"
"We are rather noisy to-day. But we are very earnest in this matter. We
want to be separated from the Indiana Territory and be made an
independent State."
Tante-gra'mere caught up her whip, and cracked it so suddenly on the
back of her little page, who was prying into a wall closet, that he
leaped like a frog, and fell on all fours at the opposite corner of the
hearth. His grandmother, the black woman, put him behind her, and
looked steadily at their tyrant. She sat on the floor like an Indian;
and she was by no means a soft, full-blooded African. High cheek-bones
and lank coarse hair betrayed the half-breed. Untamed and reticent,
without the drollery of the black race, she had even a Pottawatomie
name, Watch-e-kee, which French usage shortened to Wachique.
Tante-gra'mere put this sullen slave in motion and made her bring a
glass of wine for Colonel Menard. The colonel was too politic to talk to
Angelique before her elder, though she had not yet answered his
proposal. He had offered himself through her father, and granted her all
the time she could require for making up her mind.
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