rance, his cane across his knees.

Pierre pointed a skeletal finger above his head to a shelf mounted on
the white-painted plaster wall, where an Indian pipe lay, its bowl
carved of red pipestone, its stem polished hickory.

"Take down the calumet," Pierre said. "Let me hold it."

Auguste took the pipe reverently, with a hand at each end of its
three-foot length. Two black feathers with white tips fluttered from the
bowl as he put the pipe into Pierre's hands. From the moment he touched
the pipe, Auguste's hands were shaking as much as Pierre's. Only he and
Pierre understood how much power was in this pipe--power to bind men
for life to whatever they promised when they smoked the sacred tobacco.

Pierre let the pipe lie on his chest, his fingers touching it lightly.

"This pipe was given me a few years after you were born, Auguste, by
Jumping Fish, who even then was one of the civil chiefs of the Sauk and
Fox. It is the sign of an agreement between our family and the Sauk and
Fox, fully understood and freely entered into by both sides."

Auguste looked in wonderment from Pierre to Elysee, and Grandpapa nodded
solemnly.

Elysee said, "We had spent years exploring the more unsettled parts of
the Illinois Territory, and we had decided that here was the land we
wanted as our family seat in the New World. In 1809 we bought this land
for a dollar an acre at the Federal land office in Kaskaskia. Thirty
thousand dollars. The Federal government claimed that the Sauk and Fox
had signed a treaty a few years earlier with Governor William Henry
Harrison, selling fifty-one million acres, including all of northern
Illinois, to the United States for a little over two thousand dollars, a
shockingly paltry sum."

Pierre said, "But we knew that the Sauk and Fox disputed that claim."

Auguste said, "Yes, Black Hawk says Harrison cheated the Sauk and Fox.
He says the chiefs who signed the treaty were drunk and could not speak
English or read or write it, and did not know what they were agreeing to
when they made their marks. He says that anyway those chiefs had no
permission from the tribe to sell any land."

"Exactly," said Elysee. "And we wanted to live in peace with the Sauk
and Fox. And that was why your father went to Saukenuk. We hoped to make
reasonable payments for the land we would live on to those from whom it
had been taken."

Pierre said, "I was still there with your mother, by my own choice, when
war broke out in 18