saw such a girl!"

She laughed at him and kept on whipping the air dangerously near his eyes, until she had driven him backward as far as he could squeeze himself into a comer of the room.

Madame Roussillon came to the door from the kitchen and stood looking in and laughing, with her hands on her hips. By this time the rapier was making a criss-cross pattern of flashing lines close to the young man's head while Alice, in the enjoyment of her exercise, seemed to concentrate all the glowing rays of her beauty in her face, her eyes dancing merrily.

"Quit, now, Alice," he begged, half in fun and half in abject fear; "please quit—I surrender!"

She thrust to the wall on either side of him, then springing lightly backward a pace, stood at guard. Her thick yellow hair had fallen over her neck and shoulders in a loose wavy mass, out of which her face beamed with a bewitching effect upon her captive.

Rene, glad enough to have a cessation of his peril, stood laughing dryly; but the singing down at the river house was swelling louder and he made another movement to go.

"You surrendered, you remember," cried Alice, renewing the sword-play; "sit down on the chair there and make yourself comfortable. You are not going down yonder to-night; you are going to stay here and talk with me and Mother Roussillon; we are lonesome and you are good company."

A shot rang out keen and clear; there was a sudden tumult that broke up the distant singing; and presently more firing at varying intervals cut the night air from the direction of the river.

Jean, the hunchback, came in to say that there was a row of some sort; he had seen men running across the common as if in pursuit of a fugitive; but the moonlight was so dim that he could not be sure what it all meant.

Rene picked up his cap and bolted out of the house.

CHAPTER III

THE RAPE OF THE DEMIJOHN

The row down at the river house was more noise than fight, so far as results seemed to indicate. It was all about a small dame jeanne of fine brandy, which an Indian by the name of Long-Hair had seized and run off with at the height of the carousal. He must have been soberer than his pursuers, or naturally fleeter; for not one of them could catch him, or even keep long in sight of him. Some pistols were emptied while the race was on, and two or three of the men swore roundly to having seen Long-Hair jump sidewise and stagger, as if one of the shots had taken effect. But, although the moon was shining, he someway disappeared, they could not understand just how, far down beside the river below the fort and the church.

It was not a very uncommon thing for an Indian to steal what he wanted, and in most cases light punishment followed conviction; but it was felt to be a capital offense for an Indian or anybody else to rape a demijohn of fine brandy, especially one sent as a present, by a friend in New Orleans, to Lieutenant Governor Abbott, who had until recently been the commandant of the post. Every man at the river house recognized and resented the enormity of Long-Hair's crime and each was, for the moment, ready to be his judge and his executioner. He had broken at once every rule of frontier etiquette and every bond of sympathy. Nor was Long-Hair ignorant of the danger involved in his daring enterprise. He had beforehand carefully and stolidly weighed all the conditions, and true to his Indian nature, had concluded that a little wicker covered bottle of brandy was well worth the risk of his life. So he had put himself in condition for a great race by slipping out and getting rid of his weapons and all surplus weight of clothes.

This incident brought the drinking bout at the river house to a sudden end; but nothing further came of it that night, and no record of it would be found in these pages, but for the fact that Long-Hair afterwards became an important character in the stirring historical drama which had old Vincennes for its center of energy.

Rene de Ronville probably felt himself in bad luck when he arrived at the river house just too late to share in the liquor or to join in chasing the bold thief. He listened with interest, however, to the story of Long-Hair's capture of the commandant's demijohn and could not refrain from saying that if he had been present there would have been a quite different result.

"I would have shot him before he got to that door," he said, drawing his heavy flint-lock pistol and going through the motions of one aiming quickly and firing. Indeed, so vigorously in earnest was he with the pantomime, that he actually did fire, unintentionally of course,—the ball burying itself in the door-jamb.

He was laughed at by those present for being more excited than they who witnessed the whole thing. One of them, a leathery-faced and grizzled old sinner, leered at him contemptuously and said in queer French, with a curious accent caught from long use of backwoods English:

"Listen how the boy brags! Ye might think, to hear Rene talk, that he actually amounted to a big pile."

This personage was known to every soul in Vincennes as Oncle Jazon, and when Oncle Jazon spoke the whole town felt bound to listen.

"An' how well he shoots, too," he added with an intolerable wink; "aimed at the door and hit the post. Certainly Long-Hair would have been in great danger! O yes, he'd 'ave killed Long-Hair at the first shot, wouldn't he though!"

Oncle Jazon had the air of a large man, but the stature of a small one; in fact he was shriveled bodily to a degree which suggested comparison with a sun-dried wisp of hickory bark; and when he chuckled, as he was now doing, his mouth puckered itself until it looked like a scar on his face. From cap to moccasins he had every mark significant of a desperate character; and yet there was about him something that instantly commanded the confidence of rough men,—the look of self-sufficiency and superior capability always to be found in connection with immense will power. His sixty years of exposure, hardship, and danger seemed to have but toughened his physique and strengthened his vitality. Out of his small hazel eyes gleamed a light as keen as ice.

"All right, Oncle Jazon," said Rene laughing and blowing the smoke out of his pistol; "'twas you all the same who let Long-Hair trot off with the Governor's brandy, not I. If you could have hit even a door-post it might have been better."

Oncle Jazon took off his cap and looked down into it in a way he had when about to say something final.

"Ventrebleu! I did not shoot at Long-Hair at all," he said, speaking slowly, "because the scoundrel was unarmed. He didn't have on even a knife, and he was havin' enough to do dodgin' the bullets that the rest of 'em were plumpin' at 'im without any compliments from me to bother 'im more."

"Well," Rene replied, turning away with a laugh, "if I'd been scalped by the Indians, as you have, I don't think there would be any particular reason why I should wait for an Indian thief to go and arm himself before I accepted him as a target."

Oncle Jazon lifted a hand involuntarily and rubbed his scalpless crown; then he chuckled with a grotesque grimace as if the recollection of having his head skinned were the funniest thing imaginable.

"When you've killed as many of 'em as Oncle Jazon has," remarked a bystander to Rene, "you'll not be so hungry for blood, maybe."

"Especially after ye've took fifty-nine scalps to pay for yer one," added Oncle Jazon, replacing his cap over the hairless area of his crown.

The men who had been chasing Long-Hair, presently came straggling back with their stories—each had a distinct one—of how the fugitive escaped. They were wild looking fellows, most of them somewhat intoxicated, all profusely liberal with their stock of picturesque profanity. They represented the roughest element of the well-nigh lawless post.

"I'm positive that he's wounded," said one.