Cavelier,—called La Salle from an estate he had once owned in France,—explorer, and seignior of Fort Frontenac and adjacent grants on the north shore of Lake Ontario, was at that time in the prime of his power. He was returning from France, with the king’s permission to work out all his gigantic enterprises, with funds for the purpose, and one of the most promising young military men in Europe as his lieutenant.

Montreal merchants on the wharf singled out La Salle with jealous eye, which saw in the drooping point and flaring base of his nose an endless smile of scorn. He was a man who had only to use his monopolies to become enormously rich, cutting off the trade of the lakes from Montreal. That he was above gain, except as he could use it for hewing his ambitious road into the wilderness, they did not believe. The merchants of Montreal readily translated the shyness and self-restraint of his solitary nature into the arrogance of a recently ennobled and successful man.

La Salle had a spare face, with long oval cheeks, curving well inward beside the round of his sensitive prominent chin. Gray and olive tones still further cooled the natural pallor of his skin and made ashen brown the hair which he wore flowing.

The plainness of an explorer and the elegance of a man exact in all his habits distinguished La Salle’s dress against that background of brilliant courtiers.

He moved ashore with Frontenac, who saluted benignly both the array of red allies and the inhabitants of this second town in the province.

The sub-governor stepped out to escort the governor-general to the fort, bells rang, cannon still boomed, martial music pierced the heart with its thrill, and the Carignan squad wheeled in behind Frontenac’s moving train.

“Sieur de la Salle! Sieur de la Salle!” a little girl called, breaking away from the Sisters of St. Joseph, whose convent robes had enclosed her like palisades, “take me also in the procession!”

This demand granted itself, so nimbly did she escape a nun’s ineffectual grasp and spring between Tonty and La Salle.

Frontenac himself had turned at the shrill outcry. He laughed when he saw the wilful young creature taking the explorer by the wrist and falling into step so close to his own person.

A pursuing nun, unwilling to interrupt the governors train, hovered along its progress, making anxious signs to her charge, until she received an assuring gesture from La Salle. She then went back dissatisfied but relieved of responsibility; and the child, with a proud fling of her person, marched on toward the fort.

II
HAND-OF-IRON.

“Mademoiselle the tiger-cat,” said La Salle to Tonty, making himself heard with some effort above the din of martial sound.

The young soldier lifted his hat with his left hand and made the child a bow, which she regarded with critical eyes.

“I am the niece of Monsieur de la Salle,” she explained to Tonty as she marched; “so he calls me tiger-cat.”

“Mademoiselle Barbe Cavelier is the tiger-cat’s human name,” the explorer added, laughing. “It is flattering to have this nimble animal spring affectionately on one from ambush; but I should soon have inquired after you at the convent, mademoiselle.”

“I did not spring affectionately on you,” said Barbe; “I wanted to be in the procession.”

“Hast thou then lost all regard for thy uncle La Salle during his year of absence?”

Barbe’s high childish voice distinctly and sincerely stated, “No, monsieur; I have fought all the girls at the convent on your account. Jeanne le Ber said nothing against you; but she is a Le Ber. I am glad you came back in such grandeur. I was determined to be in the grandeur myself. But it is not a time to give you my cheek for a kiss.”

La Salle smiled over her head at Tonty. The Italian noted her marked resemblance to the explorer. She had the same features in delicate tints, the darkness of her eyelashes and curls only emphasizing the type. Already her small nose drooped at the point and flared at the base. As La Salle and his young kinswoman stepped together, Tonty gauged them alike,—two self-restraining natures with unmeasured endurance and individual force like the electric current.

Montreal’s square bastioned fort, by the mouth of a small creek flowing into the St. Lawrence, was soon reached from the wharf. It stood at the south end of the town.

“My dear child,” said La Salle, stating his case to Barbe, “it is necessary for me to go into the fort with Count Frontenac, and equally necessary you should go back at once to the Sisters. I will bring you out of the convent to-morrow to look at the beaver fair. This is Monsieur de Tonty, my lieutenant; let him take you back to the nuns. I shall be blamed if I carry you into the fort.”

Barbe heard him without raising objections. She looked at Tonty, who gave her his left hand and drew her out of the train.

It swept past them into the fortress gates,—gallant music, faces returning her eager gaze with smiles, plumes, powdered curls, and laces, gold and white uniforms, soldiers with the sun flashing from their gun-barrels.

Barbe watched the last man in. To express her satisfaction she then rose to the tip of one foot and hopped three steps. She was lightly and delicately made, and as full of restless grace as a bird. Her face and curls bloomed above and strongly contrasted with the raiment her convent guardians planned for a child dependent, not on their charity, but on their maternal care.

The September morning enveloped the world in a haze of brightness, like that perfecting blue breath which we call the bloom upon the grape. A great landscape with a scarf of melting azure resting around its horizon, or ravelling to shreds against the mountain’s breast, or pretending to be wood-smoke across the river, drew Tonty’s eye from the disappearing pageant.

That fair land was a fit spot whereon the most luxurious of civilizations should touch and affiliate with savages of the wilderness. Up the limpid green river the Lachine Rapids showed their teeth with audible roar. From that point Mount Royal could be seen rising out of mists and stretching its hind-quarters westward like some vast mastodon. But to Tonty only its front appeared, a globe dipped in autumn colors and wearing plumes of vapor. The sky of this new hemisphere rose in unmeasured heights which the eye followed in vain; there seemed no zenith to the swimming blinding azure.

A row of booths for merchants had been built all along the outside of Montreal’s palisades, and traders were thus early setting their goods in array.

At the north extremity of the town that huge stone windmill built by the seigniors for defence, cast a long dewy shadow toward the west. Its loopholes showed like dark specks on the body of masonry.

Sun-sparkles on the river were no more buoyant and changeable than the child at Tonty’s side. Dimples came and went in her cheeks. Her blood was stirred by the swarming life around her.

“Monsieur,” she confided to her uncle’s lieutenant, “I am meditating something very wicked.”

“Certainly that is impossible, mademoiselle,” said Tonty, accommodating his step to her reluctant gait.

“I am meditating on not going back to the convent.”

“Where would you go, mademoiselle?”

“Everywhere, to see things.”

“But my orders are to escort you