The vesper bell rung, breaking
its music in echoes against the sandstone bosom of the bluff. Red
splendors faded from the sky, leaving a pearl-gray bank heaped over the
farther river. Still Jean watched Kaskaskia.
"But the glory remains when the light fades away,"
he sung to himself. He had caught the line from some English boatmen.
"Ye dog, ye dog, where are you, ye dog?" called a voice from the woods
behind him.
"Here, grandfather," answered Jean, starting like a whipped dog. He took
his red cap from under his arm, sighing, and slouched away from the
bluff edge, the coarse homespun which he wore revealing knots and joints
in his work-hardened frame.
"Ye dog, am I to have my supper to-night?"
"Yes, grandfather."
But Jean took one more look at the capital of his love, which he had
never entered, and for which he was unceasingly homesick. The governor's
carriage dashed along the road beneath him, with a military escort from
Fort Chartres. He felt no envy of such state. He would have used the
carriage to cross the bridge.
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