but its
character lifted it above the ordinary burning of brushwood at night.
The most dignified Kaskaskians, heretics as well as papists, came out to
see it lighted; the pagan spell of Midsummer Night more or less
affecting them all.

Red points appeared at the pile's eight corners and sprung up flame,
showing the eight lads who were bent down blowing them; showing the
church front, and the steps covered with little negroes good-naturedly
fighting and crowding one another off; showing the crosses of slate and
wood and square marble tombs in the graveyard, and a crowd of honest
faces, red kerchiefs, gray cappos, and wooden shoes pressing close
around it. Children raced, shouting in the light, perpetuating
unconsciously the fire-worship of Asia by leaping across outer edges of
the blaze. It rose and showed the bowered homes of Kaskaskia, the tavern
at an angle of the streets, with two Indians, in leggins and
hunting-shirts, standing on the gallery as emotionless spectators. It
illuminated fields and woods stretching southward, and little weeds
beside the road whitened with dust. The roaring and crackling heat drove
venturesome urchins back.

Father Baby could be seen established behind a temporary counter,
conveniently near the pile, yet discreetly removed from the church
front. Thirsty rustics and flatboat men crowded to his kegs and clinked
his glasses. The firelight shone on his crown which was bare to the sky.
Father Olivier passed by, receiving submissive obeisance from the
renegade, but returning him a shake of the head.

Girls slipped back and forth through the church gate. Now their laughing
faces grouped three or four together in the bonfire light. In a moment,
when their mothers turned to follow them with the eye, they were nowhere
to be seen. Perhaps outside the beacon's glare hobgoblins and fairies
danced. Midsummer Night tricks and the freemasonry of youth were at
work.

People watched one another across that pile with diverse aims. Rice
Jones had his sister on his arm, wrapped in a Spanish mantilla. Her tiny
face, with a rose above one ear, was startling against this black
setting. They stood near Father Baby's booth; and while Peggy Morrison
waited at the church gate to signal Maria, she resented Rice Jones's
habitual indifference to her existence. He saw Angelique Saucier beside
her mother, and the men gathering to her, among them an officer from
Fort Chartres. They troubled him little; for he inten