Chapter IV: Part 4

As he felt so did all the adventurers. They spent their days in voyaging romantically up and down the Great River and through the bayous and among the islands round its estuary hunting for the gold and pearls which they expected to see shining in the sand or outcropping from the banks. Their nights were taken up with dreams of how they should spend this wealth when once it was found and shoveled into the boats and taken to France.

To be sure, Anthony with the best intentions had said to his Indian flunkies the same thing the other Frenchmen said to theirs: "Plant me some of those juicy melons you know so well how to raise, and potatoes and plenty of maize and beans for the sickquatash, and some of that delightfully bad tobacco. Here are imported French seeds of cabbages and turnips and Old World vegetables. Plant them also."

The docile Indians had sowed the plantations. In the virgin alluvial soil under the warm spring rains the astonished seed from Picardy had grown like Jack's beanstalk. The Indians watching these huge creations were filled with superstitious fears. When an immense cabbage head had burst they shrieked in chorus, "Bad Medicine!" and ran away. Nothing could induce them to return. So the Frenchmen ordered the negroes--there were only a handful of them--"_You_ tend the gardens."

The darkies promised. They really meant to do so that day or the next or the next. If the masters had directed them and stood over them there would have been provisions in plenty. But the masters went gold-hunting and the darkies lay in the shade and waited for the weeds to stop growing so they could pull them all at once. Now the gardens were in ruins and the owners hungry.

"Remorse is a dreadful thing," thought Anthony; "I can feel it gnawing at my belt and I am terribly ashamed." He turned back to the commandant: "I suppose the question is, shall we ask alms of our nearest neighbors, our worst enemies, those cruel Spaniards at Pensacola?"

As it was quite impossible to send an armed force from the little group of impoverished, sick, and famished colonists to enforce a request, Anthony offered to go alone and beg.

The carelessness and short-sightedness of men in prosperity has never ceased to be a marvel. It is equaled only by the endurance and courage of the same men in trouble. Every one of the miserable colonists offered to take the voyage in Anthony's place. So it was arranged that if he should fail to return others were to follow on the same mission, since Louisiana--which was the name of nearly half of North America--had come to such a pass that she must say, "Give me food or I may die in savagery."

"Let me take as attendant that Chickasaw boy the scouts brought in this morning," was Anthony's only demand. "I can understand a little of his speech and perhaps on the voyage I may coax from him some news of the tribes north and learn why he is unfriendly toward us."

The captive spy was promised his freedom if he would serve Anthony as far as Pensacola, and he went sullenly enough with the only man whose words he knew. Anthony trusted to the intimacy of two days and a night to learn from the Chickasaw all he knew that might serve the French in their distress.

So Anthony, beautifully groomed and dressed and taking his Chickasaw valet, rigged a sail to his canoe and started for Pensacola. In the bow he set his clay stove, some precious pounded corn in a bowl, and a porous jar which kept drinking-water cool by evaporation. Nobody then and nobody now in the neighborhood of the Mississippi can get along without a crock.

A vein of earth, a perfect potter's clay, outcrops on the lower reaches of the Great River. The fingers of prehistoric Indian children itched to mold splendid mud-pies just like the scarcely more skilful children of our times do on those same shores. No one knows who turned the first dish, dried it or baked it and painted it with stripes of color.

A primitive clay stove sails up and down the river and into the Gulf in almost every fisherman's boat to-day, just as it did on Anthony's trip. Big crocks in prosaic trucks now go merchandizing over the same Mississippi regions where once they traveled by picturesque Indian pick-a-back. On many southern window-sills the water-jars are still cooling in a draught.

Bricks for building houses on the river, tiles for roofing them and terra-cotta for ornamenting them, began to be manufactured early in the history of the colony. In the city of New Orleans are potteries which have raised the making of mud-pies into a beautiful art. Here and there throughout the Mississippi system are talented dreamers who turn the clay into inspiring groups of the sculptor's art.

* * * * *

Sailing along the banks of pottery clay, Anthony measured out his bowl of corn and wondered if he could make it do for the Chickasaw and himself. As he sped under drive of wind and push of oar he glimpsed at intervals those great heaps of empty oyster-shells, the kitchen-middens, which proved that somebody in far-away days had feasted long and well on these now starving shores. It was not so very far by way of the coast to Pensacola Bay, and in good time he put into the harbor and asked for the governor of the post, one Don Francisco Martin. He was taken to an officer of the fort, and this is what was said:

"I am Anthony Auguelle, the Picard du Gay, representing the French of Louisiana in a message to your governor."

"You are a companion of the buccaneer pilot Lawrence de Graaf. I saw you both on the _Badine_. You are assigned to a dungeon on bread and water."

"In the name of France I demand an audience."

"In the name of Spain I will recommend you to the Don Martin when he has nothing else to notice."

A prison is a dreadful thing; a Spanish dungeon the worst of all forms of confinement. The cruelties of the Inquisition which made such underground holes possible still sicken the thoughts of a civilized world. But Anthony was so spent with weariness that he ate his plain bread greedily--it was the first wheat bread he had tasted for months--and gulped the water gratefully. The darkness was a relief to his sand-dazzled eyes and the cold stones felt good to a sun-blistered back. He slept around the clock and clambered the ladder from his cell on the point of a bayonet at the bidding of the officer. He was in good spirits. The only really bad thing about a dungeon is to have to stay in it.

The Don Francisco Martin thought it a good plan, whenever possible, to give his rivals of France and England a taste of his dungeon. But life was so dull at the outpost of Pensacola and his curiosity about a French message was so great that he granted an audience in the courtyard on this second day.

"You are lately come from Paris," said the don, noting the cut of Anthony's fine coat. "Before we proceed to business we will entertain ourselves like gentlemen. I'm sure it will give you pleasure to show us the newest feints in fencing. Luckily I have three swordsmen at hand to prove your skill," and he nodded to his gaoler, who picked up one of those immense brass keys which the Spaniards used with such gruesome effect, and went rattling down a shell-paved corridor.

Anthony looked at the smiling, whiskered don and he felt like a mouse under a tom-cat's claws. He viewed the garrison of rowdies crowding up to see a fight, and at the hot, empty sky, with narrowed eyes, as one who expects his only help from heaven.

Imagine his astonishment when the gaoler came clanking back with de Graaf a very shadow of himself, a toothless buccaneer much the worse for imprisonment, and a big Spaniard all gone to nerves.

Anthony covertly scanned the sky more than once as he listened to the don's mocking words: "All these soldiers of fortune have arms with them; you shall cross swords. Who survives the duel gets his freedom and his request." And the sarcasm, "A gentleman's game for gentlemen!"

Now Anthony Auguelle did not belong to the blood royal. The don was sure of that. The Picard du Gay had become a gentleman in heart and appearance through association with the best explorers of his time. But under the lash of the Spaniard's tongue he thought it best to affect that haughty bearing supposed to be one of the marks of a title. And he thought this the right time to use the bits of news he had gained from the Chickasaw.

"I will not kill de Graaf," he declared, "for you, Don Martin, need him to read a message in the air," and he waved his hand dramatically toward puffs of smoke which he had at last discovered floating in the northern sky.

The don stood up. The sentries ran for their neglected posts. The soldiers sprang to arms. Every neck was craned. As a hint to de Graaf, Anthony gave a meaning gesture toward the Chickasaw at his heels, and de Graaf, who lived by his wits, was ready to answer with confidence when the surprise abated: "That, Don Martin, is the signal of the Chickasaws who are coming toward your fort to besiege it. I heard their war-drums along the coast before I was taken by your men."

The don turned to Anthony, who touched the Chickasaw, who in turn spoke a gruff word to a Spanish interpreter. It meant that his tribe were in arms. De Graaf was thus confirmed in his statement.

The don's brows were drawn; his eyes grew keen.

"I will not kill the buccaneer," cried Anthony again. "I throw him a purse of gold instead," suiting his action to his boast, "and so will you, Don Martin, when he tells you what _he_ knows."

While the don stared at Anthony, that gambler with fate, smiling at the buccaneer, began to chuckle and then to laugh. The sea-robber responded like a child with a tickled rib. "Tell the don, my bully boy"--here Anthony spoke slowly to be sure he had the Anglo-Saxon words--"what the Carolina English will do to Pensacola and to Biloxi."

"Ho-ho-ho!" roared the buccaneer. "It's a secret. I must not tell."

"When I and the Chickasaw and de Graaf know it, it is a secret no longer. Tell the don and save your neck."

Like the unthinking dog he was, the buccaneer obeyed Anthony as his master and declared, "English ships are ready to come down the Atlantic in double force to surprise you."

The don considered his four sources of information. He did not for one moment doubt Anthony's honesty; nobody ever did. It was plain that the news was true.

"By Chickasaws on land and English on sea French and Spaniards are to be cracked like bugs between two boards. What is your advice, du Gay?"

The answer was prompt: "Release my Chickasaw and your buccaneer to tell their different peoples the plot is discovered. It will not be carried out this time. It is much easier to discourage than it is to defeat the English. Send de Graaf to warn the fort at Mobile and let the Indian and the buccaneer see him get away so they may report that too."

Then the don grinned: "It shall be done. I would I had you for a friend, du Gay. You release your admirers in trios, throw pardons with a king's hand. What for yourself?"

"When I rid us of this swordsman I shall ask a boon," and he turned to the Spanish prisoner. It would not help Anthony's cause to disappoint the garrison who pined to see a fight. Thus Anthony took the ring with the swagger of a matador and the spirit of a game-cock.

Luck had followed him so far. A whole loaf of bread had filled his worst need and he drew his blade with confidence. The big Spanish jailbird was both strong and skilful, but two weeks in a black dungeon with rats, lice, and the fear of hanging had given him a wild eye and a shaking hand. He thrust strongly but not well. He was desperate and erratic. In normal health he could have split Anthony like a rabbit, but not to-day.

During the first few minutes it was more a game of tag than fencing. The two jumped about as though they were grasshoppers. Anthony's one idea was to save himself from the half-insane Spaniard. In a little while the big one began to weaken. Then Anthony thought it proper to amuse the spectators by airing the fancy thrusts and feints and all the fads that he had practised in Paris. Cheer followed cheer. This was what they wanted to see. The don himself was longing for just such a show. So Anthony continued it as long as he thought the Spaniard could stand up; on guard for bursts of passion on his opponent's part.

It was a sorry game.

Anthony, bent on winning his own ends, cared nothing for the ethics of a duel. When he saw his man ready to drop he thrust forward and pinned him against a post. But he did not drive his sword through the Spaniard, as was his right, as the don nodded permission, and as the whole colony now assembled whooped and howled and begged for him to do. Instead, he signaled the crowd to silence and, withdrawing his blade, wiped it airily on a bit of lace kerchief and announced: "I present his life to the fort. He is expert. Such will do good work against the Chickasaw."

The crowd, who a minute before would have been glad to see his blood spurt, now greeted the Spaniard with hurrahs, dragged him to the kitchen, and feasted him. Pensacola, a much older place than Biloxi, had learned to conserve its products. There was no food shortage among these Spaniards.

Don Francisco Martin seemed to be regretting that irony about gentlemen. He gave Anthony a friendly hand and said, sincerely, "I will be glad to grant you any request I can."

And the Picard du Gay said, simply, as one man to another, "My people are starving; unless you feed us we must perish."

So a ship was loaded with stores. Lest the hunger-wild Frenchmen should eat food without proper cooking and thus add an epidemic to their woes, the don ordered the half-deck covered with great bowls. Each was filled with the savory stew of venison and com or rice and dried fish which the Indians dub sagimity.

And who shall say how that ship came in? The starving French, lost to all feeling but the primitive call of hunger, thronged the bay to watch her drop anchor. They wept aloud and gurgled with laughter. They danced and hugged one another. They rushed into the water, stretching bony fingers; got beyond their depth, and had to be rescued with scoldings and ridicule in the midst of the utmost confusion. When the boat began to unload, the grateful French kissed the hands of their enemies, the Spaniards, and knelt to bathe their feet with happy tears.

As the sagimity came to shore they fell upon it and guzzled like kittens in the cream, quite unashamed. They stood upon the beach to sup and to feed one another. From one bowl to another they hurried, abandoning this, shoving it aside for that, running to another, stepping on it, heedlessly crushing it down into fragments. They had endured slow starvation with pathetic dignity, but the smell and sight of savory stew was too much for decorum, and half the emptied jars were thrown aside with a crash in the mad rush for full ones.

Many settlements have perished for lack of food. Starvation is an ill as old as the human race. It shows its skeleton head at some place on our globe almost every year of the world. The Great River itself has had many hungry times, but none quite so strange as this one when lifelong foes became friends and the beach was strewn with fragments of the crockery brought by the rescuers.

The Indians, who, while waiting their turn at the feast, looked on at the uncontrollable appetites of the succored French, pointed with stolid significance to the long pile of ruined dishes on the beach of Deer Island.

When Anthony, offering food to them, asked what they meant, they answered: "What has happened once can happen again and yet again. In the time of our fathers we, too, were fed by enemies as you are saved to-day, and there we got our name, for the guardian Indians of the Mississippi are called Biloxi, and the word Biloxi means the Broken Pots."

IX

THE SLAVE SHIP

A Hurricane Brings Odd Guests to His Colony for the Governor,
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville--Voodoo in Rag-time

SHOUTING of white men, screaming of black ones, startled Anthony as he came down the main street of the port town called New Orleans in honor of the regent duke of France.

"That must be a brawl in the slave-mart," was his first thought as he began to run. He wanted to be at hand if the Sieur de Bienville needed him to help quell it.

Several bad colonists, with worse slaves, had joined the Mississippi French by crossing over from the West Indies in small boats at amazing risk. They navigated from point to point in fair weather through the Gulf of Mexico. The heavy seas were avoided when possible. The waterways in the protected channels between the coast-line islands had made the voyage possible. Vessels now entered the Mississippi by way of the east through Lake Pontchartrain, a much safer path than through the Delta.

They had brought with them blackamoors and several kegs of rum.

New Orleans had not been glad to see them. But the Sieur de Bienville had given each slave-owner a parcel of land on which to build shelters and lay out gardens. He hoped to keep the masters busy and the negroes so separated that they would work quietly. He tried to make both classes add to the usefulness of the port. The very good plan did not prove a success. In less than a week here were the new-comers back in the heart of the town, turning the orderly market-place into a scene of riot. Drunken owners were beating drunken servants.

The scandalized settlers had already called out their French soldiers against the renegades from the West Indies. The uniformed ranks passed Anthony at double-quick as he hurried along. By the time he had gained the open square where the auction-block stood the unpopular white immigrants, doubly guarded, were on their way to the only prison the settlement could boast.

The slaves still lay about in disgraceful sodden heaps. The Sieur de Bienville, self-possessed and active, was already giving commands to have them carried to the different plantations where they belonged. By the marks on their ears they were sorted out like cattle at a fair.

Young de Bienville, passionately ashamed at such a scene and full of pity for the ill-treated blacks, was going among them and examining their injuries.

"To make these poor creatures suffer so lessens their usefulness for days. Ten thousand livres' worth of damage has been done to valuable human chattels in the last half-hour," he cried, indignantly. "When I shall have power to dictate a black code, and strength to enforce it, no slave shall be abused nor given rum to drink."

He looked to Anthony for sympathy. He did not get it, for that witness of the reformer's vow was leaning over a prostrate bleeding slave. Anthony's face was not sorrowful, but full of the liveliest interest. This slave was old and wizened and, what was a rare thing to see, his wool was as white as a dandelion puff. Anthony gazed at him as though he had found a gem.

"What now?" demanded the Sieur de Bienville, shocked at Anthony's callous pose.

"Listen!" whispered Anthony, "listen! He groans in a high minor key. When he cries with pain his wailings take the form of a most unusual rhythm, as if he were singing to express his woe. These blacks are different from our own slaves. They have another form of patois and they may also have a new kind of music."

The Sieur de Bienville's blue eyes went dark with disgust. "You are all ears and tongue, Tony; you act as though you had no soul." And he stalked away, resolving to add to his code, "Slaves shall be authorized to give information against heartless masters."

Anthony's curiosity was not really unkind. It was a matter of business. He was the one whom the French settlers expected to act as interpreter for them in a land where every Indian tribe spoke a different language and every set of blacks had another jargon. For that reason Anthony was usually attended by some Indian boy whom he had picked up on one of his many exploring voyages with the Sieur de Bienville. Any such Indian acted as a tutor to Anthony in his own particular dialect and as a servant to his master's whims. So it happened that Anthony was now attended in the market-place by a red slip of a Chouacha. And when the white-headed blackamoor could not be brought to consciousness at once it was the Chouacha who bathed and dressed the wounds caused by a metal-tipped whip and who carried the sighing, singing wretch to a cot in Anthony's own cabin.

The Sieur de Bienville would have been still further provoked and perplexed could he have seen how Anthony spent the whole day hanging over his patient. When he found that his voice could not mimic the delicate falsetto notes which came through the old darky's thick lips, he got out his violin and caught many of the curious sobbing sounds. In the intervals of nursing he practised on its strings the elusive strains of this weird music.

Within the next few days the men from the West Indies were forced to put up some of their slaves for sale, to pay the expenses of their debauch. So Anthony again hastened to the market-place to see what was going on.

Atop of the block in the noise and jostling of a rapidly moving auction stood, one after another, several splendid blackamoors shining like lacquered teakwood, grinning good-naturedly, and rolling white, conceited eyes which told that each knew he was worth a bag of livres. Oddly enough, they had none of the humility which marked the French slaves. Something over-confident, reckless, defiant, was in the manner of them all.

"Tell me, Tony, what _is_ the stir among these people?" demanded the Sieur de Bienville. "I don't understand it and I don't like it. Is there mischief coming?" He was giving serious attention to this sale of blacks. He was lieutenant of the governor; much care fell upon him. He was thinking: "I am going to replace this haphazard handling of live men with a better system. It will be both humane and economical to enforce a set of rules to protect a slave from violence and the master from loss."

His thoughts began to take the form of that book of regulations which were afterward completed by French statesmen, approved by the king, made laws under the famous title of the Black Code, and finally enforced throughout the valley of the Great River.

He never thought of such a thing as freeing all the blacks. Slavery of negroes was a part of the social system of those days. No one dreamed of questioning its right. The Sieur de Bienville was one of the first men on the continent to demand justice or mercy for a blackamoor.

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne--for that was the Sieur de Bienville's name--was a French-Canadian aristocrat, fair, beautiful, rich, and carefully reared. In his noble impulse was the beginning of the development of the captive race.

More than a hundred years after this time another youth, dark, plain, poor, and self-educated, of that pioneer American race which followed the French to the Mississippi, left his flatboat at the dock in New Orleans and came to stand in this same market-place. Like the Sieur de Bienville, he felt his heart contract with pity, his sense of justice stir. He used the blunt speech of the modern midwest instead of the elegant French of the early south, but he was of the same mind when he said of that slavery which the auction-block revealed, "If I ever have a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard!"

Like Bienville, too, he carried out his resolution. During the Civil War when north and south were quarreling as to whether freedom or slavery should prevail, this same American pioneer set his signature, _Abraham Lincoln_, to an Emancipation Proclamation. Because of his power as President of the United States and commander of the army and navy he freed four million slaves.

But the Sieur de Bienville did not want any such great change. His plans, as he watched the auction, were for minor reforms, and he kept a wary eye on the restless slaves all about him. His stockades, his soldiers, his armament for the protection of his settlers, were in perfect order. Plots and mutiny among the blacks were not uncommon.

Anthony was waiting for a bid to be set upon the white-headed one whom he had rescued and who was to be sold for debt. "Damaged goods," quoth he, "will be sold at a bargain. Such are 'poor men's slaves.' I'll buy my tuneful cripple."

When the little old man was hoisted to the block, he stared at the crowd of slaves in a manner both cunning and defiant. They answered as though he had spoken, by a curious stirring among themselves. He drew them toward him as by a magnet; he was full of a sense of power. Anthony and the Sieur de Bienville could make nothing of this under-current among all the blacks.

After having bought him at half-price and having spent many more hours jabbering with him, fiddling his one tune in gayer syncopated time and trying to tame him, the Picard du Gay made up his mind that he had spent his money for a cotton-crowned sinner who had some evil work in hand and who would bear watching.

When, therefore, the black slipped like a shadow from their gallery at dusk, Anthony beckoned the Chouacha and together they took his trail. It was a gloomy evening, and so sly was he in looking back that they had to follow at long distances.

On the crooked path he made they almost lost him. If it were not for other black prowlers--very many of them--going to the same lonesome group of moss-bearded live-oaks, even the Indian might have missed him altogether.

The grove was surrounded by numerous sentinels. Alone Anthony could not have stolen in. But no black man can outwit an Indian on his native ground, so the Chouacha set his moccasined feet on dry twigs, crisp palmetto, and grinding rocks without making a sound, and Anthony in similar gear followed him, unheard and unseen, to a clump of bushes overlooking the meeting-place.

There was a mystic, wavering, half-smothered fire in the center of the group, which included, to Anthony's alarm, both the West-Indian blacks and the New Orleans negroes. There was an appalling crowd of them. The ancient one, Anthony's own, was the center of the horde and its chief spirit.

Slaves were not allowed to carry weapons, not even heavy sticks, yet this old man was passing around knives enough to arm them all. Anthony clasped his hand to his belt. His own knife was gone! The slaves had stolen from their masters! This display of knives augured ill for some one. The whole concourse looked sinister, the old leader horribly so.

Anthony began to be worried. Unarmed slaves in mutiny were bad enough, but if each carried an unsuspected knife he might do dreadful murders. Together this band of plotters could destroy the colony.

The Chouacha was stolid, but even he could see that a massacre was on foot. Anthony tried to tell himself that this meeting might be only some savage fresh-meat feast or barbecue. While his better thoughts said this, the cold sinking pit of his stomach told him otherwise.

The Picard du Gay had seen many red dances, but never a black one. His numbed brain could not give in detail afterward the little he witnessed of this. The old man led the singing of that same moaning, diabolical song which Anthony had caught on his fiddle-strings. All the slaves singing it marched round him, while he alone danced barefooted in and out of the living fire, treading down the coals as though they were leaves. He conjured with toads; he drooled incantations; his nose-ring flopped; his amulets rattled.

The sultriness of the swamp oppressed the watchers. The air was heavy and ominously still, as though a storm were coming. Anthony began to have all sorts of ticklings; something might be crawling on his neck or coiling round his ankles. He wanted to get away and run to tell the French of possible danger. He could not stir; the dance had hypnotized him.

Something glistening slid along a tree on the opposite side of the firelit group. It thrust a serpent's head into the light. The old man rested a hand upon it. As the thing shook the man shook; as the man shook all the blacks shook. Their bodies quivered, their eyes rolled, the very ground seemed to tremble. Anthony felt the contagion spreading over him from top to toe.

Voodoo! The wizened old blackamoor was a wizard! Voodoo!

"I go," whispered the Chouacha, "to rouse the town!"

Was Anthony afraid? Certainly not! Did he believe he could be changed by an evil charm into a beast? Of course he didn't! But he hated snakes; and in his nervousness he did an unwise thing. He leveled his pistol through an opening in the bushes, drew a delicate bead on that wavering demon, and with one quick, splitting, banging shot he blew away the serpent's head.

The voodoo doctor was almost stunned. A full moment of tense silence followed this unexpected sorcery. Then the sky was crossed from side to side with a great white bolt of fire. By its light all saw the distant Chouacha running. Then came crash on crash of thunder in the sudden darkness. On the ears of the frenzied voodoo dancers it beat like the summons of a tom-tom. The voodoo himself answered with a shout.

Brandishing their knives, they followed him in a roaring mob as he started after the Chouacha to hoodoo their masters and all the race of whites.

The Sieur de Bienville, always suspicious of the colonists from the West Indies, was armed, as usual, and ready to respond at once to the Chouacha's alarm.

He had often given the soldiers orders not to shoot any valuable negroes who might run amuck. They were to be clubbed into submission, but not killed. Now he changed his command to: "Powder and ball! Shoot to kill!" The Chouacha's warning was not a minute too soon.

What a struggle that was! The negroes had not believed the whites would be ready. The whites had not imagined the negroes would be so well armed. The clash was something of a surprise to both. There have been many bloody uprisings among the New World blacks, many pathetic and losing rebellions, but none fraught with such consequences as the memorable one in New Orleans. Were white men to hold the Mississippi port and its lands for their kind of civilization, or was New France to become a negro republic as Santo Domingo and Haiti did? That was what the quarrel meant. That was why it became a fight to the death on both sides.

If after two centuries of development and training a President of the United States could say of the American soldiers who helped the island of Cuba win her freedom, "Our colored troops fought well at San Juan," what might not be said of the desperate bravery with which the West-Indian fanatics fought that long-ago battle in the streets of New Orleans when the voodoo doctor led them to make a strike for themselves? Here also the blacks fought well--too well for the safety of their cruel masters.

The howling of the storm, darkness broken by the awful lightning, accompanied the mob as it attacked and the French citizens as they defended themselves.

At the same time, during that strange and terrible hour there came laboring out of the Gulf, as vanguard of the wind, an old ship seeking a place of shelter. She was rickety and rotten, ancient and condemned, fit for no decent use. And so she had been taken to hold a cargo of the veriest misery on earth, a tribe of stolen blacks.

Some sorely hurt by the pitching ship, some dying, some already dead, all without hope during the long, hard voyage, the ill-fated ship bore them through the Great River's mouth and to the port at New Orleans where raged this battle of the races.

A flash showed her coming on like some huge swollen image in a dream, magnified by clouds and lightning. The plotters and the planters alike paused in mid-action to blink at what they could not believe they really saw. By the next flash the hurricane had struck the town--a chaos of wind and rain, falling houses, rending trees.

No fighting could go on.

Another flash, and a great waterspout, child of the hurricane, could be seen whirling up the river; another, and the waterspout had struck the ship, beat her down, crushed her!

Anthony's ears never forgot the shrieks of the drowning wretches flung from the ship into the water, nor the roar of the storm as, breaking through the forest in front of her, it tore its way across country. After a few dreadful moments a bright moon seemed to jump into the sky. All was clear and quiet again. The tropical storm had come and gone in the space of a few minutes. Both whites and blacks, turned from their purpose by the appalling accident, rushed to the salvage of the human wreckage. Many from the ship were hauled ashore; some were washed away. All were in distress. The square of the slave-mart was turned for the second time within the week into an outdoor hospital.

When the excited blacks had rushed from their attack to the rescue of the slaves caught in the rigging of the broken ship, the voodoo tried in vain to rally them to fighting-pitch. They were bent on getting out the drowning men, their brothers.

Then he secretly called aside his most devoted band of zealots. Pointing out the Chouacha and reminding them that the Indian had been the one they saw running through the lightning flash to set the town to arms, he swore them to eternal vengeance against all Indians and sent them scurrying back through the forest to the Chouachas' village.

Here the voodoo doctor's afrites caught the peaceful natives by surprise, butchered many of them, set their town on fire, and, returning in violent haste to New Orleans, tried for the second time to draw the negroes into battle. But it was too late. Some were in manacles, some in jail, and some meekly caring for the victims of the slave ship.

This attack on the Indian village made all Indians the enemies of the negroes for many generations; and since this hatred forbade the two races from uniting against the French, the voodoo's worst deed was the one which best protected the town from the possibility of other mutinies, for, whatever the negroes planned in revolt, the revengeful Indians defeated it. Anything the Indians proposed to do unlawfully the blacks told to the authorities for spite.

The voodoo's power was at an end.

He guessed that his intimates would be hanged (they promptly were) and that he himself would be subjected to some of the dreadful torturing punishments of that age. He preferred a dramatic taking-off. So in the cold gray dawn in the sight of the still waking populace, red, black, white, he ran out upon the rail of the slowly settling ship, sang his wailing conjurer's song, and, plunging Anthony's knife to its hilt in his heart, fell headlong into the Great River. Before the eyes of the whole town his body spun round and round as it sank.

Even to-day, when the dawn is cold after a storm in the full of the moon, there are times when some watchers think they see the ghost of the voodoo whirling in the eddy at that same place, a wicked ghost that has been hoodooed and can never get away from the scene of his crime nor rest in peace because the bad he tried to do to the three races of the Mississippi was turned by the fate of the slave ship into lasting good for them all.

X

PRETTY PRINCESS

Maids of the Natchez Send Tomahawks to Surprise Fort Rosalie--Fashions
in Scalps

SAILORS clinging to the rigging with toes and fingers sang an echoing chantey as one by one they furled the canvas wings of the frigate coming through Lake Pontchartrain to anchor before New Orleans.

The frigate, a splendid ship of fifty guns, had belonged to one of the Le Moyne brothers, de Iberville; another, de Châteauguay, was her captain; and a third, de Bienville, was the governor of these colonies she had come from France to supply. There was a large family of the patriotic Canadian Le Moynes in active service throughout the New World. Like all the lesser French nobles, each was called by the title of the estate he owned instead of his parent's name.

News that the ship had been sighted spread so quickly that by the time she had arrived not only the people of the town, but all the blacks from the outlying plantations and many red natives of forest camps, were on the dock to meet her.

The Sieur de Bienville kept a thousand details in his mind. "Run, Tony," he commanded the Picard du Gay, "and offer your services as interpreter to the Natchez chief of the White-Apple region. Be sure that some of the uniformed officers do him homage; see that the daughter and her attendant maids receive a present. Watch you, too, and give the blacks the signal to bob and duck at the proper places."

At the same moment the White-Apple chief was saying to the Apple-Blossom at his side: "Allow our white brothers to make friends. Much is to be gained from a boat like this."

The coming of an overseas ship is a time of tense feeling in any port at any age of the world. Fortunes stay or go, hearts rejoice or break, with the destiny of an argosy. The New Orleans people and the immigrants alike laughed and cried with the pleasure and excitement of meeting. Whether they were kinsfolk or strangers, they chattered together.

Many of these new settlers were farmers and artisans. They brought implements for tilling the land and special tools for mechanical trades. The Mississippi French had learned that if their towns were to grow, somebody had to go to work.

A whole regiment of troops had come to supply the garrisons. Quantities of munitions and stores to maintain them were in the hold. Several priests and nuns were among the passengers. All were welcomed by cheer after cheer.

On deck and on shore interest centered in an item of the cargo, a bevy of girls, shipped from the mother country by the king as a gift to the colony. Chaperoned by nuns, they came to the dock half-shyly, half-boldly.

Anthony Auguelle, stationed with the Indians, was embarrassed. He twisted his best cap round and round and dangled its plume. Four girls were looking at him and he didn't know what to do. The every-day smile which he used for officers, priests, red men, and negroes with such good effect faded away. He was grave and awkward. The girls passed him with indifferent tosses of their dainty heads.

His Majesty had sent them to persuade the too lively young bachelors of the colony to settle down in sedate home life. They were penniless orphans of Paris. Nothing could be lost by venturing into another country; fortune and happiness might be gained thereby. Romance and adventure called to them as it had to their brothers, and they had answered blithely.

With no dowry except the tiny hand-trunks of personal needs with which the crown had furnished them, they would have gone unclaimed in the matrimonial markets of the capital. On the brink of the Great River their ruffles and ribbons, coquettish headgear of lace, small, neat shoes, their whole feminine charm, sent the pulses of backwoodsmen to fluttering. Straightway each maid had her choice of a dozen suitors.

French overlords, even on the remotest borders, kept up the dignity of the Empire by holding court in as formal an imitation of the royal audience at Versailles as they could.

The hall at New Orleans, built of bark-covered logs, was large and high. A mammoth fireplace at one end and a canopied dais with a throne-like chair gave it an air of state. In its impressive atmosphere the Sieur de Bienville received all the colonists as graciously as any king could have done.

Immigrants from the poverty-stricken lower middle class of workaday France were enchanted with the semi-tropical luxuriance of this new land of parti-colored races. The elegance of the reception-chamber appealed to their love of change. Where else in the wide world could common people be associated so cordially with uniformed soldiers and their gorgeous officers, be waited upon by fantastic blackamoors, be introduced to a dusky princess more beautiful than any one they had ever seen? She spoke to them in the French phrases Anthony had taught her. Her maids danced with the officers the steps that his fiddle had measured for them in his visits to the White-Apple plantation.

The governor patronized all the marriage ceremonies which the priests performed for the king's maids. He presided over the fête which followed.

The first days of the new colonists were happy ones. A fraternal policy demanded that they be made to feel at ease and that the intelligent, semi-barbarous Natchez be assured of the new-comers' kindness.

Anthony sulked. "I did not want one of the maids," he explained, pettishly, "but I hate to be sniffed at."

"Neither was I chosen," replied the tactful Sieur de Bienville. "Let us console each other by thinking how the hands of women will improve our town of clumsy men. Then will be scrubbing and good cooking and clean curtains and flower-gardens--"

Anthony interrupted: "And no dogs and no cock-fights and no fun of any sort! I am going back to the wilderness!"

The Sieur de Bienville's laughing face went grave. "You are needed in the Natchez forest, Tony. So much is at stake that I shall go with you. The friendliness which you have begun with the restless White-Apple must continue until we are sure of the tribe's allegiance. We will go with the returning Indians to their village. It does not matter if we French quarrel among ourselves; we can forget and make up again. But when our traders offend the Indians, as has lately been done, the natives remember and resent it, planning secret revenge."

"The Natchez welcome a dog as they do his master; game-chickens abound," cried Anthony. "Let us go!" and away they both paddled with the chief.

It seemed more like play than politics to be rowing up-stream in the Natchez delegation through country where so many notable events were to happen. They specially observed a bluff something over a hundred miles above New Orleans where great red cypresses stood. Each was like a painted post, or a _bâton rouge_, as they pronounced it. They planned to build a fortress there, little dreaming that a capital city by the name they gave would one day flourish on the spot. From Baton Rouge for many miles north the banks they passed were within the century to become the refuge of the three thousand French Acadians driven out of Nova Scotia into such pathetic exile that the story of their "Evangeline," as told by the poet Longfellow, will never be forgotten as long as this bit of "Acadian coast" retains its name.

While Anthony played his fiddle to cement the peace between the White-Apple people and the French, the Sieur de Bienville as a military precaution put into perfect working order a tiny near-by outpost of three stockaded log cabins which he had built some years before. His brother Iberville had chosen the site. It was the first permanent settlement on the Mississippi and was called Fort Rosalie. On its foundation was afterward laid the American city of Natchez.

Since the Great River came out of the void and wet the feet of the first dinosaur there has never been a dull minute upon it. Anthony's gray eyes were always hunting for unusual sights.

"What is that?" he whispered to the Sieur de Bienville on the homeward way as some heavy creature like a huge water-rat stirred among the roots of a tree hidden under the bank.

"Paddle nearer, Tony. Faster! It may be a wounded man."

It was a _coureur de bois_, not hurt in body, but so frightened that his state was pitiful.

"The Natchez murdered my two companions days and days ago," he screamed, in hysterical relief, when he found that he was rescued from his slimy cave by men of his own nation. "What will the post do about such an outrage?" he demanded, wildly. "Are traders to be sacrificed without revenge?" He pounded distracted hands upon his chest.

As he fed the poor thing, who had been living upon raw fish and roots for a long time, the officer asked, "What did your companions do first to the Natchez?"

"We walked around in their funny church a little; that's all," faltered the _coureur de bois_. "The White-Apple's daughter saw us and threw a tomahawk at us. She hit first one and then another." He turned very pale as he recalled the sight. "I escaped by falling in the river."

"Not the pretty Apple-Blossom?" gasped Anthony, "Not our gentle pupil in French and music who came to the wedding?"

The Sieur de Bienville inclined his head. "She has charge of the maids who help tend the temple's sacred fire which came from the sun and which never goes out. These men profaned a sanctuary."

"She should have tomahawked you, too!" cried Anthony to the _coureur de bois_. "You foolish fellows came near being the death of us all. We have spent a week soothing the Natchez. We could not find out why they were angry."

"They will never forgive nor forget. It is only one of the many indignities done them by your careless acts. If you promise never to mention the murder or to stir up trouble about it I'll carry you with us," said the stern young officer. "Otherwise back you go into the river."

The _coureur de bois_ agreed to silence. They took him to New Orleans, an abject prisoner.

Yet many days later, when there came messengers, one tumbling over the other in their frantic haste to tell of a massacre of settlers at several small posts, he began to babble his story, and the cry went round: "The Natchez! The Natchez did it. We must subdue the Natchez!"

The young wives from France were panic-stricken at this frightful menace of armed savages. Husbands who for themselves would not have minded a few Indians on the war-path were now excited by the uncontrollable terror of the women. They demanded of Bienville the extinction of the Natchez. A mob spirit grew.

"Do you see the gray moss hanging from the live-oaks?" these citizens cried. "The Spanish and the Indians call its clusters 'French wigs.' If we do not kill these Natchez, then shall our hair dangle in like festoons from every branch."

"Give us action!" howled the soldiers. "We came to protect the colony. Now is the time to strike!"

The distressed governor sighed heavily. He could not afford mutiny of his troops nor the desertion of his citizens. Neither could he trust the Natchez, who no longer trusted him.

"It is the beginning of the end," he told Anthony, sadly. "The condition of peace between two nations for which our priests hoped is too ideal. None of us on either side are self-controlled enough to maintain it."

He hastily filled his bateaux with several hundred men, hurried under sail and oar up the Mississippi to Fort Rosalie, marched out from there, took the Natchez by surprise, and fell upon them with gun and bayonet.

Now Anthony loved a fight. For his vivacious nature it was the best way to clear the air. Pummeling some rude fellow who needed it was a satisfaction. But this battle was not a fight. It was war; cruel, bloody war. His whole soul sickened at cutting down these Indians whose artistic, half-civilized towns had so often been his shelter. He had a childish fancy that if he had been given time to go about among them with the fiddle they loved, he could have brought peace again.

It was too late. They were beaten by the sword. Conquered and subdued, the Natchez agreed to whatever the French dictated. Fort Rosalie became the headquarters of the Sieur de Bienville. Under his direction the sullen Indians labored at enlarging the fort which had taken their freedom from them. Many of the king's maids and their husbands came to its shelter to found homes.

Then the Sieur de Bienville was called to France and Anthony wandered disconsolate from the fort, now under a commander as heartless as Bienville had been kind.

Although the plantations were destroyed, the Natchez temple to the sun, their deity, stood inviolate. The village looked the same as ever. Anthony often went there unafraid. Some of his old welcome still remained when they accepted his gifts. For in Indian-land one speaks by a present. If he gives nothing it is the same as though he were silent.

"Make me a pipe," the pretty princess coaxed him one day, "a flute of several reeds." She selected some from a handful she held. She counted the others carefully and tied them in bundles, the same number in each. "Play me a tune upon it; not a sad song because the new governor demands that we give up our town to him, but a joyous air which tells that the sun still shines."

Anthony made the pipe and taught her maids a triumphant tune. The princess gave him a bundle of reeds. "Destroy a reed each day. When there is only one left come again and we will give you a present of tender chickens and fresh eggs--all that our chiefs can carry, to take to the fort. The delicacies will speak for us and show our feeling of submission to the conquerors." Her smile was not a pleasant thing to see; it worried him.

With an anxious mind the Picard du Gay took his bundle of reeds. He made the rounds of the small settlements dependent on Fort Rosalie and warned them that the Natchez meant mischief. He pleaded with the officers of the fort to reinforce themselves. He could not explain what the reeds meant nor tell the settlers what to fear from the Indians whose arms had been confiscated.

The Sieur de Bienville, in France, was pleading with the court for more men for colonial defense. The local governor sent requests, by every ship, for arms--more arms. _Coureurs de bois_ predicted uprisings. Who listens to any Cassandra?

On the day that he drew the last reed Anthony went early to see the princess. The maidens, gentle and domestic, were loading the braves with dressed fowls and baskets of eggs. A more peaceable-looking procession never took the trail to any fort.

"Stay you here before our temple with me," commanded the princess, whose vivid pose and brilliant eyes suggested a crisis of some sort. "A white man shall witness our submission and play our song upon his pipes."

He felt helpless, worn, and old, a victim in her power.

She abandoned French and took up Natchez words. "The war between us has only begun. No one but the sun above can see how it will end."

Confused by her distraught manner, Anthony looked helplessly at the one reed in his hand.

"Every Natchez tribe had such a bundle," she went on. "This morning, when there was one reed left, each warrior ran to the nearest white man's post around Fort Rosalie with his newly made stone tomahawk hidden under a present. Every Frenchman is massacred. Every lodge-pole is hung with scalps--your hair, not ours. So do the fashions change."