drinking."

He gave me a strange look. Many the stroll I took with him afterwards,
when he sought to relax himself from the cares which the campaign had put
upon him. This night was still and clear, the west all yellow with the
departing light, and the mists coming on the river. And presently, as we
strayed down the shore we came upon a strange sight, the same being a
huge fort rising from the waterside, all overgrown with brush and
saplings and 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