the blockhouse, of stone, its upper two stories of
square-hewn timber. Some day, he thought, as he rode past the hill
crowned by the great house, he would enter Victoire as master.

They rode on, passing big log barns and animal sheds Raoul had helped
build. They followed a narrow trail through fields planted in corn and
wheat, through orchards, the trees as yet only a little higher than a
man but already yielding apples and peaches. Farther out still, cattle
and horses grazed on grassland that rolled eastward like the waves of
the ocean.

Five miles from the Mississippi they came to the boundary stone with an
M carved on it that marked Victoire's easternmost extent. From there
Raoul could see, a good ten miles or more away, the sign of the Indians,
a long finger of gray smoke leaning northeastward among the fluffy white
clouds. The mine entrance was at the bottom of a ravine carved in the
prairie by the Peach River, and the smoke doubtless meant the Indians
were smelting lead.

After a long ride they reached the little river. The five men reined up
and tethered their horses downwind from the smoke; an Indian, it was
said, had a sense of smell as keen as a dog's. Raoul led his men to the
edge of the ravine.

They walked quietly along the ravine until they sighted Indians down at
the bottom. Sauk or Fox, Raoul saw, recognizing their shaven heads with
tufts of hair in the center. One of the bucks was standing at the mine
entrance holding a skin sack that appeared to be full of chunks of
galena, lead ore. The other two were adding logs to the smelter's fire.
Their six horses--three for riding and three for carrying lead--were
standing at the edge of the river about ten feet from the smelter.

The Indians' smelter was simply a square pit dug in the hillside, lined
with rocks at the bottom and filled with logs and brushwood. They were
melting down the galena, letting it flow through the rocks into a
slanting trench that led to a square mold dug in the earth. Raoul
counted five pigs of lead already formed, cooled and stacked beside the
mold. They'd probably been at this ever since the end of winter,
thinking the mine was so far from town that no white man would notice.

Lead was selling at seventeen dollars per thousand pounds at the pit
head up north in Galena, the new boom town named for the ore, and if
these Indians had been working since the snow melted, they might have
robbed Raoul of as much as two hundred dollars