stretching their wooden-shod feet in front of them. No kind of covering
intervened betwixt their gray heads and the sky's fierce light, which
made the rivers seem to wrinkle with fire. An old Frenchman loved to
feel heaven's hand laid on his hair. Sometimes they spoke to one
another; but the most of each man's soul was given to basking. Their
attitudes said: "This is as far as I have lived. I am not living
to-morrow or next day. The past has reached this instant as high-water
mark, and here I rest. Move me if you can. I have arrived."

Booths were set up along the route to the common meadow, where the
thirsty and hungry might find food and drink; and as the crowd surged
toward its destination, a babel of cries rose from the venders of these
wares. Father Baby was as great a huckster as any flatboat man of them
all. He outscreamed and outsweated Spaniards from Ste. Genevieve; and a
sorry spectacle was he to Father Olivier when a Protestant circuit-rider
pointed him out. The itinerant had come to preach at early
candle-lighting to the crowd of sinners which this occasion drew to
Kaskaskia. There was a flourishing chapel where this good preacher was
esteemed, and his infrequent messages were gladly accepted. He hated
Romish practices, especially the Sunday dancing after mass, which Father
Olivier allowed his humbler parishioners to indulge in. They were such
children. When their week's work was over and their prayers were said,
they could scarcely refrain from kicking up their heels to the sound of
a fiddle.

But when the preacher saw a friar peddling spirits, he determined to
denounce Kaskaskia as Sodom and Gomorrah around his whole circuit in the
American bottom lands. While the fire burned in him he encountered
Father Olivier, who despised him as a heretic, and respected him as a
man. Each revered the honest faith that was in the other, though they
thought it their duty to quarrel.

"My friend," exclaimed the preacher, "do you believe you are going in
and out before this people in a God-fearing manner, when your colleague
is yonder selling liquor?"

"Oh, that's only poor half-crazy Father Baby. He has no right even to
the capote he wears. Nobody minds him here."

"He ought to be brought to his knees and soundly converted," declared
the evangelist.

"He is on his knees half the time now," said Father Olivier
mischievously. "He's religious enough, but, like you heretics, he
perverts the truth to suit himself."