hes of salt. The plain truth is that dark savages of the
pure blood often do possess the magnetism of perfect physical
development and unfathomable mental strangeness; but real beauty they
never have. Their innate repulsiveness is so great that, like the
snake's charm, it may fascinate; yet an indescribable, haunting disgust
goes with it. And, after all, if Alice had been asked to tell just how
she felt toward the Indian she had labored so hard to save, she would
promptly have said:

"I loathe him as I do a toad!"

Nor would Father Beret, put to the same test, have made a substantially
different confession. His work, to do which his life went as fuel to
fire, was training the souls of Indians for the reception of divine
grace; but experience had not changed his first impression of savage
character. When he traveled in the wilderness he carried the Word and
the Cross; but he was also armed with a gun and two good pistols, not
to mention a dangerous knife. The rumor prevailed that Father Beret
could drive a nail at sixty yards with his rifle, and at twenty snuff a
candle with either one of his pistols.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST MAYOR OF VINCENNES

Governor Abbott probably never so much as heard of the dame jeanne of
French brandy sent to him by his creole friend in New Orleans. He had
been gone from Vincennes several months when the batteau arrived,
having been recalled to Detroit by the British authorities; and he
never returned. Meantime the little post with its quaint cabins and its
dilapidated block-house, called Fort Sackville, lay sunning drowsily by
the river in a blissful state of helplessness from the military point
of view. There was no garrison; the two or three pieces of artillery,
abandoned and exposed, gathered rust and cobwebs, while the pickets of
the stockade, decaying and loosened in the ground by winter freezes and
summer rains, leaned in all directions, a picture of decay and
inefficiency.

The inhabitants of the town, numbering about six hundred, lived very
much as pleased them, without any regular municipal government, each
family its own tribe, each man a law unto himself; yet for mutual
protection, they all kept in touch and had certain common rights which
were religiously respected and defended faithfully. A large pasturing
ground was fenced in where the goats and little black cows of the
villagers browsed as one herd, while the patches of wheat, corn and
vegetables were not inclosed