The lower room of the officers’ lodging was filled with the light of a fire. To the hearth was drawn a half-circle of men, their central figure being a RÉcollet friar, so ragged and weather-stained that he seemed some ecclesiastical scarecrow placed there to excite laughter and tears in his beholders.

This group arose as Jacques le Ber entered with his daughter, and were eager to be of service to her.

“There is a fire lighted in the hall upstairs by which mademoiselle can sit,” said the sergeant of the fort.

Le Ber conducted her to the top of a staircase which ascended the side of the room before he formally greeted any one present. He returned, unwinding his saturated wool wrappings and pulling off his cap of beaver skin. He was a swarthy man with anxious and calculating wrinkles between his eyebrows.

“Do I see Father Hennepin?” exclaimed Le Ber, squaring his mouth, “or is this a false image of him set before me?”

“You see Father Hennepin,” the friar responded with dignity,—”explorer, missionary among the Sioux, and sufferer in the cause of religion.”

“How about that hunger for adventure,—hast thou appeased it?” inquired Le Ber with freedom of manner he never assumed toward any other priest.

The merchant stood upon the hearth steaming in front of the tattered RÉcollet, who from his seat regarded his half-enemy with a rebuking eye impressive to the other men.

“Jacques le Ber, my son, while your greedy hands have been gathering money, the poor Franciscan has baptized heathen, discovered and explored rivers; he has lived the famished life of a captive, and come nigh death in many ways. I have seen a great waterfall five hundred feet high, whereunder four carriages might pass abreast without being wet. I have depended for food on what Heaven sent. Vast fish are to be found in the waters of that western land, and there also you may see beasts having manes and hoofs and horns, to frighten a Christian.”

“And what profit doth La Salle get out of all this?” inquired Le Ber, spreading his legs before the fire as he looked down at Father Hennepin.

“What I have accomplished has been done for the spread of the faith, and not for the glory of Monsieur de la Salle, who has treated me badly.”

“Does he ever treat any one well?” exclaimed Le Ber. “Does not every man in his service want to shoot him?”

“He has an over-haughty spirit, which breaks out into envy of men like me,” admitted the good Fleming, whose weather-seamed face and plump lips glowed with conscious greatness before the fire. “I have decided to avoid further encounter with Monsieur de la Salle while we both remain at Fort Frontenac, for my mind is set on peace, and it is true where Monsieur de la Salle appears there can be no peace.”

Jacques le Ber turned himself to face the chimney.

“Thou hast no doubt accomplished a great work, Father Hennepin,” he said, with the immediate benevolence a man feels toward one who has reached his point of view. “When I have had supper with my daughter I will sit down here and beg you to tell me all that befell your wanderings, and what savages they were who received the faith at your hands, and how the Sieur de la Salle hath turned even a RÉcollet Father against himself.”

“Perhaps Father Hennepin will tell about his buffalo hunt,” suggested the sergeant of the fortress, “and how he headed a wounded buffalo from flight and drove it back to be shot.”[10]

Father Hennepin looked down at patches of buffalo hide which covered holes in his habit. He remembered the trampling of a furious beast’s hoofs and the twitch of its short sharp horn in his folds of flesh as it lifted him. He remembered his wounds and the soreness of his bones which lasted for months, yet his lips parted over happy teeth and he roared with laughter.