skey, his good whiskey, Old
Kaintuck from a canvas-wrapped stone jug, not the terrible-tasting corn
liquor he dispensed from the barrel in the taproom. Then the five of
them went out to mount their horses in the courtyard of the trading
post. Raoul rode his chestnut stallion, Banner.

_My domain_, Raoul thought proudly, as he looked around. Surrounding the
trading post was a palisade twenty feet high made of logs set
vertically, with a catwalk running all around it and a guard tower in
each corner. From a pole atop the southwest tower flew the flag of the
United States, thirteen stripes and twenty-four stars, and below it the
flag of the de Marions' Illinois Fur Company, an arrow and a musket
crossing behind a beaver pelt.

Dominating the buildings inside the palisade was a blockhouse, limestone
at ground level, with an overhanging second story of logs and rifle
slits all around. Raoul had built it to fortify the trading post against
his memories of Checagou. Pierre and Papa might have thought it foolish
expense and effort, but where had they been when he needed them?

Near the east side of the blockhouse was the inn they'd just left, a log
house, food and drink on the ground floor and lodgings above. On the
west side, the fur store. Over in the northwest corner was the magazine,
a windowless cube of limestone blocks, surrounded by its own little
palisade the height of a man. Here were stored the bags and barrels of
gunpowder that passed through the trading post.

They rode out through the gateway, arched over by the name DE MARION,
formed out of small bits of log by Raoul's brother-in-law, Frank
Hopkins, carpenter and printer. Raoul glanced down at the town of
Victor, built on the steep slope below the trading post. From here he
could see mostly half-log roofs and clay-lined log chimneys following
the road that zigzagged across the face of the bluff. The houses all
faced west, with their backs to the limestone slope. North and south
from the base of the bluff stretched miles of bottomland along the
Mississippi River. The spring floods that left the bottom some of the
richest farmland in the world also made it necessary to build almost
everything on the bluff above the high-water line.

Raoul pulled Banner's head around and led his little troop at a trot
along the ridge that ran east. Now Victoire came into view, the chateau
his father and brother had built on the edge of the prairie, its first
floor, like that of