"My dear Croghan, you insinuate the American way may be better."
"It is, on the western border. It may not be on the northern."
"Then you would not have advised my attempting the Indians here?"
"I shouldn't have discouraged it. When I got the secret order, I said: 'Bring the French--bring the missionaries--bring anything that will cut the comb of Tecumseh!'"
"The missionaries and the French like being classed with--anything," I said.
"We're Americans here," Croghan laughed. "The dauphin may have to fight in the ditch with the rest of us."
"The dauphin is an American too, and used to scars, as you know. Can you give me any news from Green Bay in the Wisconsin country?"
"I was ordered to Green Bay last year to see if anything could be done with old Fort Edward Augustus."
"Not now," he answered soberly. "She's dead."
"That's bad," I said, thinking of lost opportunities.
"Is pretty Annabel de Chaumont ever coming back from France?"
"That's worse," he sighed. "I was very silly about her when I was a boy."
We had our supper in his quarters, and he busied himself until late in the night with preparations for defense. The whole place was full of cheer and plenty of game, and swarmed like a little fair with moving figures. A camp-fire was built at dark in the center of the parade ground, heaped logs sending their glow as far as the dark pickets. Heads of families drew towards it while the women were putting their children to bed; and soldiers off duty lounged there, the front of the body in light, the back in darkness.
Cool forest night air flowed over the stockade, swaying smoke this way and that. As the fire was stirred, and smoke turned to flame, it showed more and more distinctly what dimness had screened.
A man rose up on the other side of it, clothed in a coffee sack, in which holes were cut for his head and arms. His hat was a tin kettle with the handle sticking out behind like a stiff queue.
Indifferent to his grotesqueness, he took it off and put it on the ground beside him, standing ready to command attention.
He was a small, dark, wiry man, barefooted and barelegged, whose black eyes sparkled, and whose scanty hair and beard hung down over shoulders and breast. Some pokes of leather, much scratched, hung bulging from the rope which girded his coffee sack. From one of these he took a few unbound leaves, the fragment of a book, spread them open, and began to read in a chanting, prophetic key, something about the love of the Lord and the mysteries of angels. His listeners kept their eyes on him, giving an indulgent ear to spiritual messages that made less demand on them than the violent earthly ones to which they were accustomed.