The Rose of Old St. Louis | Page 6

plumed myself this one had been. But as I glanced back toward the house on the bluffs that had proved my undoing, to my intense relief I saw that the three gentlemen had followed not far behind me and were even now descending the pathway to the creek. I hastened to meet them and make my apologies.
A more courteous gentleman than Mr. Gratiot I never met. He spoke very good English indeed, his accent I believe not so good as my French one, but his grammar much better.
"My dear young gentleman, you acquitted yourself nobly," he was kind enough to say. "In the eyes of the young ladies, if I may possibly except Mademoiselle Pelagie, you are a hero. But they are much chagrined that you should have left them without giving them a chance to express their sympathy or their admiration."
The sound of those silvery peals of laughter was too vividly in my remembrance to permit me to accept Mr. Gratiot's compliments without a large grain of allowance for a Frenchman's courtesy, but I bowed low in seeming to accept them. Then he introduced me to his companion, who proved not to be Mr. Vigo after all, but Dr. Saugrain, the French émigré so renowned for his learning. I looked at him keenly as I made my bow, for I had heard something of him in Philadelphia, and in Kentucky there had been so many tales of the wonderful things he could do that I think most people looked upon him as a dealer in black arts. But he was in no respect my idea of a Mephisto. He was small and wiry of build, and dressed in black small-clothes, with ruffles of finest lace at wrist and knee.
Black silk stockings showed a well-turned calf in no whit shrunken with age, and his silver shoe-buckles glittered with brilliants. His hair, iron-gray and curly, was tied in a short queue with a black satin ribbon, and beneath a rather narrow and high brow beamed two as kindly blue eyes as it had ever been my lot to meet.
His greeting was most cordial, though there was a merry twinkle in his eye while speaking to me that made me feel he might still be laughing inwardly at my ridiculous descent of Mr. Gratiot's staircase. With a very grand manner indeed, and with much use of his hands, as is the fashion of Frenchmen, he said:
"My dear sir, it mek me mos' proud and mos' 'appy to know you. Vous êtes véritablement un brave. Le capitaine d?ne chez moi to-day; I s'all be désolé and inconsolable if he bring not also his ver' dear young frien'." Then, with a sudden and entire change of manner, he laid his finger beside his nose and said in a loud whisper:
"My frien', I would not min' you kill that dog, moi! I lofe 'im not."
But while his words did not sound kind to me, who am such a lover of dogs that nothing but the necessity of self-defense would ever make me lift a hand against one, yet, all the time he spoke, his eyes twinkled more merrily than ever, and I wondered at the man whose manner could change so quickly from the grand seigneur's to that of a king's jester, and I puzzled my brains mightily to know what his connection with the dog could be.
CHAPTER II
I PROPOSE A TOAST
"The rose that all are praising."
"And this is the village of St. Louis, sir?"
My discomfiture, my mortification, my rage, the vision of dainty beauty, the strange little savant--every remembrance of my brief visit to Cahokia had been swept away by the rushing waters of the great river of which I had read and heard so much.
My brain was teeming with tales of the Spanish adventurer De Soto; of the French trader Joliet; of the devoted and saintly Jesuit, beloved of the Indians, Père Marquette; and of the bold Norman La Salle, who hated and feared all Jesuits. I saw the river through a veil of romance that gilded its turbid waters, but it was something far other than its romantic past that set my pulses to beating, and the blood rushing through my veins so that I hardly heard my captain's answer, and hardly knew what I replied to him.
Through the months of my sojourn in Kentucky there had been one all-absorbing theme--the closing of the Mississippi to American boats by the Spanish, and their refusal to grant us a right of deposit on the Isle of New Orleans. Feeling had run so high that there were muttered threats against the government at Washington.
There were two factions, each acting secretly and each numbering thousands. One was for setting off at once down the river to capture New Orleans and take exclusive possession of both