s to me now the very happiest of my life._

_From her I learned to note and love the beauties of mountain and of
stream. The broad blue St. Lawrence and the mighty forests on its
banks were a constant source of delight to my childish fancy, and those
memories cling to me, ineffaceable even by all these years of war and
tumult._

_When she died I drifted to our newer stations in the south, down the
great river, and it is of that last year in Louisiana, while I was yet
Captain de Mouret of Bienville's Guards, that I would have my children
know._

_Along the shore of Back Bay, on the southern coast of our Province of
Louisiana, the dense marsh grass grows far out into the water,
trembling and throbbing with the ebb and flow of every tide._

_Thicker than men at arms, it stands awhile erect where the shallow sea
waves foam and fret; then climbing higher ground, it straggles away,
thinner and thinner, in oaken-shaded solitudes long innocent of sun._

_Beginning on the slopes, a vast mysterious forest, without village,
path, or white inhabitant, stretches inland far and away beyond the
utmost ken of man. There the towering pines range themselves in
ever-receding colonnades upon a carpet smooth and soft as ever hushed
the tread of Sultan's foot. Dripping from their topmost boughs the
sunlight's splendor flickers on the floor, as if it stole through
chancel window of some cool cathedral where Nature in proud humility
worshiped at the foot of Nature's God._

_It was in those wilds, somewhere, the fabled El Dorado lay; there
bubbled the fountain of eternal youth: through that endless wilderness
of forest, plain and hill flowed on in turbid majesty the waters of De
Soto's mighty grave._

CHAPTER I

THE MASTER

It was late one clear moonlight night in the spring of 17--, when three
silent figures emerged from the woodland darkness and struck across the
wide extent of rank grass which yet separated us from the bay.
Tuskahoma led the way, a tall grim Choctaw chieftain, my companion on
many a hunt, his streaming plumes fluttering behind him as he strode.
I followed, and after me, Le Corbeau Rouge, a runner of the Choctaws.
We were returning to Biloxi from a reconnaissance in the Chickasaw
country.

Each straight behind the other, dumb and soundless shadows, we passed
along the way, hardly bruising a leaf or brushing the rustling reeds
aside.

"See, there is the light," grunted Tuskahoma, pointing to a glimmer