great importance to communicate.

"Ah, well, Oncle Jazon, we'll have a nip of brandy together before we
go," said the host.

"Why, yes, jes' one agin' the broilin' weather," assented Oncle Jazon;
"I don't mind jes' one."

"A very rich friend of mine in Quebec gave me this brandy, Oncle
Jazon," said M. Roussillon, pouring the liquor with a grand flourish;
"and I thought of you as soon as I got it. Now, says I to myself, if
any man knows good brandy when he tastes it, it's Oncle Jazon, and I'll
give him a good chance at this bottle just the first of all my friends."

"It surely is delicious," said Oncle Jazon, "very delicious." He spoke
French with a curious accent, having spent long years with
English-speaking frontiersmen in the Carolinas and Kentucky, so that
their lingo had become his own.

As they walked side by side down the way to the river house they looked
like typical extremes of rough, sun-burned and weather-tanned manhood;
Oncle Jazon a wizened, diminutive scrap, wrinkled and odd in every
respect; Gaspard Roussillon towering six feet two, wide shouldered,
massive, lumbering, muscular, a giant with long curling hair and a
superb beard. They did not know that they were going down to help
dedicate the great Northwest to freedom.

CHAPTER V

FATHER GIBAULT

Great movements in the affairs of men are like tides of the seas which
reach and affect the remotest and quietest nooks and inlets, imparting
a thrill and a swell of the general motion. Father Gibault brought the
wave of the American Revolution to Vincennes. He was a simple
missionary; but he was, besides, a man of great worldly knowledge and
personal force. Colonel George Rogers Clark made Father Gibault's
acquaintance at Kaskaskia, when the fort and its garrison surrendered
to his command, and, quickly discerning the fine qualities of the
priest's character, sent him to the post on the Wabash to win over its
people to the cause of freedom and independence. Nor was the task
assumed a hard one, as Father Gibault probably well knew before he
undertook it.

A few of the leading men of Vincennes, presided over by Gaspard
Roussillon, held a consultation at the river house, and it was agreed
that a mass meeting should be called bringing all of the inhabitants
together in the church for the purpose of considering the course to be
taken under the circumstances made known by Father Gibault. Oncle Jazon
constituted himself an executive committee of o