ht punishment followed conviction; but it was felt
to be a capital offense for an Indian or anybody else to rape a
demijohn of fine brandy, especially one sent as a present, by a friend
in New Orleans, to Lieutenant Governor Abbott, who had until recently
been the commandant of the post. Every man at the river house
recognized and resented the enormity of Long-Hair's crime and each was,
for the moment, ready to be his judge and his executioner. He had
broken at once every rule of frontier etiquette and every bond of
sympathy. Nor was Long-Hair ignorant of the danger involved in his
daring enterprise. He had beforehand carefully and stolidly weighed all
the conditions, and true to his Indian nature, had concluded that a
little wicker covered bottle of brandy was well worth the risk of his
life. So he had put himself in condition for a great race by slipping
out and getting rid of his weapons and all surplus weight of clothes.

This incident brought the drinking bout at the river house to a sudden
end; but nothing further came of it that night, and no record of it
would be found in these pages, but for the fact that Long-Hair
afterwards became an important character in the stirring historical
drama which had old Vincennes for its center of energy.

Rene de Ronville probably felt himself in bad luck when he arrived at
the river house just too late to share in the liquor or to join in
chasing the bold thief. He listened with interest, however, to the
story of Long-Hair's capture of the commandant's demijohn and could not
refrain from saying that if he had been present there would have been a
quite different result.

"I would have shot him before he got to that door," he said, drawing
his heavy flint-lock pistol and going through the motions of one aiming
quickly and firing. Indeed, so vigorously in earnest was he with the
pantomime, that he actually did fire, unintentionally of course,--the
ball burying itself in the door-jamb.

He was laughed at by those present for being more excited than they who
witnessed the whole thing. One of them, a leathery-faced and grizzled
old sinner, leered at him contemptuously and said in queer French, with
a curious accent caught from long use of backwoods English:

"Listen how the boy brags! Ye might think, to hear Rene talk, that he
actually amounted to a big pile."

This personage was known to every soul in Vincennes as Oncle Jazon, and
when Oncle Jazon spoke the whole town felt bou