ience acquits you. And now the time
has come when you are free to go anywhere you please."

Jean looked over the flood.

"But there's no place to go to now, father. I was waiting for Kaskaskia,
and Kaskaskia is gone."

"Not gone, my son. The water will soon recede. The people will return to
their homes. Kaskaskia will be the capital of the new State yet."

"Yes, father," said Jean dejectedly. He waited until the priest
sauntered away. It was not for him to contradict a priest. But watching
humid darkness grow over the place where Kaskaskia had been, he told
himself in repeated whispers,--

"It'll never be the same again. Old Kaskaskia is gone. Just when I am
ready to go there, there is no Kaskaskia to go to."

Jean sat down, and propped his elbows on his knees and his face in his
hands, as tender a spirit as ever brooded over ruin. He thought he could
bear the bereavement better if battle and fire had swept it away; but to
see it lying drowned before him made his heart a clod.

Singly and in bunches the lantern-bearing boats came home to their
shelter in the pecan-trees, leaving the engulfed plain to starlight. No
lamp was seen, no music tinkled there; in the water streets the evening
wind made tiny tracks, and then it also deserted the town, leaving the
liquid sheet drawn and fitted smoothly to place. Nothing but water,
north, west, and south; a vast plain reflecting stars, and here and
there showing spots like burnished shields. The grotesque halves of
buildings in its foreground became as insignificant as flecks of shadow.
The sky was a clear blue dome, the vaporous folds of the Milky Way
seeming to drift across it in indistinct light.

Now, above the flowing whisper of the inland sea, Jean Lozier could hear
other sounds. Thunder began in the north, and rolled with its cloud
toward the point where Okaw and Mississippi met; shaggy lowered heads
and flying tails and a thousand hoofs swept past him; and after them
fleet naked men, who made themselves one with the horses they rode. The
buffalo herds were flying before their hunters. He heard bowstrings
twang, and saw great creatures stagger and fall headlong, and lie
panting in the long grass.

Then pale blue wood smoke unfolded itself upward, and the lodges were
spread, and there was Cascasquia of the Illinois. Black gowns came down
the northern trail, and a cross was set up.

The lodges passed into wide dormered homesteads, and bowers of foliage
promised th