tall weeds. The palisades that held its earthenwork
were rotten and crumbling, and the mighty bastions of its corners
sliding away. Behind the fort, at the end farthest from the river, we
came upon gravelled walks hidden by the rank growth, where the soldiers
of his Most Christian Majesty once paraded. Lost in thought, Clark stood
on the parapet, watching the water gliding by until the darkness hid
it,--nay, until the stars came and made golden dimples upon its surface.
But as we went back to the camp again he told me how the French had
tried once to conquer this vast country and failed, leaving to the
Spaniards the endless stretch beyond the Mississippi called Louisiana,
and this part to the English. And he told me likewise that this fort
in the days of its glory had been called Massacre, from a bloody event
which had happened there more than three-score years before.

"Threescore years!" I exclaimed, longing to see the men of this race
which had set up these monuments only to abandon them.

"Ay, lad," he answered, "before you or I were born, and before our
fathers were born, the French missionaries and soldiers threaded
this wilderness. And they called this river 'La Belle Riviere,'--the
Beautiful River."

"And shall I see that race at Kaskaskia?" I asked, wondering.

"That you shall," he cried, with a force that left no doubt in my mind.

In the morning we broke camp and started off for the strange place which
we hoped to capture. A hundred miles it was across the trackless wilds,
and each man was ordered to carry on his back provisions for four days
only.

"Herr Gott!" cried Swein Poulsson, from the bottom of a flatboat, whence
he was tossing out venison flitches, "four day, und vat is it ve eat
then?"

"Frenchies, sure," said Terence; "there'll be plenty av thim for a
season. Faith, I do hear they're tinder as lambs."

"You'll no set tooth in the Frenchies," the pessimistic McAndrew put in,
"wi' five thousand redskins aboot, and they lying in wait. The Colonel's
no vera mindful of that, I'm thinking."

"Will ye hush, ye ill-omened hound!" cried Cowan, angrily. "Pitch him in
the crick, Mac!"

Tom was diverted from this duty by a loud quarrel between Captain Harrod
and five men of the company who wanted scout duty, and on the heels of
that came another turmoil occasioned by Cowan's dropping my drum into
the water. While he and McCann and Tom were fishing it out, Colonel
Clark himself appeared, quelled the