voice, and felled a third with a stroke like that of a bear's paw.

Consternation was at high tide when Farnsworth, who always slept with an ear open, reached Roussillon place and quickly quieted things. He was troubled beyond expression when he found out the true state of the affair, for there was nothing that he could do but arrest Alice and take her to Hamilton. It made his heart sink. He would have thought little of ordering a file of soldiers to shoot a man under the same conditions; but to subject her again to the Governor's stern cruelty--how could he do it? This time there would be no hope for her.

Alice stood before him flushed, disheveled, defiant, sword in hand, beautiful and terrible as an angel. The black figure, man or devil, had disappeared as strangely as it had come. The sub-Lieutenant was having his slight wound bandaged. Men were raging and cursing under their breath, rubbing their bruised heads and limbs.

"Alice--Mademoiselle Roussillon, I am so sorry for this," said Captain Farnsworth. "It is painful, terrible--"

He could not go on, but stood before her unmanned. In the feeble light his face was wan and his hurt shoulder, still in bandages, drooped perceptibly.

"I surrender to you," she presently said in French, extending the hilt of her rapier to him. "I had to defend myself when attacked by your Lieutenant there. If an officer finds it necessary to set upon a girl with his sword, may not the girl guard her life if she can?"

She was short of breath, so that her voice palpitated with a touching plangency that shook the man's heart.

Farnsworth accepted the sword; he could do nothing less. His duty admitted of no doubtful consideration; yet he hesitated, feeling around in his mind for a phrase with which to evade the inevitable.

"It will be safer for you at the fort, Mademoiselle; let me take you there."

CHAPTER XIII

A MEETING IN THE WILDERNESS

Beverley set out on his mid-winter journey to Kaskaskia with a tempest in his heart, and it was, perhaps, the storm's energy that gave him the courage to face undaunted and undoubting what his experience must have told him lay in his path. He was young and strong; that meant a great deal; he had taken the desperate chances of Indian warfare many times before this, and the danger counted as nothing, save that it offered the possibility of preventing him from doing the one thing in life he now cared to do. What meant suffering to him, if he could but rescue Alice? And what were life should he fail to rescue her? The old, old song hummed in his heart, every phrase of it distinct above the tumult of the storm. Could cold and hunger, swollen streams, ravenous wild beasts and scalp-hunting savages baffle him? No, there is no barrier that can hinder love. He said this over and over to himself after his rencounter with the four Indian scouts on the Wabash. He repeated it with every heart-beat until he fell in with some friendly red men, who took him to their camp, where to his great surprise he met M.

Roussillon. It was his song when again he strode off toward the west on his lonely way.

We need not follow him step by step; the monotony of the woods and prairies, the cold rains, alternating with northerly winds and blinding snow, the constant watchfulness necessary to guard against a meeting with hostile savages, the tiresome tramping, wading and swimming, the hunger, the broken and wretched sleep in frozen and scant wraps,--why detail it all?

There was but one beautiful thing about it--the beauty of Alice as she seemed to walk beside him and hover near him in his dreams. He did not know that Long-Hair and his band were fast on his track; but the knowledge could not have urged him to greater haste. He strained every muscle to its utmost, kept every nerve to the highest tension. Yonder towards the west was help for Alice; that was all he cared for.

But if Long-Hair was pursuing him with relentless greed for the reward offered by Hamilton, there were friendly footsteps still nearer behind him; and one day at high noon, while he was bending over a little fire, broiling some liberal cuts of venison, a finger tapped him on the shoulder. He sprang up and grappled Oncle Jazon; at the same time, standing near by, he saw Simon Kenton, his old-time Kentucky friend.

The pungled features of one and the fine, rugged face of the other swam as in a mist before Beverley's eyes. Kenton was laughing quietly, his strong, upright form shaking to the force of his pleasure. He was in the early prime of a vigorous life, not handsome, but strikingly attractive by reason of a certain glow in his face and a kindly flash in his deep-set eyes.

"Well, well, my boy!" he exclaimed, laying his left hand on Beverley's shoulder, while in the other he held a long, heavy rifle. "I'm glad to see ye, glad to see ye."

"Thought we was Injuns, eh?" said Oncle Jazon. "An' ef we had 'a' been we'd 'a' been sh.o.r.e o' your scalp!" The wizzened old creole cackled gleefully.

"And where are ye goin'?" demanded Kenton. "Ye're making what lacks a heap o' bein' a bee-line for some place or other."

Beverley was dazed and vacant-minded; things seemed wavering and dim.

He pushed the two men from him and gazed at them without speaking.

Their presence and voices did not convince him.

"Yer meat's a burnin'," said Oncle Jazon, stooping to turn it on the smouldering coals. "Ye must be hungry. Cookin' enough for a regiment."

Kenton shook Beverley with rough familiarity, as if to rouse his faculties.

"What's the matter? Fitz, my lad, don't ye know Si Kenton? It's not so long since we were like brothers, and now ye don't speak to me! Ye've not forgot me, Fitz!"

"Mebby he don't like ye as well as ye thought he did," drawled Oncle Jazon. "I HEV known o' fellers a bein' mistaken jes' thet way."

Beverley got his wits together as best he could, taking in the situation by such degrees as seemed at the time unduly slow, but which were really mere momentary falterings.

"Why, Kenton! Jazon!" he presently exclaimed, a cordial gladness blending with his surprise. "How did you get here? Where did you come from?"