eech-owl!"

"It was you fell over me, Miss Betsey."

"If we are going to try the charm," announced Peggy Morrison, "we must
begin. You had better all get in a line behind me and do just as I do.
You can't see me very well, but you can scatter the hempseed and say
what I say. And it must be done soberly, or Satan may come mowing at our
heels."

From a distant perch to which he had removed himself, the screech-owl
again remonstrated. Silence settled like the slow fluttering downward of
feathers on every throbbing figure. The stir of a slipper on the
pavement, or the catching of a breath, became the only tokens of human
presence in the old college. These postulants of fortune in their
half-visible state once more bore some resemblance to the young ladies
who had stood in decorum answering compliments between the figures of
the dance the night before.

On cautious shoe leather the march began. One voice, two voices, and
finally a low chorus intoned and repeated,--

"Hempseed, I sow thee,--hempseed, I sow thee; let him who is to marry me
come after me and mow thee."

Peggy led her followers out of the east door towards the river; wheeling
when she reached a little wind-row of rotted timbers. This chaos had
once stood up in order, forming makeshift bastions for the fort, and
supporting cannon. Such boards and posts as the negroes had not carried
off lay now along the river brink, and the Okaw was steadily undermining
that brink as it had already undermined and carried away the Jesuits'
spacious landing.

Glancing over their shoulders with secret laughter for that fearful
gleam of scythes which was to come, the girls marched back; and their
leader's abrupt halt jarred the entire line. A man stood in the opposite
entrance. They could not see him in outline, but his unmistakable hat
showed against a low-lying sky.

"Who's there?" demanded Peggy Morrison.

The intruder made no answer.

They could not see a scythe about him, but to every girl he took a
different form. He was Billy Edgar, or Jules Vigo, or Rice Jones, or any
other gallant of Kaskaskia, according to the varying faith which beating
hearts sent to the eyes that saw him.

The spell of silence did not last. A populous roost invaded by a fox
never resounded with more squalling than did the old Jesuit College. The
girls swished around corners and tumbled over the vegetable beds.
Angelique groped for Maria, not daring to call her name, and caught and
ran wit