So the amiable dog became a lion, bold, impudent, mocking; the mask was
gone forever, both from his face and his desires. He wore his empty
scabbard with all the effrontery of a man who had fought and won his
first duel. Du Puys had threatened to hang the man who gave the
vicomte a sword. As the majority of the colonists were ignorant of
what lay behind this remarkable quarrel, they naturally took sides with
the man whose laugh was more frequent than his frown. Thus, the
vicomte still shuffled the ebon dominoes of a night and sang out
jovially, "Doubles!" Whenever the man he had so basely wronged passed
him, he spat contemptuously and cried: "See, Messieurs, what it is to
be without a sword!" And as for Brother Jacques, it was: "And how is
Monsieur Jacques's health this fine morning?" or "What a handsome rogue
of a priest you are!" or "Can you tell me where I may find a sword?" He
laughed at D'Hérouville, and bantered the poet on his silence,--the
poet whose finer sense and intuition had distrusted the vicomte from
the first.
One day madame came out to feed the mission's chickens. Her hand swung
to and fro, and like a stream of yellow gold the shelled corn trailed
through the air to the ground. The fowls clustered around her noisily.
She was unaware of the vicomte, who leaned against the posts of the
palisade.
There was in his glance which said: "Madame, I offered to make you my
wife; now I shall make you something less." And seeing the Chevalier
stirring inside the fort, he mused: "My faith, but that old marquis
must have had an eye. The fellow's mother must have been a handsome
wench."
Once the vicomte came secretly upon D'Hérouville, Frémin, Pauquet, and
the woodsman named The Fox because of his fiery hair and beard, peaked
face and beady eyes. When the party broke up, the vicomte emerged from
his hiding place, wearing a smile which boded no good to whatever plot
or plan D'Hérouville had conceived. And that same night he approached
each of D'Hérouville's confederates and spoke. What passed only they
themselves knew; but when the vicomte left them they were irrevocably
his.
"Eye of the bull!" murmured Corporal Frémin, "but this vicomte is much
of a man. As for the Chevalier, what the devil! his fingers have been
sunken into my throat."
A mile from the mission, toward the north, of the lake, stood a hut of
Indian construction. It had been erected long before the mission. It
served as a half-way to the savages after days of hunting in the
northern confines of the country of the Onondagas. Here the savages
would rest of a night before carrying the game to the village in the
hills. It was well hidden from the eyes, thick foliage and vines
obscuring it from the view of those at the mission. But there was a
well worn path leading to it. It was here that tragedy entered into
the comedy of these various lives.